Working Paper Europe as a Symbolic Resource On the Discursive Space of Political Struggles in Poland Artur Lipiński No. 10 | January 2010 2 | KFG Working Paper No. 10 | January 2010 KFG Working Paper Series Edited by the Kolleg-Forschergruppe „The Transformative Power of Europe“ The KFG Working Paper Series serves to disseminate the research results of the Kolleg-Forschergruppe by making them available to a broader public. It means to enhance academic exchange as well as to strengthen and broaden existing basic research on internal and external diffusion processes in Europe and the European Union. All KFG Working Papers are available on the KFG website at www.transformeurope.eu or can be ordered in print via email to [email protected]. Copyright for this issue: Artur Lipiński Editorial assistance and production: Farina Ahäuser Lipiński, Artur 2010: Europe as a Symbolic Resource. On the Discursive Space of Political Struggles in Poland, KFG Working Paper Series, No. 10, January 2010, Kolleg-Forschergruppe (KFG) „The Transformative Power of Europe“, Freie Universität Berlin. ISSN 1868-6834 (Print) ISSN 1868-7601 (Internet) This publication has been funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Freie Universität Berlin Kolleg-Forschergruppe „The Transformative Power of Europe: The European Union and the Diffusion of Ideas“ Ihnestr. 26 14195 Berlin Germany Phone: +49 (0)30- 838 57033 Fax: +49 (0)30- 838 57096 [email protected] www.transformeurope.eu Europe as a Symbolic Resource | 3 Europe as a Symbolic Resource On the Discursive Space of Political Struggles in Poland Artur Lipiński Freie Universität Berlin Abstract The aim of this paper is to reconstruct the structure of discursive positions pertaining to the relationship between Poland and the European Union (EU). Such a problematization draws on the assumption that Europe is always understood in relation to the nation state and, in turn, the image of the latter is explicitly referred to or can be inferred from the vision of the EU. The analysis of the empirical data has revealed three discursive positions which organize the production of meaning and govern the strategies of representation. The first position represents the EU as a chance for the further modernization of Poland. The second position perceives the EU as the game of interests between sovereign nation states. The task of the nation state is to benefit from cooperation within an extra-state structure and to retain maximum sovereignty at the same time. The third identifies the EU as “a threat” hostile to the nation state and its interests. The chain of equivalence connects the EU with almost all negative social phenomena. The discursive analytical assumptions adopted in the paper help to show how the same topics and words (chance, threat, interests, nation, state, sovereignty, “Europe of fatherlands”, and modernization) acquire different meanings in the context of particular interpretations of other words. The Author Artur Lipiński has been a post-doc fellow at the Research College “The Transformative Power of Europe” at Freie Universität Berlin, in 2008-2009, focusing on the role of discourse in the construction of political identities in Polish politics. Since 2006 he is an assistant professor at the Institute of Political Science, Kazimierz Wielki University, Bydgoszcz, Poland. Contact: [email protected] 4 | KFG Working Paper No. 10 | January 2010 Contents 1. Introduction 5 2. Setting the Polish Context 11 3. Europe as a Discursive Resource - Three Positions in the Political Space 13 3.1 Europe as a Chance 12 3.2 Europe as a Game of Interest between Nation States 18 3.3 Europe as a Threat 23 5. Conclusion 27 Literature 29 Europe as a Symbolic Resource | 5 1. Introduction The relationship between Poland, but also other Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries (Batory 2002: 526; Grabbe/Hughes 1999: 189), and the European Union (EU) is often differentiated into two distinct phases. The first phase, called by Stadtmüller (2007: 6) “the age of innocence”, is characterized by a lack of knowledge and real understanding of the European Union as an institutional structure. At that time Polish foreign policy was guided by the broad principle of Europeanization perceived as “the return to Europe” (Törnquist-Plewa 2002). The second phase emerged with the start of negotiations in 1997, when enthusiasm began to cool down and initial consensus was gradually replaced by political tensions. I would also distinguish a third phase starting with the accession in May 2004. In this phase Poland switched from its status of an object which is acted upon, to a full actor which has to face and react to the challenges resulting from EU membership. This has created a completely new situation in which European issues, regardless of their salience, necessarily have to become a part of the internal political discourse with parties debating the question of EU reforms, future treaties, further development, models of institutional structure, enlargement plans, and so on. Although it is difficult to agree