Historical analogies, traumatic past and responses to the war in Ukraine

Abstract

This article examines the use of historical analogies by political leaders during foreign policy crises. Specifically, we focus on the German, Polish and Czech leaderships' reactions to Russia's invasion of Ukraine and investigate the historical analogies which leaders invoked to justify their responses to Russia's aggression. The existing scholarship recognizes the importance of historical analogies in foreign policy decision-making, but the literature focuses predominantly on several high-profile analogies (i.e. the Munich Agreement or the Vietnam War) and lacks comparative perspective. We employ a dual-method approach that combines qualitative coding with semantic network analysis, and conduct a comparative analysis of the full spectrum of analogies used by Polish, Czech and German policy-makers. We find that politicians did not focus on a single overarching analogy, but employed a wide array of historical references. We also find that even though the countries' policies largely aligned and that their leaders often invoked the same events, the meaning of analogies and the signals they sent differed substantially across cases. Analysing the full spectrum of analogies demonstrates that justifications for supporting Ukraine were shaped more by these states' own historical traumas than by their sympathy for Ukraine, support for international law, or desire to uphold the rules-based international order.

On the morning of 24 February 2022, Europe woke up to the news that the Russian Federation had launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Suddenly, after decades without a major interstate war, Europe was facing a new geopolitical reality and a rapidly unfolding crisis which required major security and foreign policy decisions. Available information was incomplete, levels of anxiety were high and the threat to the existing security order in central and western Europe was palpable. It is in a moment of major crisis like this that leaders compensate for a lack of information and time by relying on cognitive schemes,¹ such as analogies.

Analogies—comparisons ‘between one thing and another, where the two things are held to exhibit structural similarities in some or all of their properties’—are among the most powerful cognitive schemes that policy-makers employ to make sense of emerging, often novel and unfamiliar situations;² organize information; win supporters; and justify action or lack thereof. Very often, these analogies are historical in the sense that a contemporary situation is compared to one that took place in the past. Politicians, argues Vertzberger, are ‘applied historians’ who use their personal past, knowledge and intuition in search of practically useful history they can exploit.³ Some analogies, such as the 1938 Munich Agreement or the Vietnam War or, more recently, 9/11 or the United States' invasion of Iraq, are especially powerful in driving or constraining foreign policy action.⁴

Leading foreign policy scholars such as Ernest May, Richard Neustadt and Robert Jervis⁵ analysed how and why leaders use historical analogies as a conceptual tool; whether or not the analogies used are empirically correct (typically not); and the effects of historical analogies on foreign policy action. Yet, the analysis of historical analogies in foreign policy-making also suffers from several important gaps. First, whereas existing research focuses on why policy-makers use analogies as a cognitive scheme, we know much less about how and why they choose which specific analogies to invoke. Second, the scholarship focuses on either abstract ‘historical analogy’ as a general concept or a small number of high-profile, universally recognized analogies, such as the Munich Agreement, Pearl Harbor or the Vietnam War. But there is no reason for why leaders ought to limit their rhetoric to just a single overarching analogy; the same political message can be supported by invoking several analogies simultaneously. Finally, our understanding of how leaders use analogies suffers from the dearth of comparative perspective.

In this article, we aim to promote a better understanding of the use of historical analogies in foreign policy-making by focusing on reactions to Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. More specifically, we focus on three European countries—Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic—that played a key role in formulating the European Union's response to Russian aggression. Our main goal in this article is to map the German, Czech and Polish leaders' use of historical analogies to explain and address Russia's war and suggest policy responses. Rather than focusing on one key analogy and a single case-study, as the literature typically does, we present the entire spectrum of historical references these countries' leaders used in their reasoning. Going beyond a single case-study also allows us to analyse the use of analogies comparatively.

Importantly, we do not aim to explain Czech, Polish and German policies as such, or how exactly analogical reasoning influenced the adoption of specific policies following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Rather, our focus is on the historical analogies themselves as a tool to understand the leaders' motivations, concerns and preferences, and the rhetorical choices leaders made to justify their foreign policy choices. We move forward the understanding of historical analogies in foreign policy-making by analysing the full spectrum of analogies that leaders rely on during times of crisis. By concentrating on the use of multiple, sometimes conflicting, analogies in Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic, we aim to enhance our understanding of how historical experiences have shaped these countries' understanding and rhetorical responses to the war in Ukraine.

Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic are fruitful cases for comparative analysis. For these countries, Russia's invasion is the key foreign policy concern; all three are important members of NATO and the EU and responded to the invasion by providing Ukraine with weapons and financial support. The three countries also played a crucial role in formulating the EU approach to and discussion on the Russian invasion. These countries also differ from other EU states with a history of victimization by the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union (USSR). Unlike the Baltic states, none of the countries was part of the USSR, nor do they have substantial Russian-speaking or ethnically Russian populations, the presence of which influences domestic and foreign policy debates. The Russia-related security threat perceptions are therefore more immediate and acute in the Baltic states. There, the Russian invasion arguably ushered in ‘a postcolonial moment’ and an emergence of ‘vicarious identification’ (living through others) with Ukraine, thus differentiating the Baltic states from the three countries in our study.⁶

Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic also differ substantially from Hungary. Unlike these three states, which all play a key role in driving forward EU policies, Hungary's role is mostly limited to trying to block, or at least delay, the EU's support for Ukraine. Hungary's geopolitical orientation (despite being a NATO member) also differs from our other cases. Furthermore, Hungary has a regime and domestic public sphere that are quite different from those of Germany and the Czech Republic, and even Poland—all the concerns around its democratic backsliding notwithstanding. This difference is analytically important. Historical analogies are often invoked because of the public message they send and their potential to generate domestic support. But this messaging functions differently in countries that have free media and a functioning democracy versus a de facto electoral autocracy such as Hungary.

