One country, two borders: how Poland differentiates narratives about migrants

Construction site of a wall defending Polish border, Polish and Belarusian border. Photo: Red_Baron / Shutterstock

From the very beginning, the Polish authorities have been stressing that the different treatment of those entering the Polish territory from Belarus and Ukraine was related to their different impact on national security. Given this, it is worth examining how the Polish government utilised strategic communication in response to the two crises on its eastern border.

As put by Christopher Paul, strategic communication is a series of “coordinated actions, messages, images and other forms of signalling or engagement intended to inform, influence, or persuade selected audiences in support of national objectives”. The end goal of influencing the attitudes and opinions of target audiences is to shape their behaviour. The Polish authorities have been using national security rhetoric to both substantiate assistance provided to the Ukrainian refugees and to justify their refusal to do the same for those attempting to cross the Polish border via Belarus.

The government’s strategic communications aimed at creating favourable public attitudes towards Ukrainian refugees, and unfavourable attitudes towards people coming through Belarus, were driven by quite similar topics: national security, public security and economic security. The Polish example demonstrates that governments can use identical themes in their strategic communications to shape positive public attitudes towards one group of foreigners, while simultaneously trying to shape negative attitudes towards another group of foreigners.

National security above all

The strategic communications during the Poland-Belarus migration crisis were largely driven by an attempt to present the situation on the border not as an ordinary migration crisis, but as an element of hybrid warfare being waged by Belarus and Russia against Poland. Without considering their cases and allowing them to apply for protection, the Polish authorities argued that people stuck on the Belarusian border were not refugees but economic migrants and that their arrival at the border was a state-orchestrated act. Jarosław Kaczyński, the leader of the ruling Law and Justice party, argued that Belarus was waging a hybrid war in retaliation for Poland’s support for the opposition forces in Belarus. At the same time, Polish President Andrzej Duda dubbed the crisis on the border with Belarus a “planned, provoked action” on part of the Belarusian authorities. Attempts to cross the Polish border from Belarus were described as “attacks” by Mariusz Błaszczak, the Polish minister of defence. Labelling the crisis as a “hybrid war” and the people on the Belarus border as “instruments” of this war can be understood as an attempt to dehumanise the migrants and trigger negative public attitudes towards them.

In contrast, since February 24th 2022, the Polish government has been calling people entering Poland from Ukraine “refugees fleeing the atrocities of war” and has been portraying assistance provided to them by the Polish people as a matter of national security. The Polish prime minister emphasised that “A safe Ukraine is also the Polish and European raison d’état” and that “the defence of Ukraine is also the defence of Poland. Ukrainians are fighting for us [and so] we owe them gratitude.” He stressed he was therefore glad that “almost all Poles welcomed war refugees who needed support with open hearts.” Along similar lines, President Duda stressed that “Ukrainians are fighting not just for their, but also our freedom” and underlined that Poland should support Ukraine not only through supplying arms but also by accepting Ukrainian refugees.

Interestingly, the dichotomy in the treatment of both migration crises has been very clearly visible in communications by the Polish border guard, which publishes daily statistics on Twitter on how many “illegal crossings” on the Polish border from Belarus they prevented during the previous day and how many people crossed the Polish border from Ukraine. Their daily tweets about crossings on the Ukrainian border contain the hashtag #Pomagamy (“we are helping”), information on the number of people that have crossed the Poland-Ukraine border since February 24th 2022, and the number of those that arrived in Poland from Ukraine the day before a given tweet was published. The tweets about movements on the Poland-Belarus border contain information on how many “illegal crossings” were prevented, the nationality of the people who tried to cross the border, and the number of people arrested for assisting in the “illegal crossings”. The contrasting messages are a clear attempt to attach distinct labels to people arriving from Ukraine on the one hand and Belarus on the other. This is likely to induce different threat perceptions related to both groups within Polish society.

Public security is a priority  

In September 2021, Błaszczak and Mariusz Kamiński, the interior minister, asserted during a press conference that photos found in the mobile phone of one of the migrants stopped at the border with Belarus indicated sexual disorders of paedophilia and zoophilia. Based on it, they claimed that people who “stormed” the Polish border posed a danger to Poles and to Poland, adding that some of them were directly linked to the Taliban or the Islamic State. Polish government representatives also stated repeatedly that people who were trying to cross the Poland-Belarus border were mainly young men. The deputy head of the interior ministry, Maciej Wąsik, claimed that people on the Polish-Belarus border were “mainly men, young, military conscription age, strong”, and that there was no indication that they are threatened with anything bad in their country.

