ABSTRACT
Radical political transformations – such as the toppling of an authoritarian regime – are usually associated with intensive mythmaking. After the fall of communism, mythologies legitimising the Third Republic had to be forged and a unifying narrative that could provide the framework for national collective identifications had to be constructed. The Polish political elites had to make choices about which aspects of the historical past should become a focal point for the process of post-communist identity formation. The new dominant narrative of the Third Republic had to invoke core values that have been associated with Polishness, and that could ensure continuity in history, and at the same time also articulate how an independent Poland had reoriented itself in the post-1989 world; that is, how Poland viewed its past, present and future. The choice of core values did not present much difficulty. A study investigating political leaders’ opinions on what constitutes Polishness, conducted in the early 1990s, revealed that politicians were unanimous in identifying several ‘sacred values’. 1 Respondents, regardless of political affiliations, believed that values fundamental to national unity were: the nation, the fatherland, patriotism, sovereignty and patriotic duty. 2 These values were seen as rooted in Polish history, universally recognised by Poles and endorsed by a national consensus. Polish self-identification through Catholic symbols and rituals (the Pole–Catholic model) was regarded to be a persistent and dominant phenomenon in the national culture, as a kind of ‘obvious tradition’. 3 The resonance of narratives rooted in the Romantic tradition (which is particularly conducive to mythmaking) was considerable among Polish society as recently as the 1980s. Thus, the symbolic repertoire for use in the construction of dominant national narratives also seemed to be readily available. And yet one of the claims frequently voiced in public debates on Polish national memory was that the post-1989 elites had failed to establish a founding myth for the Third Republic. Questions probing the post-communist mythmaking included: If urban space is a repository of memory and history, what version of the past has emerged now that the initial process of revising Poland’s memorial landscape has been completed? Is patriotic mythmaking and the restoration of national pride the best way forward to ensure social cohesion and strong legitimacy of the state? Given the diminishing role of the nation-state, is it possible to effectively endorse one dominant narrative of the national past? Answers to these questions varied widely, depending on the political and ideological affiliations of contributors to the debate – but some amount of consensus was reached. Different sections of Poland’s existing elites agreed that it was increasingly difficult to endorse a single, dominant narrative of the national past, even if they disagreed whether this was a positive or negative development. 4
