Settling Accounts with the Troublesome Past: Self-Criticism in Poland and Eastern Europe

Abstract

Public acts of self-criticism in Eastern Europe – a genre cultivated and extorted by the communist parties – did not disappear with the end of communism. In the young democracies of the region self-criticism has become an attempt to diagnose society’s ‘backward’ character and to develop ‘self-correction’ scenarios in order to participate in the Western modernising discourse. On the one hand, conservative and right-wing elites suppose that public acts of self-criticism (performed by politicians, artists or scholars) can endow the vetting procedures of the ancien régime with a sense of social catharsis and retroactive justice. On the other hand, liberal and left-wing intellectuals subject themselves to collective self-reckoning, not only with their choices made in the transition period, but also with the memory of WWII, in order to shape a civil society free of anti-Semitism and intolerance. An analysis based on the discourse-historical approach in critical discourse analysis, Reinhart Koselleck’s historical semantics and Michel Foucault’s notion of discourse, and carried out on the text corpus of selected acts of self-criticism in Poland, aims to diagnose the role these acts had in shaping public discourse on the troublesome past.

Citation

Nowicka-Franczak, M. (2017), "Settling Accounts with the Troublesome Past: Self-Criticism in Poland and Eastern Europe", Karner, C. and Kopytowska, M. (Ed.) National Identity and Europe in Times of Crisis, Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 259-283. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-78714-513-920171012