In contrast, Polish officials and state-controlled media have been stressing that the majority of refugees coming from Ukraine were women and children. The state-controlled TV channel, TVP, published an article with the headline “Shocking report from Ukraine. The drama of thousands of women with children and great help from Poland”. The prime minister argued that “out of the millions of Ukrainian refugees, women and children constituted the vast majority.”

On February 27th 2022, the official account of the Polish Territorial Defence Forces published two photos on Twitter with captions “refugees” and “migrants”. One photo with the caption “migrants” depicts young men trying to break a fence at the Polish-Belarus border. The second photo with the caption “refugees” depicts two old women sitting and receiving help from a person in Polish military uniform. The text of the tweet reads: “the difference between a migrant and a refugee? These pictures say more than a thousand words.” On the same day, the official account of the Law and Justice party branch in Brodnica posted two photos, one with young Ukrainian women on the border with the caption “these are refugees,” and another with aggressive men on the Polish-Belarusian border with the caption “these were not refugees.”

It is worth noting at this point that as the Polish state does not accept applications from people who crossed the border through Belarus, Poland does not have official statistics to prove that the majority of people on the Belarus border were men. Moreover, women and children also try to cross the border which is confirmed by the fact that the Polish border guard pushed at least eight children and their families back to Belarus from the Polish border town of Michałów. As for the photos presented during the aforementioned press conference, Polish journalists found out that some of them were screenshots of an old video available on the internet and therefore it is unlikely that they were personally taken by the person on whose phone they were allegedly found.

Economic security

Polish politicians actively tried to portray people on the Belarusian border as “economic migrants” who wanted to enter the EU for economic benefits. Duda stressed that migrants “could afford plane tickets” to fly to Belarus and were coming in search of a better life in the EU. According to the Polish authorities, those trying to cross into Poland from Belarus ­were not “poor people who were fleeing from some danger”, but rather economic migrants “pretend[ing] to be refugees”. Błaszczak claimed that their motivation was “a drive to the European Union, a longing for luxury, a longing for places where you can live, receive benefits and not work”.

In contrast, Ukrainian refugees were presented as hard-working people potentially having a positive impact on the Polish economy. As the prime minister argued in May 2022, Polish entrepreneurs desperately needed a labour force and “the work of Ukrainians living in Poland can be a great added value to our economy.” On a similar note, Wąsik stated that the Polish agricultural sector was lacking in its labour force and the government would try to convince Ukrainians to move to smaller towns. Back in May 2022, the authorities were stressing that one in four Ukrainians who fled to Poland were already legally employed in the country, which was “unique on the global scale”.

Strategic communications conducted by the Polish government about Ukrainian refugees and people arriving through Belarus were reflected in the results of public opinion polls. In May 2022, Ipsos conducted a survey asking Poles whether migrants and refugees trying to reach Poland across the border with Belarus deserved the same help as refugees from Ukraine. The majority (60 per cent) of respondents answered negatively. This opinion was most prevalent among supporters of the ruling PiS party (see the chart below). While it is beyond the scope of this text to investigate what was the exact role of government strategic communications in the formation of such attitudes, available evidence shows a significant correlation between them. This assumption can be confirmed by the results of an earlier survey conducted in November 2021, before Russia attacked Ukraine. Back then, the politicians from the ruling party and state-owned media channel TVP Info had already been conducting campaigns portraying migrants and refugees attempting to enter Poland through Belarus as a threat to Polish security. When asked how the border guards should behave towards those illegally crossing the Polish border, the majority of the viewers of TVP Info, as well as the Polsat TV station (which is also mostly aligned with the ruling party’s line), were in favour of pushing them back to Belarus.

Source:  https://oko.press/uchodzcy-gorszego-sortu

The Polish government has used various discursive practices in their strategic communications to shape social perceptions about two groups of migrants/refugees entering Poland: those crossing from Ukraine on the one hand and those coming from Belarus on the other. The Polish government’s portrayal of the crisis on the Poland-Belarus border as a hybrid war legitimised certain measures against the second group, including pushbacks and rejection of their right to apply for protection, whereas helping Ukrainian refugees was presented as being in line with Poland’s national interests. The key messages conveyed by the Polish authorities tried to portray the acceptance of people entering via the Belarusian border as a potential threat to the national, public and economic security of Poland, while welcoming Ukrainian refugees was presented as having a positive impact on these three domains.

Givi Gigitashvili is a Research Associate at the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab. He is also pursuing a postgraduate degree in strategic communications at King’s College London.

belarus, migration, Poland, refugees, Ukraine