Abstract
This book investigates the linguistics features and strategies of conflict, crisis, and threat construction in the context of Poland, especially when the right-wing populist and conservative political party, Law & Justice (L&J), came to power in 2015. The party is known for its anti-democratic and anti-European disposition, which especially gained supports from the people who viewed European integration as obstacles to develop their own economy and who defended national identity and traditional beliefs. This book focuses on the discursive construction, and examines how the populist rhetoric is produced by L&J’s leaders to enact their leadership and reinforce their ideologies. It covers discussions of the parliamentary and governmental discourse against the opponents who weaken the ruling legitimization, and the complicated relations with the European Union related to immigration and economic activities. Through conducting a comprehensive discourse analysis on parliamentary discourse and governmental discourse from L&J leaders, this book highlights the threat generation as a powerful instrument for L&J to exert social coercion and consolidate the leadership. It also provides insights into the relations between L&J and the populist right-wing rhetoric trend in Europe.
Along with the introduction and concluding remarks, this book is composed of six chapters. The first two chapters give details about the background of the study. Chapter 1 presents a synthetic account of the theoretical underpinnings of political leadership and political communication, and illustrates intertwined relations between threat construction, social coercion, (de)legitimization, propaganda, fear dichotomies, and credibility. It discusses the important role of the threat production and conflict management in enacting the political leadership, and further argues for the discursive construction of the Us-and-Them conflict as central instrument of generating threat. Finally, this chapter introduces the feasible analytical models, for instance, discourse space theory (DST), political metaphor (PM) and proximization in the examination of the discursive construction of conflict, coercion, and threat. Chapter 2 outlines the historical perspective on the threat-based communication in the Polish context, from the postwar communist years to the post-1989 democratic period. It demonstrates that crisis discourse has been consistently used as an effective strategy by Polish leaders to achieve political goals in different periods, especially through reproducing the Us/Them conceptual categories to align with the partisan interests.
The following chapters focus on the linguistic analyses of L&J’s discourse in its parliamentary term 2015–2019, to examine how the politicians legitimize the current public policies through developing threat and producing ideological conflicts. Chapter 3 and 4 are mainly concerned with the domestic issues, specifically looking at discourses against the political opposition. Chapter 5 and 6 discuss international affairs, highlighting strained relations between Poland and the European Union. These chapters not only argue for the coercive and ideological function of L&J’s discourse in the examined period, but also highlight its relations with other populist discourse in the Europe. For example, similar anti-European rhetoric can be found in discourse from the UKIP’s (United Kingdom Independence Party) leader, Nigel Farage, in emphasizing their own country as an independent and proud sovereignty nation.
Chapter 3 examines discourse attacking L&J’s opposition in the Polish parliament and reveals the predominantly threatening portrayal of the opposition in the discourse. Specifically, it highlights the preferent use of the distance strategy to conceptualize the opposition as the remote Them entity and demonstrates the potential of this construction to necessitate the proactive measures. It also pays attention to different linguistic means in the conceptualization, such as metaphors, deixis of proximity and distance, and emphasizes the importance of the proximization strategy to generate fear and motivate preventive actions. Finally, this chapter explores both similar and different strategies in other European discourse to exclude political opponents, such as in Italy and Hungary. For instance, although rhetoric of Hungary’s leader, Victor Orban, is less radical than leaders of L&J in marginalizing the Them camp, the emphasis on the US camp is similarly constructed through first-person plural pronouns, such as ‘we’, and common nouns, such as ‘Hungarians’. Similarities are also evidenced by the frequent use of the word ‘revolution’ to foreground the ‘now’ timeframe, so as to legitimize the national policies.
