Emilia Sieczka

This project sets out to analyze recent conceptual makeovers in political and academic discourse that have appropriated Poland’s Solidarity movement in the service of various specific agendas, despite its former heterogeneity. Emilia Sieczka argues that after the fall of communism, this heterogeneity gave way to discursive practices in which the reimagined and politically reappropriated causes of Solidarity became a point of reference through which the “transformation” of 1989 was assessed, an empty signifier to be instrumentalized in a political competition. On one hand, this research is a study in intellectual history, employing historical discourse analysis of sociological and historical publications on Solidarity issued between 1989 and 2024; on the other, it is an investigation of the post-transition hegemonic strategies performed by political elites in imposing their own ideas of what Solidarity stood for in order to inscribe it within the context of normative distinctions between “true” and “superficial” transformation.