Post-Socialist Britain? British media representation of German and Polish history and migration

This paper presents early work on the media strand of the new AHRC-funded project ‘Post-Socialist Britain? Memory, Representation and Political Identity amongst German and Polish Immigrants in the UK’. The project explores connections between collective memory and political identity in the process of migration, with a particular focus on countries with experience of state socialist rule. ‘Post-Socialist Britain?’ takes as its point of departure the growth in support for anti-immigrant, radical right and Eurosceptic parties across Europe. This phenomenon has frequently been explained in these contexts as underpinned by collective memory of authoritarianism. Yet, those who give such explanations usually assume that those remembering authoritarianism do so in their country of origin. Using the case studies of German and Polish migrants in the UK, Post-Socialist Britain? breaks out of this national mould to explore if and how memory is linked to political identity when the individual moves to a new national context. The media strand of the project seeks to understand the discursive space in which Germans and Poles in the UK construct their political identities and how this might interact with memories of the country of origin. The public sphere is important for political identity: it is a space for democratic participation and solidarity but also a space of exclusion of marginalised groups. How far and in what way post-socialist migrants are addressed and can participate as members of the political community therefore becomes key. Using narrative frame analysis, we explore representations of German and Polish history and German and Polish migration in the most widely read online broadsheet and tabloid UK newspapers at key moments between 2014-2019. We focus on the question how representations of history and migration interact to create very different images of Poland and Germany that Poles and Germans in the UK encounter and respond to in negotiating their identities as migrants. In narratives on history, both Germany and Poland are mainly connected to World War II – the former as perpetrator, the latter as victim and as setting where events take place, rather than an actor. In relation to migration, Germany appears mainly as policy-maker and as receiver of migrants, whereas Germans as migrants are rarely discussed – although there have been some articles looking at the effects of Brexit on Germans in the UK. By contrast, Poles are mainly portrayed as migrants to the UK, rather than Poland being seen as an actor in international politics or a receiving country. Through our analysis, we explore the extent to which national histories are mediatized in ways that take into account the UK’s diverse patterns of migration.