Online Conflict Discourse, Identity, and the Social Imagination of Silesian Minority in Poland by Krzysztof E
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Online Conflict Discourse, Identity, and the Social Imagination of Silesian Minority in Poland By Krzysztof E. Borowski © 2020 Krzysztof E. Borowski M.A., University of Wrocław, 2011 B.A., University of Wrocław, 2009 Submitted to the graduate degree program in Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Graduate Faculty of the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Co-Chair: Marc L. Greenberg Co-Chair: Renee Perelmutter Svetlana Vassileva-Karagyozova Arienne Dwyer Nathan Wood Date Defended: 29 April 2020 ii The dissertation committee for Krzysztof E. Borowski certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Online Conflict Discourse, Identity, and the Social Imagination of Silesian Minority in Poland Co-Chair: Marc L. Greenberg Co-Chair: Renee Perelmutter Date Approved: 29 April 2020 iii Abstract The second decade of the twenty-first century has been that of digital nationalism. In particular, the 2016 United States presidential elections and Brexit vote in the United Kingdom have shown that the increased use of social media has raised popular nationalism (Whitmeyer 2002) to a whole new level. While Europe and other parts of the world have visibly become more globalized, the Northern Atlantic region has witnessed a contradictory tendency for the rise and spread of nationalist sentiment. Much of this phenomenon has been taking place on the internet where conditions of apparent anonymity created a fertile ground for uninhibited identity expressions and performances. From the United States to Poland, people have retreated to their stable, national identities as a way of coping with the various facets of liquid modernity, in which the need for networking pushes individuals to engage in community building by bonding with other individuals through shared emotions (Bauman 2006, 37). This has also been the case in Europe where the supranational project of the European Union (EU) has encouraged Polish, Czech, or Hungarian citizens to forego their national identities and to embrace a broader European identity instead. However, instead of strengthening a postnational perspective on the world, the internet and social media have paradoxically made people even more aware of their identity and the identities of others. There, discussions surrounding national identity, sovereignty, and free flow of people and products are always present and, almost unavoidably, always political. “The transition to a digital media environment,” Rushkoff (2016) writes, “is making people a whole lot less tolerant of this dissolution of boundaries. Am I Croatian or Serbian? Kurd or Sunni? Greek or European? American or Mexican?” The quiet erosion of European cohesion, culminating in the 2020 iv unprecedented withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the EU, can also be explained in such a way. These tensions mirror more global concerns about the increasingly “liquid” world (Bauman 2005), in which “[t]he collapse of the ‘institutions’ of the solid modern era – of nation, state and territory – led to the emergence of a new world disorder where only the global elite may feel at home” (Jacobsen and Marshman 2008: 26). The internet and digital media further exacerbate this process as instantaneous communication makes people aware of the plethora of nonnational and/or post-national identities that others adopt. These fears are also present and tangible in present-day Poland where people’s belief in the unity and indivisibility of the Polish nation has been shattered by Silesian activism, both online and offline. There, questions of identity and sovereignty have unavoidably become highly politicized, representing an easy target for politicians searching for votes, status, or publicity. With the added social media dimension, another, and, arguably, an even more important group of political actors has emerged—popular activists, ideologically committed to spreading political messages in digital spaces. The ongoing Polish-Silesian conflict about identity is a case in point here. The 1989 political transformation has put Poland on a fast track to democracy and liberalization, but it has also opened up the discussion about the country’s internal minorities, including the largest unrecognized minority of Silesians in south-southwestern Poland (see the Silesia, Silesian, Silesians section). With Poland’s accession into the EU in 2004, Silesian activists have turned to the rhetoric of postnational “Europe of regions” to support their ethnolinguistic demands, which has generated much controversy and backlash among the Polish majority. The activists’ emphasis on multiculturalism and multilingualism has resulted in similar reactions. Such activism, critical with regard to the Polish state, has often coincided with v rhetorical strategies that involved the use of the German language along Polish. As a result, this led some politicians and publicists to believe that Silesian regional activism furthers German, not Polish, national agenda, and that self-identified Silesians can be viewed as “camouflaged Germans” (see chapter 2). Thus, the Polish-Silesian conflict over identity has become an ongoing political issue that affects the daily lives of Poles and self-identified Silesians, and that is discussed at the governmental and popular level, both online and offline. With the spread of social media, this issue has leaked into everyday discussions among nonelite political actors who now discuss it online. The debate on Silesian identity makes part of a larger discussion on Polish national identity at the turn of the twenty-first century. With the rapid liberalization, Poland and Poles have witnessed an ideological clash between the traditional and innovative understanding of what it means to be Polish. The traditional perspective builds on the narrative of collective victimhood on part of more powerful neighbors (for instance, Germans) who, despite violence and decades of subjugation, could not break the Polish spirit thanks to the leading role of the Roman Catholic church, preservation of the Polish language, and attachment to traditions. In the innovative version, a person can have more than one identity and identify as, for example, Cracovian, Pole, and European at the same time (cf. the EU accession campaign in Poland, which was spearheaded by the political elites under the slogan Tak, jestem Europejczykiem/Europejką ‘Yes, I am European’). My dissertation shows how online discourse drives social change, boundary work, identity performance, and, ultimately, community management (including in-group/out-group membership) by looking at the development and spread of popular nationalism on the internet. As people from outside of the political elites form online communities, they become politically vi active in online discussions on national (and regional) identity. In doing so, such online communities become communities of practice (Eckert 2006) that discuss recent events and larger issues, take sides, form coalitions, come up with idiosyncratic ways of discussing certain topics and people, and, finally, engage in a range of online behaviors that involve othering, narrativizing, and hateful speech. As a result, nationalism becomes a catalyst for the formation of online communities that emerge and coalesce around political goals, common language, and shared ideological stances. The dissertation examines how public discourse drives social change by looking at nonelite political actors become the ‘movers and shakers’ who radicalize themselves over the course of ongoing online discussions and then advance their ideological agendas by inciting radicalization among others. Finally, this work also analyzes the key role of language in the process of political radicalization in online spaces. This dissertation traces the emergence, coalescence, and maintenance of two such factions in the Western Daily discussion forum (Pol. Dziennik Zachodni, https://dziennikzachodni.pl), as evidenced in language use. Taking a sociolinguistic approach to internet discussions and applying a close, critical discursive reading of unstructured online conversations, the dissertation examines such phenomena as linguistic creativity, othering, narrativizing, and hate speech. All of these phenomena are crucial for identity struggles because it is through them that identities are constructed in the Western Daily forum. Given the context collapse (Marwick and boyd 2011), it is through language that members of the two warring communities can instantaneously identify each other as language becomes an immediate identifier of each participant’s stance toward the topic of the discussion. Not only language conveys intended meanings, but it also encodes pre-existing assumptions that people bring to the vii conversation, which is why methods of critical discourse analysis are well-positioned to uncover these meanings by focusing on language use. My upbringing in Poland and native knowledge of Polish endowed me with the sociocultural and linguistic background necessary for understanding and explaining the meaning of discourses surrounding the issue of Silesian identity in modern-day Poland. The privilege of working on a Ph.D. in the United States endowed me with much-needed theoretical, historiographic, and geographical distance, with which I approached this topic. This dissertation is thus written from the perspective of an “inside outsider,” that is, someone who is fluent in the social, cultural, and historical fabrics of the region and the