Chapter 4 moves to the construction of opponents from the social groups. It explores how the narrative of the ‘worst sort of Poles’ is used to oppose out-groups that refuse to share the collective identity and that contests the legitimacy of the state, such as legal activists of the constitutional order, LGBT groups, etc. It discovers that the conceptual othering can be achieved by the historical narratives, that is, using historical terms to perform particular functions. For example, the historical catchword ‘Targowica’ (i.e. functioning as a synonym of national disloyalty) is used in L&J’s discourse to highlight an urgent domestic threat from the opponents. Furthermore, certain cognitive strategies, such as deictic distancing, metaphorization, and proximization can also be found. In particular, by depicting LGBT as a foreign ideology, the community is distanced as a threat to the national identity (deictic distancing) and construed as a Them camp (proximization). Through attributing the ‘past/source’ negative values of ‘Targowica’ to the ‘present/target’ political opponents (metaphorization), opponents are constructed as a political threat to Poland. This chapter finally points out the similar construction of the ‘worst sort’ groups in other European discourses, such as in two Balkan countries, Romania and Bulgaria.
Chapter 5 turns to the discussion of the international relations between Poland and the European Union. It especially focuses on the issues of migration and L&J’s judicial reform, emphasizing L&J’s negative stances toward the EU immigration policy and the implementation of Article 7 of the European Treaty. It shows that the discourse of ‘national sovereignty’ is significantly developed with a view to highlighting Poland as an independent state as well as legitimizing the political leadership to ensure people’s safety. At the same time, it also points out how L&J’s discourse of national sovereignty relates to the discourses of Brexit referendum in the UK. Rhetorical similarities of conceptual, pragmatic and lexical nature can be observed to express the national pride. For example, the privileged future is construed by absolute assertions and words expressing commitments, while the oppositional future involves probabilistic modality (‘would’) and abstract concepts (‘political correctness’).
Chapter 6 explores discourses related to Nord Stream 2 (NS2) project, and focuses on the relations between Poland and its neighbors: Germany and Russia. It shows how metaphors and proximization strategies are helpful to construct the NS2 project as a threat to Poland’s economy and national security, as an attempt to reject European hegemony. This conceptualization is argued for performing coercive and fear-inducing function and contributing to supporting L&J’s leadership.
This book makes advances in populist study in the context of Poland, which is underexplored from the discursive standpoint, and sheds lights on the relations between discourse and the social coercion and political legitimization. It is logically structured, and provides a wholistic picture on the social-historical context of the Polish situation as well as a detailed linguistic examination of the discourse concerning home and foreign issues. It is insightful because it presents the discursive construction of the threat, crisis, and conflict, and its role in enacting powerful leadership and legitimizing national mobilization. It highlights the function of the language not only to address the crisis situation, but also to create the aura of crisis, strengthen the Us/Them ideological divisions, and thus necessitate the domestic policies and justify the leadership. Most interestingly, the book relates L&J discourse to right-wing discourses of other European countries and shows ties of L&J discourse with the populist right-wing ideological trends in the Europe.
The book is also distinctive from its combination between the thorough micro-analysis of the rhetoric strategies and the wider macro-interpretation of the manipulative functions of the linguistic phenomenon. The analysis draws upon the analytical models from critical discourse analysis (CDA) and critical-cognitive pragmatics, outlining prominent linguistic features such as metaphors, nominalization, deictic expressions, proximization, etc. It therefore can be seen as a complement to the mainstream CDA, which mainly backgrounds the conceptual dimension in the analysis (Hart and Cap, 2014), and can provide a better understanding of the conceptual operations in denigrating the potential enemies. Despite the remarkable qualitative interpretation of the discourse, I would argue that a quantitative investigation of the linguistic patterns can be considered to explore strategies to enact the leadership. Methods from corpus linguistics can potentially benefit the exploration of the larger corpus. It is a thought-provoking book, nevertheless, with inspiration of the functions of the discourse of threat in the crisis management, and the linguistic and conceptual operations to construct political opponents and build the national pride. It is highly recommended to those interested in the situation in Poland, and in L&J’s successful rhetoric strategies in managing the crisis and motivating the national mobilization.