Between East and West: Central European-Ness as a Self-Defence strategy

Abstract

This thesis asks whether Central European-ness functions as a continuous strategy of self-defence against categorisation from both West and East, and how that strategy is produced and carried on in Polish discourse. The region is named simultaneously by a West which files it as insufficiently European and by an East which claims it as an object of imperial tutelage, and this double condition keeps identification unsettled. The framework is constructivist, with ontological security as its internal mechanism and a postcolonial lens admitted only as a diagnostic for the asymmetry of categorising power. Using the discourse-historical approach, identity statements are coded along two axes in a corpus of Oscar Halecki's civilisational historiography, ten joint declarations of the Three Seas Initiative, thirteen speeches and statements by President Andrzej Duda, and seven press articles. The answer is a qualified affirmative. The repertoire assembled by Halecki in 1952 passes intact into the presidential register and the press, though it is spoken according to what each audience will tolerate, and it disappears from the multilateral texts. Poland authors the frame without owning it, and while defending itself against categorisation, it categorises Ukraine. The contribution is an operationalised dual-axis...