Abstract
In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera suggests that the first step in liquidating a people ... is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. (159) In the last five years, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of its satellite regimes, the nations of Central and Eastern Europe have been engaged in the process of massive national reconstruction, trying to remember what they once were and redefining what they are. As Italian political scientist Maurizio Cotta has recently observed, "the last few years have witnessed one of the most far-reaching processes of the construction of new political entities in recent centuries" (13). This process is now occurring over half of the European continent, and involves a wholesale rewriting of every aspect of national life, from inventing a new language for describing--and thus making possible--new political institutions and processes, to supplying a new set of collectively validated symbols to define a new national identity and on to (re) defining the basic terms of public debate. In the process, the basic institutions of public life are being transformed, political parties established, an arena for open public debate created, and the basis for a new democratic public life set.
Journal Title
Iowa Journal of Communication
Volume
26
Issue
2
First Page
26
Last Page
42
Language
en
File Format
application/pdf
Recommended Citation
Omatowski, Cezar M.
(1994)
"Reinvesting a Nation: The Rhetoric of Political Transformation in Poland,"
Iowa Journal of Communication: Vol. 26:
No.
2, Article 4.
Available at:
https://scholarworks.uni.edu/ijc/vol26/iss2/4
Copyright
©1994 Iowa Communication Association
