Communism as a General Crime: Applying Hegemony Analysis to Anti-Communist Discourse in Contemporary Poland

Abstract

With the collapse of state socialism in Eastern Europe, anti-communism gained new momentum. In Poland, it has become a hegemonic discourse that manifests itself in (and reproduces itself through) legislation, public history, politics, and education, as well as pop culture. However, the discursive dominance of anti-communism has hardly been researched systematically. In this article, I aim to apply hegemony analysis, as developed by Martin Nonhoff – and based on Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s theory of discourse – to anti-communism in contemporary Poland. I give an overview of the methodology and discuss concrete analytical tools and their possible application and argue that, as a result of an antagonistic division of discursive space, communism becomes a “general crime”, an obstacle that prevents Polish society from finding “ultimate reconciliation with itself” and reaching its (mythical) fullness.

Keywords

• anti-communism
• discourse
• hegemony (analysis)
• Laclau
• Mouffe
• Nonhoff