Presidential discourse as a discourse of collective memory: from local to national community

Abstract

Presidential discourse is an important medium for collective memory because of the president’s role as warrant of the national unity. This memory is shaped in speeches commemorating anniversaries important to the whole community, but also in speeches at meetings with local communities during the president’s trips across the  country. The aim of this paper is to analyse the way in which presidential discourse builds the local memory during such meetings, includes it in the national memory, and shapes the attitude of remembering. The corpus consists of the speeches by president Andrzej Duda delivered at meetings with local communities in 2019. The study focuses on the content of collective memory conveyed in the presidential discourse as well as on the narrative, lexical and pragmatic means used to express it (i.e. the independence narrative, evaluative terms, speech acts of thanking). The presidential discourse of memory has three main functions: strengthening bonds between members of the national community, creating patterns of patriotic behaviour and legitimizing power relations. The dominant independence narrative reflects right-wing politics of history, emphasizing hero worship, patriotic and Christian values, the role of the family, as well as the unity of the National community. Although it shows Poland’s past through local history, it ignores the existence of different communities of memory. The independence narrative portrays also the “ordinary people” as the main protagonist of history. Their importance is emphasized by acts of thanks that invert the power relations — the president expresses gratitude to the descendants of the heroes of the past, acknowledging the State’s debt to the people.