NATIONALIST POPULISM AND POST-COMMUNISM

The main task of the analysis is to identify the ways in which the political elite employ particular categories in their narrative. The importance of political discourse and the role it plays in the reproduction of ethnocentrism or ethnic prejudices is often underestimated. However, such discourses play a role not only in the production of various types of ethnic hostilities and prejudices, but also in their reproduction. Political discourses are not value free and usually reflect the ideologies that the political elite stand behind. Such ideologies might also influence the ways in which social attitudes are expressed in the discourse structures. The elite, however, do not simply reproduce already existing ideological patterns, but accommodate them to the actual circumstances. Therefore, the ideologies should by no means be understood as something rigid, but as fluid, or things that are likely to undergo some changes in their substance. As Ruth Wodak argues, although the content of the prejudices may remain constant, they are “employed or deployed to accommodate the discursive demands of an altered political situation”. 79 One of the main tasks of this study is to point out the instrumental, elite driven reproduction of nationalist populist appeals in the political discourse. 80 In practice, the aim is to examine the nationalist, ethnocentric and populist language behaviour of the representatives of the political elite in the two examined countries during different time periods.The political elite play a crucial role in the reproduction of ethnocentric and nationalist beliefs, attitudes and behavioural patterns. As Teun van Dijk rightly pointed out, the elite are the ones who initiate, monitor and control the majority and the most influential forms of institutional and public text and talk. 81 By having preferential access 79 R. Wodak, “The genesis of racist discourse in Austria since 1989”, C. R. Caldas-Coulthard, M. Coulthard (eds.) Texts and Practices. Readings in Critical Discourse Analysis. (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 114. 80 There is already abundant literature in anthropology, sociology and social psychology about the ways in which “we” see and describe “them”. Group perception, biases in intercultural observation and stereotyping are well-known topics in such scholarly discourse. Much of this work focuses on psychological or cultural perceptions, beliefs, attitudes and ideologies; on the mental strategies of categorisation, differentiation and polarisation; or on the social strategies of exclusion, inferiorisation and marginalisation, among others. However, as Teun van Dijk argues, in the scholarly approaches to the perception and treatment of the Self and Others, the fundamental social practice of discourse has generally been ignored. See T. van Dijk, “Political Discourse and Racism: Describing Others in Western Parliaments”, S. H. Riggins (ed.) The Language and Politics of Exclusion. Others in Discourse . (Thousand Oaks, London, New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1997), p. 40. 81 T. van Dijk, “The Elite Reproduction of Racism”, pp. 3–4. One result of the earlier projects realised by Teun van Dijk was to discover that various groups of elite play a major role in the discursive reproduction processes of the system of racism. According to him, popular racism exists; however, sometimes it may be more overt

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