"Polish pride is something else" Polish diaspora nationalism, integration through racism and the far-right

This paper explores processes, triggers and cultural dimensions of far-right radicalization among Polish migrants/minority in Britain. We examine a combination of factors that play a part – Polish nationalism mythologizing emigration, class positionality within British capitalist labour relations, and construction of whiteness/Europeanness – especially in the context of Polish state’s diaspora engagement policies which stimulate nationalist and identitarian activism. However, the far-right leaning of some Polish migrants and groups in Britain is not a simple case of a one-way transplantation from Poland of racism and hostility to diversity. Rather, it forms a part of what we term "integration through racism" – a process which entails also the positive feedback from the British society actively constructing Polish minority as a special and desirable one due to its whiteness, Europeanness, military traditions and hard work ethic – in the words of Tommy Robinson, the founder of far-right English Defence League who attends the yearly nationalist march in Warsaw: "Polish pride is something else". This paper therefore offers a critique of Benedict Anderson’s notion of "long distance nationalism" which, by focusing solely on the sending country politics, silences structures of systemic racism in countries of residence and orientalizes far-right activism of diasporas isolating them from host countries’ far-right and populist milieus. We demonstrate that British national populists actively reach out to Polish migrants and organizations for support or association with symbols and mythologies around Polish militarism, nationalist struggles and supposedly anti-left, traditional, Christian outlook. The paper uses the morphological approach to identify ideological patterns emerging in this transnational far-right field while also employing multi-sited ethnography to explore meaning-making practices of ritualized nature that support the mythopoeic narratives elevating Poland to the rank of a major hub of transnational far-right activism.