On certain limitations of the globalization discourse in Poland: a cultural studies perspective

The assumption that globalization means the relatively free circulation of goods, texts, people, ideas and information on a global scale, as well as the circulation of concepts of globalization and views on it, is the starting point of this essay. Its main aim is to define the salient features of the Polish globalization discourse by comparing it with the analogous discourse in the West, where it was first conceptualized. The conclusions arising from a closer analysis of the Polish discourse are as follows: regardless of whether methodological nationalism is considered a fundamental limitation upon any social science research determining its general priorities, such discourse privileges traditional concepts of nation-state as a mode of sovereignty territorially legitimated and/or state-centrism on a world scale, which rest upon resentments motivated by national memories of an inauspicious past and are of emotional, psychologically enduring character.