Ukrainian Historical Issues in Polish Media in the Context of a Hybrid War: Between Myths and Post-Truth

Abstract

Ukrainian-Polish relations have been rather controversial in terms of historical policy lately, and it has a negative impact on interstate relations. On the one hand, in the foreign policy discourse Poland is considered to be one of the leading advocates of Ukraine in the collective West, along with Lithuania, and on the other hand problems of historical and humanitarian character permanently arise in bilateral relations, which form a negative background, become a subject to manipulation by third countries, and exacerbate relations both at the interpersonal and inter-institutional communication levels. The additional factor that complicates the understanding of historical policy issues is media of both countries, where the old and new myths, elements of post-truth and emotional subjective evaluations of the non-professional level penetrate beyond the historical corporate society. Populist politicians of the left and right ideological flanks try to take advantage of it, but it becomes an obstacle to political understanding, and complicates the investment development of a large subregion of the countries of Central, Southeastern Europe and the Baltic States. Historical policy has become a part of an information security, and some third countries, in our case it’s the Russian Federation, use this factor during the implementation of hybrid war tasks against Ukraine and the countries of the European Union. The article assumes that only the change of political rhetoric, the avoidance of populism regarding historical relations of two neighboring nations, the strengthening of corporate responsibility of national media in matters of historical policy’s coverage are able to neutralize the influence of radical political trends inside the countries, and outside - the influence of other states which are not interested in overcoming the tragic plume of history in Poland and Ukraine. Authors of the article do not aim to study or compare purely historical positions. This is about media tools and their role in the historical policy discourse.