The aim of the book is to explore the attitudes towards the migrants and refugees from MENA in Poland in the context of the vernacular understanding of the Polish nation and national boundaries. My point of departure is the brief analysis of the so-called migration crisis of 2015â2016 and the reaction to it on the part of the EU and Polish governments. I focus primarily on the analysis of the Polish right wing, which identified refugees with Muslims who allegedly posed a threat to the Polish nation. The analysis of this Islamophobic discourse, which gained hegemonic status, sets the background for the main aim of the book, namely, the exploration of lay views on refugees in the context of the EU relocation plan . In other words, I am interested in how ordinary people perceived refugees, what they thought about Poland accepting refugees, and to what extent they reproduced, negotiated or contested hegemonic Islamophobic discourse. I analyse their attitudes towards refugees in the context of the lay understanding of Polishness, Polish national identity and the logic of inclusion into and exclusion from the Polish nation. In my analysis, I rely on 191 individual semi-structured interviews that were carried out in 2015â2017 in WrocĹaw, Opole, WaĹbrzych and four smaller cities and towns, whose names I do not disclose due to confidentiality concerns (Surmiak, 2018). Additionally, I also draw on two group interviews conducted with twelve inhabitants of WrocĹaw.
The book on the one hand fits into the study of the lay understanding of the nation and nationalism (Bonikowski, 2016; Fox & Miller-Idriss, 2008; Skey, 2011). On the other hand, it deals with the question of attitudes towards Muslims, because informants identified refugees mainly with Muslims. The book is therefore part of a wider stream of research on contemporary Islamophobia (Bobako, 2017; Ekman, 2015; Pratt & Woodlock, 2016; Saeed, 2016). Most of the research on anti-Islamic prejudices focuses mainly on the Western world (Bobako, 2017; Narkowicz & PÄdziwiatr, 2017a, 2017b). However, as post-colonial studies demonstrate, one cannot assume in advance that the West is a universal norm, that the West is a reference point for other regions which, after all, have their own history, specificity and determinants (Mayblin, Piekut, & Valentine, 2016). In my work, I analyse the specificity of Islamophobia in Poland using the example of attitudes towards refugees. Regarding the criticism of methodological nationalism , I do not assume, however, that this specificity is conditioned by the national context (Wimmer & Schiller, 2002). I suppose that there are a number of different factors, both national and global, local and transnational that shape Islamophobia in Poland. My book is the first systematic qualitative analysis of bottom-up reactions to the so-called migration crisis in Poland, though, of course, there has been some research on the attitudes towards immigrants and refugees, including Muslims. However, these studies have been dominated by three main approaches.
First, the question of the attitude towards refugees, as well as Polishness and national identity, was the subject of public opinion polls, for example, those conducted by the Center for Public Opinion Research (CBOS, 2015, 2016). However, quantitative opinion polls have a number of disadvantages. They assume that there is a public opinion, i.e., that people have well-defined and consistent views (Bourdieu, 1993; Kilias, 2004). However, peopleâs views are often contradictory, fragmented and inconsistent. In short, quantitative public opinion polls do not reflect the complexity of human beliefs and views. Public opinion polls impose categories and structures on experiences, giving minimal opportunity to obtain insight into the vernacular interpretation of social reality. For example, it would appear that the category of immigrant is quite obvious, but the informants tend to understand it in a specific way. They commonly identified immigrants with refugees, Arabs , Syrians and Roma (interviewers usually used the pejorative term âCyganâ, DĹşwigol, 2007), but not, for example, with the Japanese. Allegedly under the influence of media images, some interviewees started to use the word âimmigrantâ to refer not to all foreigners but only to those whom they regarded as radically different, having low social status and threatening âusâ Poles. Therefore, although they regarded Japanese as culturally different, they do not view them as immigrants due to their high social status and high level of human capital (directors, managers). In contrast, the informants counted Roma as immigrants, overlooking the fact that Roma have lived in Poland for centuries, because they associated them with radical cultural and racial difference, unemployment and crime. In short, quantitative research does not allow the capture of nuances and contradistinctions among lay categories and provides poor insight into the reach meaning ordinary people attach to social reality.
The second dominant trend is the analysis of the media (e.g., Bertram, Puchejda, & Wigura, 2017; PÄdziwiatr, 2017; Skorupska & Mordacz, 2017), intellectual discourse (commentaries and academic works, e.g., Bobako, 2017) and political discourse (e.g., politiciansâ speeches, Cap, 2018; KrzyĹźanowska & KrzyĹźanowski, 2018; KrzyĹźanowski, 2018). These studies often bring valuable findings, and I will draw on them intensively later in my book. However, this type of analysis also has its limitations. This approach generally focuses on top-down analysis of high profile media. Not only does it overlook more pop-cultural channels (e.g., Majewski, 2015, 2017) but it sometimes implies naively that media is akin to a âconveyor beltâ for directives from the top of the state, as if the ideas formulated, for example, by politicians or journalists are neatly translated into everyday practice or passively consumed by their recipients. In other words, studies on media or politicians do not say much about the discourse reception in everyday life. Referring to critical media theory (Hall, 1980, 1994), this book relies on the assumption that people are active agents capable of modifying, transforming and resisting media and official discourse according to their own interests and aims (Jaskulowski & Majewski, 2016, 2017). This is an assumption that recipients must be treated as active agents who do not always reproduce official discourse and who are also capable of negotiating and contesting it. Thus, drawing on various reports and secondary sources in my book, I analyse the hegemonic discourse on the so-called migration crisis and refugees. Then, I explore how the hegemonic discourse works in everyday life: how ordinary men and women define national boundaries in relation to refugees, to what extent they reproduce, contest or negotiate dominant anti-Muslim images, and what they think about the EU relocation programme. At the same time, I am not interested in individual differences and individual interpretations but rather in wider socially shared patterns of reproduction, negotiation and contestation of hegemonic discourse (Hall, 1980).
The third approach is an attempt to explain Islamophobia in Poland in the context of structural and historical processes. Thus, referring to the theory of Immanuel Wallerstein, Bobako (2017) claims that Islamophobia is the by-product of the semi-peripheral status of Poland in the global economic system. In short, looking from a broad structuralâhistorical perspective, she argues that Islamophobia is an ideological expression of the structural dependence of Poland on the core Western economies. Anti-Muslim feelings are based on ressentiment, which is a form of false consciousness: it masks the inferior status of Poland by diverting attention from the real problems generated by neoliberal capitalism, such as growing precarity or reduced public social spending. While I do not deny the necessity for such broad historicalâstructural analyses, my book focuses more on the micropolitics of Islamophobia . I build here on pioneering research on everyday Islamophobia in Poland conducted by such scholars as Narkowicz and PÄdziwiatr (2017a, 2017b). The macro-structural approach does not explain how the Islamophobic discourse is constructed from the bottom-up and is rooted in the day-to-day experiences of ordinary people. I am starting from the ontological assumption that, ultimately, all social structures are maintained and modified in everyday interactions, which are worth analyses on their own (Berger & Luckmann, 1967).
There are also various journalistic commentaries on discourse about refugees. Although they sometimes offer interesting insights, they do not rely on systematic observations and most often they present a very simplified picture of Polish society, which does not stand up to the confrontation with empirical data. For example, one of...