Politics of enemy in CEE countries

Recent developments of the politics in CEE countries drew our attention to the massive rise of the “politics of enemy”. Enemies might be any distinct social or political grouping portrayed as an “enemy” in political communication (e.g. immigrants, minor ethnic groups, communists, foreign agents, etc.). It seems that main political actors (most importantly governments) use this antagonizing politics not only to legitimize their actions by the presumed threat, but also to mobilize the public to support their claims. The role and impacts of the creation of social and political divisions through generating enemy-images became one of the key issues in political sociology (E. Said, C. Schmitt, G. Mosca, E. Hobsbawn, E. Gellner etc.). The principles and processes of how picture of enemies are developed and maintained were elaborated in much detail: the whole process is conditioned by the existence of a collective identity of a certain social group, the positive self-identification of this group, picturing the others as a coherent social group, and attribution of a threat to this group. At the same time, there are rather few recent instances of connecting processes of enemy creation and contentious politics or collective action in general. While there are numerous studies of propaganda and uses of enemy creation in times of war and political conflicts (e.g. Vurionen, Lasswell, Herf), a very few analyses exists on the connection between the strategic construction of adversaries and contentious interactions in contemporary politics. We aim to fill this gap and propose a conceptual framework that would connect the existing approaches to the study of social divisions and group formation related to symbolical construction of “otherness” with contentious politics and social movement studies. Particularly, we aim at preparation of conceptual apparatus for the study of production, usage and maintenance of images/frames of the enemy in the processes of political mobilization in Central and Eastern European countries with a special emphasis on the “post-socialist condition” – including omnipresent politics of memory and processes of de-politicization of their public spheres after 1989. The recent outbreak of the “politics of enemy” suggests that certain features of post-socialist politics are largely conducive to this type of political contention. We aim at assessing this phenomenon through the concept of “enemization” of particular social groups by the means of framing of public collective action with frequent references to political past of the country. More specifically, we ask: - What social, cultural and psychological mechanisms are employed in the production of pictures of “The Other” and “Enemy”? - Are these mechanisms related to principles of non-political or post-political politics? - How these mechanisms relate to the operation of democratic institutions? - How are the pictures of enemy in CEE politics related to historical enmities? Are they created ex nihilo or imported from different political regions? - How these pictures relate to key political values and institutions in countries of CEE region?