Our Man in Warszawa: How the West Misread Poland

ISBN-13: 9789633863954 / Angielski / Miękka / 2021 / 220 str.

Jo Harper

Opis

Written by a Brit who has lived in Poland for more than twenty years, this book challenges some accepted thinking in the West about Poland and about the rise of Law and Justice (PiS) as the ruling party in 2015. It is a remarkable account of the Polish post-1989 transition and contemporary politics, combining personal views and experience with careful fact and material collections. The result is a vivid description of the events and scrupulous explanations of the political processes, and all this with an interesting twist – a perspective of a foreigner and insider at the same time. Settled in the position of participant observer, Jo Harper combines the methods of macro and micro analysis with CDA, critical discourse analysis. He presents and interprets the constituent elements and issues of contemporary Poland: the main political forces, the Church, the media, issues of gender, the Russian connection, the much-disputed judicial reform and many others. A special feature of the book is the detailed examination of the coverage of the Poland's latest two elections, one in 2019 (parliamentary) and the other in 2020 (presidential) in the British media, an insightful and witty specimen of comparative cultural and political analysis.
 

"Defined against a geopolitical background of insecurity and threats, perhaps PiS was just faster than its rivals in understanding the electorate. Perhaps Poland was simply reverting to type. Wasn’t this New Normal a lot like the Old Normal?“

 

“PiS had somehow cobbled together a winning brand, with doses of economic redistribution, social conservatism, and patriotic rhetoric. PiS branded itself the creator of a ‘Polish welfare state’ and its election manifesto rejected “the rules of neoliberalism.”

 

“Perhaps the weakest element of The New Statesman and other similar articles was the failure to grasp PiS’s success in structural and socio-economic terms. The focus was on how to regenerate the opposition and again, in largely symbolic and vague ways. Nothing on the economic foundations of social class, nothing of notions of elite self-perpetuation and intra elite rivalries.”