with Laure Neumayer’s opinion that European issues played a crucial role in the CEE countries’ politics, she convincingly argues that the pro-European line was a normative theme, in the sense of a general rule that political actors adopted after 1989 in order to avoid stigmatization as anti-European forces (Neumayer 2008: 8). This normative theme obviously led to the collusion of political parties on the issue of the European Union – a situation highly inconvenient from the perspective of party identity. With the lapse of time and growing importance of EU issues, a pragmatic theme, connected with instrumentalization of the EU issue, emerged and started to shape the behaviour of political parties. Parties had to act according to the political logic of identity and difference. The “Yes, but” rhetoric became a clear linguistic sign of the discursive strategies of political parties. On the one hand, it is shaped by the necessary allegiance to the EU, on the other hand, by an equally necessary instrumentalization of the EU issue employed by the political parties to differentiate between each other. Such logic led to the ambiguity of political utterances pertaining to the issue-ambiguity, one has to add, is a source of permanent problems political scientists face. While Neumayer has used political utterances mainly for illustrative purposes, without pondering the argumentative strategies of political actors, my aim is not only to reconstruct and illustrate the structure of party positions within the political landscape with appropriate excerpts, but also to analyze how political positions towards Europe and the EU, as well as lines of division between them, were built. If a discourse is a set of categories, ideas and concepts, which gives meaning to the social and physical objects (Hajer 2006: 67) and politics is about making a diagnosis of reality and providing justification for such a diagnosis,1 I am interested in the structure of discursive positions, political agents were able to take in Poland while speaking about Europe and the EU. What are their constituting elements (ideas, concepts, categories), the connections between these elements and the argumentation strategies aimed at justifying a particular articulation of Europe and the EU? In line with those who employ various discourse analytical approaches 1 A view widely held among discourse analysis working both within the Habermasian tradition and in the critical discourse analysis (see Habermas 1999; Van Leeuwen/Wodak 1999). They are both interested in the argumen- tation which used to justify certain statements. 6 | KFG Working Paper No. 10 | January 2010 in the study of EU constructions, I assume that, in order to establish a certain vision of the EU and Europe, it is necessary to scrutinize the articulation of collective identity related to the various dimensions of the nation state (Wæever 1998: 113). Therefore, I am also going to analyze how visions of the state carried in party discourses were articulated in connection with and in relation to Europe.2 To sum up, it is the aim of this study, to reconstruct discursive positions on Europe and, given the inherently relational character of discourse, its relationship to the (nation) state. Overview of the Literature It would not be too bold a generalization to say that one can distinguish between two different strands of literature reflecting on the political party positions and discourses on Europe or, to put it in another way, different visions and constructions of Europe conveyed by party discourses. Firstly and not surprisingly, there is a large number of studies situated within the field of (comparative) party politics including the growing body of literature devoted to the issue of Euroscepticism and Europeanization (Poguntke et al. 2007; Pennigs 2006). Among many theoretical studies, the ones most often referred to are the papers of Kopecky/Mudde (2002), Szczerbiak/Taggart (2000) and Ladrech (2002). The most general framework to tackle the issue of Europeanization of political parties was developed by Ladrech holding that both qualitative and quantitative methods are appropriate to measure changes in the party programmatic statements, and that references to the EU in the party manifestos are of crucial significance for this task. The other articles referred to above, discuss the issue of party positions towards the EU with particular focus on different types of Euroscepticism. The differentiation between soft and hard Euroscepticism proposed by Szczerbiak and Taggart (2000) and its subsequent critique developed by Kopecky and Mudde (2002) led to a fourfold typology of attitudes towards the European Union: Euroenthusiasts, Eurosceptics, Europragmatists and Eurorejects. These categories were invented to serve as an ideal type and point of reference necessary to qualify the position of a given party. As it immediately turned out, this framework also proved problematic, leading to some mistakes and posing obstacles for those who have tried to apply it to their own empirical work (Szczerbiak 2008a: 225f).