Schengen and the Rosary: Catholic Religion and the Postcolonial Syndrome in Polish National Habitus

Abstract

The article discusses the formation of national habitus in Poland and its recent transformation in the post-socialist period from the perspective of Norbert Elias’s sociology of social processes. The starting point of the analysis is the action “Rosary to the Borders” (Różaniec do granic) of 2017: the article analyses the use of universal Catholic and nation-bound symbolic resources in this action referring to Elias’s symbol theory, in order to indicate the main characteristics of the mechanism of collective memory in this action connecting Catholic symbols to the national ones. Religious imagery of Polishness is then related to a reconstruction of Polish state-formation process, and two uses of national habitus, the internal and the external one, are identified, in which religious symbols play a significant role. The external use is illustrated by the brief overview of German-Polish antagonism. Finally, the postcolonial syndrome of Polis society is identified as source of the framing combining external and internal use of Polish national habitus, especially after 2015.