Description
Days after the Parliament approved the Holocaust Law in January 2018, the PM of Poland, Mateusz Morawiecki, touted the controversial bill as a milestone in restoring the nation's pride: “In the past … we fouled our own nest despite having the world’s most wonderful history. Now we have to conduct a wide-scale global information campaign.” The legislation criminalised claims about the complicity of Poles in the Holocaust, introducing a sentence of three years in prison. Crucially, the bill, approved with just five opposing votes, was not an isolated incident but an element of the state’s sustained politics of memory campaign.
At the heart of this project is the surprising rise of increasingly censorial Holocaust memory policies in Poland which isolate the state internationally and undermine its image. The Holocaust Law is a particularly striking illustration of this puzzle due to the sheer scale of the critique it brought to Poland. It caused an international outcry and was heavily criticised in Washington, Jerusalem and Brussels. The project relies on multimethod data generation. I.e. an analysis of Poland’s public communication on Holocaust memory policies, in-depth interviews with Polish officials and experts, and field observations of remembrance events. The project addresses a pressing issue. Since it is in Polish “bloodlands” where two-thirds of Europe’s Jews were exterminated, Warsaw is the main battleground for the way how the global community and the EU will memorialise this genocide. Holocaust memory is increasingly used as a key element in Europe’s public diplomacy. With the rise of populist and far-right politics across the continent, the memory of the Holocaust became a central point of contention between liberal and new illiberal politics.
