Opinion Poll on Social Criteria of Polishness

In June 1988, the Public Opinion Research Centre (OBOP) conducted a survey designed by sociologists from the University of Warsaw on Polish national identity. The OBOP was the oldest public opinion research institute in Poland. It was established on the wave of post-Stalinist thought in 1958 within the structure of state television. In 1994, during the post-communist transformation, it was detached and transformed into a commercial company. Then in 1998, it was privatized and became part of the international research group Taylor Nelson Sofres (TNS Nipo) operating under the name TNS OBOP. In 2010, TNS OBOP merged with another public opinion institute called Pentor. Pentor was established in 1991 as the first private opinion poll institute in Poland. In 2005, it became part of the international corporation Research International, and since 2009 it has been part of the global research network TNS. As a result of the merger of TNS OBOP and TNS Pentor, TNS Polska was established, which currently operates within the Kantar Group (Kantar Public Reference Public2018; TNS OBOP 2008).

Despite the changes in ownership and names of the institute, the survey initiated by the OBOP in 1988 was conducted regularly and repeated every 10 years in 1998, 2008, and 2018, becoming one of the main sources of information for a wide audience on the nature of Polish national identity (Kantar Public Reference Public2018; Karkowska Reference Karkowska2019; TNS OBOP 2008). More precisely, in subsequent years the survey was repeated, focusing on only one question from the 1988 survey, which at that time was part of a broader sociological project. In 1988, the first question of the questionnaire concerned “the social criteria of Polishness” (Kantar Public Reference Public2018; Nowicka and Łodziński Reference Nowicka and Łodziński2001), and this question was also asked in subsequent years. The question was: “If you were to consider someone Polish, what would be important in your opinion, and what would be less important?” Respondents were presented with a list of ten features that were considered to be “Polishness criteria functioning in public discourse” (Kantar Public Reference Public2018: 2). These were the following characteristics:

1. 1) having citizenship in the People’s Republic of Poland (later changed to “having Polish citizenship”),

2. 2) living permanently in Poland,

3. 3) having Catholic faith,

4. 4) being born in Poland,

5. 5) having knowledge of Polish culture and history,

6. 6) speaking the Polish language,

7. 7) having at least one parent of Polish nationality,

8. 8) making special contributions to Poland,

9. 9) following Polish customs,

10. 10) feeling that you are Polish.

According to survey reports, these criteria can be ordered in terms of the extent to which their fulfilment depends on the individual (TNS OBOP 2008). The criteria “being born in Poland” and “having at least one parent of Polish nationality” were considered independent of the individual. The criteria “having Catholic faith,” “having Polish citizenship,” and “speaking the Polish language” are claimed to be more flexible and to some extent depend on the individual. As it is argued, you can change your faith, acquire citizenship, and learn the language. The criteria “having knowledge of Polish culture and history,” “making special contribution to Poland,” and “following Polish customs” are regarded as being dependent “to a large extent on the individuals themselves” (TNS OBOP 2008, 3). The criterion “feeling that you are Polish” is entirely a matter of individual choice (TNS OBOP 2008). A similar arrangement of these criteria on the scale of openness and closedness can be found in the academic literature (Karkowska Reference Karkowska2019; Nowicka and Łodziński Reference Nowicka and Łodziński2001; Pierzchała Reference Pierzchała2011; Wysocki Reference Wysocki2017). The survey was intended not only to diagnose the character of Polish identity but also to determine its degree of openness.

