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Remembering Past Atrocities: Good or Bad for Attitudes toward Minorities?
Author(s): Charnysh, Volha
Editor(s): Kopstein, Jeffrey S.; Subotić, Jelena; Welch, Susan
Date: 2023
Topics: Holocaust, Holocaust Commemoration, Main Topic: Holocaust and Memorial, Nationalism, National Identity, Memory, Surveys
Abstract: Discrediting racial hatred and political extremism is one of the explicit aims of commemorating the Holocaust. And yet, remembering the difficult past does not always produce the intended consequences because political actors can challenge the narrative to advance their goals. In particular, right-wing populist movements often counter historical accounts of past atrocities in potentially damaging ways by portraying their own nations as victims rather than perpetrators. The chapter presents the results of an online survey experiment in Poland on how contestation of the Holocaust narrative affects xenophobic and exclusionist views. I find that while uncontested narratives about ingroup wrongdoing (massacre of Jews by Poles in Jedwabne) can reduce ethnocentric beliefs, countering the perpetrator narratives with a victimhood story (massacre of Poles by Ukrainians in Volhynia) weakens this effect and also lowers support for minority rights. I also find that the Holocaust narrative, contested or uncontested, does not affect anti-Semitic or pluralist attitudes.
Historical Legacies of Interethnic Competition: Anti-Semitism and the EU Referendum in Poland
Author(s): Charnysh, Volha
Date: 2015
Topics: Main Topic: Antisemitism, Antisemitism, Nationalism, European Union, Politics
Abstract: How do historical legacies shape contemporary political outcomes? The article proposes a novel attitudinal mechanism through which distant interethnic competition can influence political preferences in the present. It theorizes that historically conditioned predispositions at the local level can moderate the effects of national-level framing of a policy issue. Using Poland as a test case, I show that subnational variation in support for EU accession was influenced by populist claims about the increase in Jewish influence in the postaccession period. Anti-Semitic cues resonated with voters in areas with historically large Jewish populations and a contentious interethnic past, where latent anti-Semitism persisted throughout the communist period. To provide evidence for this argument, the article draws on rich historical and contemporary data at the county, town, and individual level of analysis and utilizes novel research methods.