Nation for Sale? Citizen Online Debates and the ‘New Patriotism’ in Post-Socialist Poland

Abstract

In order to describe today’s socioeconomic condition, particularly in the West, scholars often refer to formulations such as ‘the neoliberal era’ (Hall & Lamont, 2013) or the ‘market times’ (Hochschild, 2012). The concepts of neoliberalism or neoliberal globalization are employed to point out the new logics of social life, where the language of the market and economic exchange encompasses almost all spheres of social and political life. According to a popular thesis sometimes summed up by the ‘commodification of everything’ thesis, everything now is ‘for sale’ and ‘market thinking so permeates our lives that we barely notice it anymore’ (Sandel, 2012). To describe the gravity of this situation the alarmed critical voices point out that even the historically ‘authentic’ and noncommercial spheres of life such as religion, creativity, politics, and nation have become subject to the process of commodification (Banet-Weiser, 2012). This means that such spheres are increasingly experienced, defined, and understood within the logic and vocabulary of the market. Consequently, it can be argued that to study how corporate and commodity logic permeates these spheres is also to look at how people think, make sense of, construct, and experience different aspects of social and political life in the era of advanced capitalism.