Survey Items in the Context of the Openness and Closedness of Polish Identity

Pierre Bourdieu (Reference Bourdieu1993) argued that opinion polls assume that people have defined and consistent views on issues that they often do not think about. Research on everyday nationalism suggests that in the modern world, national identities have become trivialized, an unnoticeable and self-explanatory context of everyday life for so-called ordinary people (Billig Reference Billig1995; Brubaker Reference Brubaker1996; Hall Reference Hall, Hall, Held and Mcgrew1992; Skey and Antonsich Reference Skey and Antonsich2017). Even social researchers often unknowingly consider a nation as something that was taken for granted and not subject to problematization, which is manifested by methodological nationalism—that is, unreflexive acceptance of national frameworks in the analysis of social phenomena (Wimmer and Glick Schiller Reference Wimmer and Schiller2002). Given that national identity is often seen as something natural and self-evident, it can be assumed that only in exceptional situations do most people reflect on their national identity. It can be argued that in Poland, such a situation took place in 2015–16 during the crisis of refugees’ rights protection (Fotaki Reference Fotaki2019). In 2015, the number of refugees and migrants coming to the European Union (EU) from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) increased significantly (Crawley et al. Reference Crawley, Düvell, Jones, McMahon and Sigona2018). In May 2015, the EU adopted a relocation plan that aimed to parcel out some refugees between member states. According to the arrangements agreed upon by the liberal-conservative government of Ewa Kopacz, Poland was to receive several thousand refugees (Horolets et al. Reference Horolets, Mica, Pawlak and Kubicki2019). However, the right-wing nationalist government of Law and Justice (PiS), formed in autumn 2015, rejected the relocation plan. PiS, the right-wing press, and some Catholic clergy triggered a moral panic against refugees identified as Muslims (Górak-Sosnowska and Pachocka Reference Górak-Sosnowska, Pachocka, Zempi and Awan2019). They presented Muslims as a threat to the very existence of the Polish nation (Narkowicz Reference Narkowicz2018; Pędziwiatr Reference Pędziwiatr, Bayraklı and Hafez2017). The right wing created an atmosphere of increased awareness of the importance of national identity. It can be said that the time of the perceived national crisis was a kind of ethnomethodological experiment that undermined the self-evidence and taken-for-granted-ness of the nation, undermined the “natural order of the world,” and made people think about their understanding of the national identity (Fox Reference Fox2017).

Racism Without Racism

As I previously mentioned, in the analysed survey there are no questions about race at all. Although it is difficult to talk about race, in the popular imagination biological criteria are often used to classify people and combine them into groups that are perceived as having a separate identity (Fairbanks Reference Fairbanks2015). As many analyses demonstrate, various national identities are constructed around racial differences, and it is difficult to assume in advance that biological factors in Poland do not play any role in the social processes of constructing Polish identity (Gilroy Reference Gilroy2000; Hall Reference Hall2017). However, as I have already noted, the nature of racism in the modern world is changing. Due to the discrediting of racism and its contemporary lack of social acceptability, it now takes on more latent forms that do not directly refer to biological factors. In this context, researchers write about symbolic racism, cultural racism, racism without racism, or neo-racism. For example, Étienne Balibar (Reference Balibar, Balibar and Wallerstein1991, 21) argues that many notions in public discourse, such as “cultural difference” or “immigration,” provide substitutes for the concept of race, because they stigmatize others, create rigid hierarchies, and justify discrimination. As he explains, “It is a racism whose dominant theme is not biological heredity but the insurmountability of cultural differences, a racism which, at first sight, does not postulate the superiority of certain groups or peoples in relation to others but ‘only’ the harmfulness of abolishing frontiers, the incompatibility of life-styles and traditions.” In this context, the statements by the informants quoted previously, highlighting the impossibility of surmounting cultural boundaries, can be interpreted as a form of neo-racism. However, in the interviews references were also made to biological factors, especially to Whiteness, which has become a signifier of “our” culture. When writing about racism without racism, I do not mean to replace race with cultural criteria in referring to biological factors, or deny that these criteria are important in defining Polishness. In other words, although Polishness is combined with Whiteness, this fact tends to be overlooked in the general consciousness (Jaskulowski and Pawlak Reference Jaskulowski and Pawlak2020). The hegemonic conception of Polishness creates an illusion—supported by the analyzed survey—that Polish national identity is free of biological and cultural racism.

The survey results themselves could suggest a significance of racial factors. All subsequent surveys revealed that for a significant percentage of respondents, having at least one parent of Polish nationality is an important criterion of Polishness (for example, in 2018, 84% of respondents considered this criterion to be very important or rather important, and in the previous years it was from 79% to 81%). Considering the social structure of Poland—a relatively small percentage of visibly different migrants (the increase in the number of migrants in recent years is mainly related to economic migration from Ukraine)—racial criteria might play a role in defining Polishness. In other words, it can be assumed that in a culturally homogeneous Polish society, biological criteria must have some relevance in creating boundaries between us and them, that by default a Pole is White, or that for many respondents a Polish parent is by default a Pole with white skin. Unfortunately, the survey did not address this issue, helping to maintain the conviction in the public space that biological factors are irrelevant in defining Polishness.

