Abstract
The paper explores the discursive strategies used by participants of Polish nationalist (radical right) organizations when they speak about others: Muslims and homosexuals. The article is based on the critical discourse analysis of 30 biographical narrative interviews with the members of three main Polish nationalist organizations: the National Radical Camp (ONR), the National Rebirth of Poland (NOP), and the All-Polish Youth (MW). Following the reconstruction of more general ways in which various categories of others are discursively constructed by narrators, the body of the paper focuses on two categories, Muslims and homosexuals, which appear most often in the narratives collected. The nationalists present themselves as the concerned defenders of both the European civilization as well as the Polish identity based on components such as religion (seen as the source of morality), tradition and history. Others are presented as a threat because of their otherness, claims and aspirations for power and dominance attributed to them. While Muslims constitute the embodiment of a cultural enemy who threatens the European (Christian) civilization, homosexuals are identified with liberalism seen as the danger destroying Polish identity and the traditional family.
Highlights
In recent years, there has been an increase in the presence and activity of nationalist, populist and right-wing ideas in the public space across Europe
The aim of the paper was to present the main discursive strategies used by the participants of the Polish nationalist movement when they speak about others
The analysis focused on two specific categories of others: Muslims and homosexuals
Summary
There has been an increase in the presence and activity of nationalist, populist and right-wing ideas in the public space across Europe. The article explores the discursive strategies used by the nationalists when they speak about others: Muslims and homosexuals. It is based on the analysis of biographical-narrative interviews with the members of three Polish nationalist organizations. While homosexuals represent others against which the nationalist mobilized in the 2000s quite well (personifying one of the threats attributed to the values of West European liberalism and left-wing), the anti-Muslim slogans became increasingly present in the organizations’ discourse only in the 2010s. There are more enemies mentioned by the nationalists (e.g. the political establishment, European Union representatives, the liberal media, left-wing activists), the paper focuses on these two cases in order to get better insight into the linguistic ways in which others are constructed
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