The politics of catastrophe: Poland's presidential crash and the ideology of post-postcommunism

East European Politics and Societies

Volumn 26, Issue 4, 2012, Pages 811-828

  Koczanowicz, Leszek ^a  

^a SWPS UNIVERSITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES   (Poland)

Author keywords

Catastrophe; Hegemony; Nationalism; Polish politics

Indexed keywords

EID: 84871346278     PISSN: 08883254     EISSN: 15338371     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0888325412447643     Document Type: Article

References (23)

1. Leszek Koczanowicz, "Politicizing Weather: Two Polish Cases of the Intersection between Politics and Weather," The South Atlantic Quarterly 106, no. 4 (2007): 753-68.
2. However, this distinction is not obvious. In totalitarian regimes, people can blame the government for everything, even for natural disasters. I think that it is other side of totalitarian obsession to control all events of everyday life.
3. I use the term hegemony in the sense given to it by Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 2001).
4. V. N. Vološinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 91.
5. Ibid., 92.
6. Ibid., 92.
7. On the relationships between disaster and crisis, see: Eric Cazdyn, "Disaster, Crisis, Revolution," South Atlantic Quaterly 106, no. 4 (2007): 647-62.
8. Leszek Koczanowicz, Politics of Time: Dynamics of Identity in Post-Communist Poland (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008).
9. However, even the statement that nobody had survived was contested. The right wing media suggested that some people survived and afterwards were finished off by the Russians.
10. The First Republic was the historical gentry republic that lost independence at the end of eighteenth century, The Second Republic existed in the interwar period 1918-1939, and the Third Republic was established in 1989. The period of the communist regime 1945-1989 was sometimes referred to as The Republic Second and Half.
11. In fact, the first Prime Minister of Law and Justice was Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz. It was widely supposed that to put him in this position a ploy was made by Jaroslaw Kaczynski to facilitate the chances of his brother to be elected as the President.
12. A thoughtful analysis of this shift is presented in David Ost's book: The Defeat of Solidarity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006).
13. For an interesting discussion of the division between "politics" and "the political" see.
14. Martin Jay, The Virtues of Mendacity. On Lying in Politics (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008).
15. Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1991).
16. For the bacground of Katyn's massacre see: Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 137-43.
17. See Norman Davies, Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw (New York: Viking Adult, 2004).
18. Janusz Kurtyka quoted in Gazeta Wyborcza 19-20 March 2011, 26.
19. However, as always it is a question to what extent such ideology is constructed by intellectuals. Maybe the popular mood was a better prediction of politicization of the catastrophe. I remember riding by cab to my school just after the announcement of the catastrophe. The taxi driver declared that he was a Catholic and Pole but he wouldn't mind if on the plane had been... and here he mentioned by name several prominent Polish politicians.
20. One of the most spectacular examples of this unity was to be the reconciliation of the fans of two competing football teams that had waged a war for almost one hundred years. Unfortunately, a couple of days after swearing the friendship these two groups of fans went into a violent brawl.
21. Jaroslaw Marek Rymkiewicz, "To Jaroslaw Kaczynski," Rzeczpospolita 21 April 2010.
22. Jarosław Marek Rymkiewicz, Wieszanie [Hanging] Wydawnictwo Sic! 2007.
23. Karl Marx, The Eighteen Brumaire of Luis Bonaparte (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972), 10.