The lack of questions about racial criteria in the survey is not contingent, but it results from a fairly widespread belief in Poland that the country is free from racism. For example, two prominent Polish sociologists, Ewa Nowicka and Sławomir Łodziński (Reference Nowicka and Łodziński2001), argue:

This quotation perfectly sums up the arguments put forward by various authors in favour of the alleged absence of racism in Poland (Grott Reference Grott2014; Kłoskowska Reference Kłoskowska and Ratcliffe2003; Nowicka and Łodziński Reference Nowicka and Łodziński2001; Siciński Reference Siciński, Domański and Rychard1997; Ząbek Reference Ząbek2009; cf. Nowicka Reference Nowicka2018). The issue of racism in Poland is usually discussed in the context of the history of the eugenics movement in the first half of the 20th century. It is argued, however, that the fascination with racial hygiene and racial science in Poland was fairly short-term, as the country’s experience of World War II quickly led to the concept of race being discredited and disappearing from Polish public and academic life (Gawin Reference Gawin2018). It is quite commonly accepted in Polish literature that racism in Poland has never been a problem for three basic reasons. Firstly, it is claimed that Poland, unlike Western European countries, did not participate in the colonization of Africa or Asia. Poland did not have overseas colonies, and there was no ideology justifying colonial conquests or a history of exploitation of colonial populations, so there was no basis for racism to develop. However, as Bolaji Balogun (Reference Balogun2018) recently showed, the notions of colonization, racism, and White superiority cannot be reduced to European imperial powers such as France or the United Kingdom but must be also extended to the less powerful European nation-states such as Poland. Analysing the activities of the Polish Colonial Society in the interwar period, he demonstrated the role of racial imaginaries in Polish politics. His analysis “revealed the colonial inheritance of racialised governance and postcolonial conditions that manifest themselves in contemporary racisms” (Balogun Reference Balogun2018, 2524; Jaskulowski and Pawlak Reference Jaskulowski and Pawlak2020).

Secondly, it is often argued that the Black population in Poland was and is few in number, and therefore there have been no conditions for the formation of racism (Kłoskowska Reference Kłoskowska and Ratcliffe2003). In fact, despite migration, the Black population remains a small percentage of Polish society. However, the small percentage of the Black population does not exclude the existence of racist stereotypes. One example is a popular book by Henryk Sienkiewicz entitled “In Desert and Wilderness” originally published in 1911, which is on the list of readings in primary school. The book tells the story of the Polish boy’s adventures in Africa and is permeated with the ideology of the White man’s superiority and full of racist stereotypes (e.g., Black people are depicted as devoid of morality and compared to animals or children). For example, one of the characters explained the alleged nature of Black people: “Among the Blacks there are honest souls, though as a rule you cannot depend upon their gratitude; they are children who forget what happened the day before” (Sienkiewicz Reference Sienkiewicz1917, 316). Although Sienkiewicz’s historical novels are considered to be key to shaping the understanding of Polishness, there is a consensus regarding his Africa novel’s “irrelevance to the politics of Polish identity” (Klobucka Reference Klobucka2001, 249), and the racism of this novel is ignored—for example, the main centre of literature studies in Poland published a monograph devoted to Sienkiewicz in 2019 in which the word racism is not mentioned at all (Szleszyński and Rudkowska Reference Szleszyński and Rudkowska2019). Further, new studies show that Black or darker skinned people experience racist prejudice in Poland (Balogun Reference Balogun, Górak-Sosnowska, Pachocka and Misiuna2019). Racism cannot be reduced to attitudes toward Black people or people of African descent, but it includes prejudices toward Jews, Muslims, and Roma. For example, in the case of the latter group, Nowicka’s research shows that Roma are sometimes perceived as racially different and are also subject to racial stereotypes—accused of laziness or having an unpleasant smell (Nowicka Reference Nowicka1995).

