Description
Building on the hybridity approach to soft power statecraft, we explore how illiberal populist governments instrumentalise memories of World War II suffering in their quest for status. Aiding the debate on the role of collective memories of suffering, the Holocaust in particular, this study of statecraft practices shaping the politics of eternity reveals how its toolkit has been extended to international politics. By deploying process-tracing to interviews, news and policy statements, and opinion polls, we find that the Law and Justice Party’s illiberal populist government resorted to manufacturing a public diplomacy crisis abroad, by hijacking the issue of Holocaust misinformation, to achieve partisan goals at home. To that end, the 2018 dispute between Poland, Israel and the United States surrounding the roll-out of an anti-defamation legislation-cum-policy, described as the ‘Polish Holocaust law’, was an opportunity in the quest for status, galvanizing political identification and mobilization of party support. We show how this policy marked a break from Poland’s international advocacy on the cannibalisation of memoires as the site of the Holocaust, and discuss the relevance of lawfare for public diplomacy and statecraft.