Thirdly, Polish authors argue that the existing forms of prejudice in Poland were not and are not racist. In this context, the issue of anti-Semitism is often discussed, which, as some authors argue, was an inalienable element of Polish nationalism. It is claimed that the Polish identity was formed in opposition to the Jews, who constituted a significant other (Michlic Reference Michlic2006). However, anti-Semitism was interpreted mainly as a phenomenon of economic and cultural basis (Grott Reference Grott2014). In other words, it is argued that in contrast to, for example, German racist anti-Semitism, in Poland the discrimination toward Jews was allegedly due to the fact that the latter dominated trade, cities, and free professions. The Polish middle class, which was emerging in the 19th century, had to compete with culturally different Jews, which led to the creation of negative anti-Jewish stereotypes. Stereotypes were therefore economic, not racial, and were a cultural expression of the economic interests of the Polish middle class. For example, the ideologists of the ND, which was largely representative of the middle classes, talked about the incomplete social structure of Polish society and proclaimed the need for an economic fight against Jews (e.g., a boycott of Jewish trade). However, it can be argued that, from the very beginning, the attitude of nationalists toward Jews was marked by at least cultural racism. Nationalists rejected the possibility of the assimilation of Jews into Polish society. In fact, they referred not so much to racial differences as to cultural differences. In their view, Jews had such a different culture that they would never become part of the Polish nation, which resembles contemporary Islamophobic rhetoric (Dmowski Reference Dmowski1934 [1902]). The essentialized notion of culture played a similar role here as the category of race; namely, it served to exclude a certain category of people. However, with the radicalisation of the 1930s, explicit biological language appeared in nationalist texts. For example, the aforementioned Roman Dmowski, in his sensational 1931 novel Inheritance, telling the story of a Jewish-Masonic conspiracy against Poland, presents Jews as a clearly distinct group in terms of physical characteristics (Dmowski Reference Dmowski1931). Moreover, in the 1930s, radicalising Polish ethno-authoritarian nationalists also resorted to physical violence. For example, they beat Jewish students at universities and customers of Jewish shops.

Selective Racism

The importance of racial criteria has also become apparent during the aforementioned refugee rights protection crisis. Right-wing discourse identified refugees with Muslims, who were presented as an existential threat to the very existence of the Polish nation. It drew on essentialised cultural differences and sometimes implicitly presented refugees as people with a dark complexion, emphasising their difference from “us” Poles (White by default). In this discourse, the dark colour became an indicator of dangerous otherness. Some right-wing politicians also used openly racist rhetoric, for example Kaczyński, who warned that refugees spread “dangerous diseases, parasites, or protozoa” (Krzyżanowski Reference Krzyżanowski2018).

The anti-refugee rhetoric founds resonance in society and was one of the reasons for the victory of PiS in the 2015 general election. In a short time, the percentage of those opposed to taking in refugees increased from 21% in May 2015 to 53% in December 2015 (Cieślińska and Dziekońska, Reference Cieślińska and Dziekońska2019). The ease of mobilization of Polish society against refugees in the name of defending national identity could indicate the significance of racial boundaries in Poland. This significance is also evidenced by my qualitative research, during which most interviewees reproduced official images of Muslims as threatening others. In accordance with the logic of cultural racism, they attributed essential cultural characteristics to Muslims. They also tended to naturalise cultural differences. In their eyes, the individual becomes a Muslim not as a result of religious socialisation but as a result of birth. Many interviewees animalised Muslims by attributing to them features that placed them closer to the animal world than to the human one. Moreover, some assumed by default that a Muslim refugee could be recognized by their darker skin colour. For example, one informant compared Syrian refugees to “filthy animals” and claimed that “it’s hard to distinguish them from the Roma because they’re very similar.”

Some authors have pointed out that the anti-Muslim pattern resembles anti-Semitic clichés and similarities (Bobako Reference Bobako2017; Narkowicz Reference Narkowicz2018; Pędziwiatr Reference Pędziwiatr, Bayraklı and Hafez2017). However, my qualitative research has shown that, although both forms of prejudice (anti-Muslim and anti-Semitism) have common features, they also differ in many respects. For example, the interviewees did not attribute to Muslims high intelligence, agency, control over money and economy, or conspiratorial plots (traditional elements of anti-Semitism). Moreover, informants never referred explicitly to examples of Jews, which of course does not exclude their unconsciously drawing on anti-Semitic clichés. Instead, they compared Muslim refugees to Roma and projected anti-Roma stereotypes onto refugees. For instance, in their opinion, Muslims, like the Roma, are reluctant to work, scrounge welfare benefits, are prone to crime, do not want to assimilate, and provocatively demonstrate their cultural otherness. The interviewees placed refugees, similarly to the Roma, outside the Polish national boundaries, referring to their essentialised cultural differences. However, for some interviewees, a visible sign of this otherness was a darker skin colour; refugees, like the Roma, are physically different from “us” Poles. In the interviewees’ statements, cultural otherness was combined with physical difference. There were also some dissimilarities between Islamophobia and Romophobia. For example, the Roma were considered radically different and constituted an individual threat (a Roma stereotype of a criminal who could beat or steal) but were not imagined as a collective threat to the very existence of the Polish nation, in contrast to Muslim refugees.

Studies on the experiences of Black people in Poland, works on the Polish colonial project, and the susceptibility of Polish society to Islamophobic slogans (taking into account the way in which the boundaries between “we” Poles and “they” Muslim refugees are constructed), indicate the significance of the racial criteria of Polishness. Although some authors suggest an essential link between Polishness and Whiteness, it is necessary to understand these links in a more nuanced way. Otherwise, we could fall into the trap of cultural racism that essentialises national or cultural identities, overlooking their internal heterogeneity. In other words, Poles are not racist because they are Poles, but some Poles link Polishness with Whiteness in some contexts. We must remember that theoretical analyses of identity indicate that it is not a static social fact but a dynamic, contextual, and situational process of identification (Brubaker and Cooper Reference Brubaker and Cooper2000; Hall Reference Hall, Hall, Held and Mcgrew1992). For example, from the perspective of social identity theory, individuals do not just have an identity, but in different contexts and situations, they invoke different identity categories. Identity is a dynamic and contextual process of categorization and identification; in one context, for instance, Whiteness might be meaningless, and in another it might be significant because, for example, its relevance will be accentuated by hegemonic social actors with the power to impose their own definitions of identity.

My qualitative research also indicates that Whiteness has such a selective significance in the definition of Polishness by interviewees. More specifically, my research suggests contextual and selective reference to racial criterion. In other words, the Whiteness criterion has been activated with regard to certain groups and in certain situations, for example, with regard to refugees from MENA countries during the so-called migration crisis, but not with regard to Asians or Muslim Turks or some Blacks, who are generally accepted, even by interviewees who are strongly opposed to taking refugees. Despite their physical differences, they are accepted because they are not perceived as a threat and because they perform useful economic functions (e.g., retail trade and food service). For example, one of the informants explained who might be recognized as a Pole: “Well, White, anyway, yeah? A man from this cultural background, rather Christian, yes?” In this way, he identified Whiteness with Polish culture and Christianity (used here as a synecdoche of Catholicism). Nevertheless, the same respondent explained that every Pole should take part in political life, and gave an example of a Black MP in the Polish parliament: “Such an example for me is, I don’t know, but of course it does not always work that way, there is some MP named Godson, I don’t know what race he is, I don’ know if he is a ‘Murzyn,’ or what to call him. But I think you can easily call him a Pole.” On the one hand, the informant emphasized White skin as an indicator of Polishness. On the other hand, he accepted the Black MP as a Pole, although he used pejorative language, calling him “Murzyn,” which many individuals, especially Black people living in Poland, find offensive. Thus, a Black MP can be considered a Pole despite his “visible” otherness, because he possesses a large amount of human capital. However, a refugee from Syria is excluded because he or she is not only visibly different, but is also defined as having a low amount of human capital (i.e. allegedly lacking education and unwilling to work, instead relying on benefits), as well as posing a threat according to the stereotype of a Muslim terrorist. The targets of racialising were groups that were perceived by informants as radically different and threatening or having low human capital. In other words, Whiteness is not a static feature of Polish national identity, but it seems to be a category evoked only in certain situations and in relation to certain groups. The question arises: when and in what circumstances is Whiteness invoked as a defining feature of Polishness, and in relation to which groups? Is the racialisation of certain groups (especially Muslims from the MENA area and Black people) a permanent element of social construction of the Polishness boundaries, or is there de-racialisation in certain contexts? It is difficult to answer these questions at the moment, but one thing is certain: research on Polish identity cannot ignore the question of racial identity.