Poland and the Czech Republic also share a rather similar post-Second World War history of relations with Russia. Both were communist dictatorships under Soviet dominance, and both were members of the Warsaw Pact. Both experienced communist violence—the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the threat of Soviet invasion and the internally imposed martial law in Poland (1981–83). Both broke free from Soviet domination and democratized in 1989, with both joining NATO in 1999 and the EU in 2004. Existing theories of political uses of history suggest that we should not expect major differences in the analogies that Polish and Czech leaders use during the current Russia–Ukraine conflict, and therefore divergences between the two countries' use of historical analogies would be analytically informative.

Germany's history of relations with Russia is different; starting with the Nazi invasion of the USSR in 1941 and continuing in the mass slaughter of civilians and genocide that Germany unleashed, its defeat in the Second World War and the Soviet occupation of East Germany. Until recently, bilateral relations between Russia and Germany were shaped by the latter's energy dependence on Russian gas and the active participation of retired but still influential German politicians (such as, for example, former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder) in promoting Russia's image and interests for perks and money. Therefore, because of this unique, both troubled and intimate history of violence and cooperation, one might expect the analogies used by German leaders to differ substantially from those of Poland and the Czech Republic. Do German, Polish and Czech leaders use similar analogies to justify largely aligned responses to the same foreign crisis? And if not, what explains the divergence?

Our key findings are as follows. First, we show that policy-makers can and do use a wide range of historical analogies to justify similar policies. One cannot uncritically assume that even in largely similar historical and political settings, similar policies are driven by similar motivations and justifications. Second, we demonstrate that policy-makers do not restrict themselves to a single overarching analogy: rather, they use a wide range of topics when they grapple with a novel geopolitical reality. When talking about the Russian invasion, Polish leaders justify their support for Ukraine by emphasizing events ranging from Soviet and Russian oppression of Poland to the Nazi occupation, and, counter-intuitively, past anti-Polish violence carried out by Ukrainian nationalists. For Czech policy-makers the key references are the Cold War, Soviet (rather than specifically Russian) imperialism and the Warsaw Pact's invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. German leaders, on the other hand, emphasize both their own history as perpetrators of mass violence and aggression and the experience of partition and suffering during the Cold War.

Thus, despite the historical similarities, and even though both countries' current policies towards Russia and Ukraine were rather closely aligned, Polish and Czech leaders significantly diverged in their use of historical analogies. If anything, German leaders' use of historical analogies was closer to that of both Polish and Czech leaders than those countries were to each other. Finally, we demonstrate that the Polish, Czech and German leaders' justifications for responses to Russia's aggression are shaped more by these states' own historical traumas than by their sympathy for Ukraine, support for international law, or desire to uphold the rules-based global order.

Historical analogies and foreign policy decision-making

Former US Secretary of State Alexander Haig observed that: ‘International conflicts attract historical analogies the way honey attracts bears, because the “lessons learned” from such analogies are supposed to help us avoid past mistakes’.⁷ The importance of metaphors in politics was observed by Aristotle in his work The art of rhetoric,⁸ while much more recently Susan Sontag has contended that ‘one cannot think without metaphors’.⁹ Cognitive psychologists have observed that human reasoning is heavily grounded in examples from the past, and that through analogizing—a tendency inherent to human beings—people make sense of the world. According to Houghton, when

faced with potentially bewildering complexity and structural uncertainty, human beings require ‘short cuts’ which allow them to process information more cheaply and expeditiously than would otherwise be possible; incoming information must be matched to existing categories and schemas already in our heads. ‘What does this look like to me?’ is the question we implicitly ask ourselves when confronted with a new or uncertain situation.¹⁰

Inspired by cognitive psychology and behavioural economics, International Relations (IR) scholarship has long been interested in the impact of analogical reasoning on foreign policy decisions. Several scholars have noted that—especially in moments of uncertainty—leaders turn to cognitive schemes, such as historical analogies, for ‘lessons learned’ from which they infer contemporary policy choices.¹¹ Analogical reasoning is ‘an inference process whereby the features of a new phenomenon or a current event are deduced through the recognition of similar features in another event’ and during periods of ‘conceptual crisis’, when established frameworks for comprehension and decision-making are uncertain, leaders are particularly prone to resorting to analogies.¹² Given the limited cognitive capacities of each individual, through analogical reasoning a complex event becomes more comprehensible as historical analogy ‘performs the role of simplifier by offering examples’.¹³ Being cognitive shortcuts, analogies assume an even greater significance when time is limited.¹⁴

Thus, analogical reasoning can be used by leaders to serve several functions. First, historical analogies serve as schemes which supply politicians with frameworks for ‘ordering and categorizing the world’ and therefore help them to interpret and give meaning to ongoing events.¹⁵ In other words, analogies provide the backdrop against which emerging or ongoing events can be understood. Second, historical analogies provide a script which delineates possible behaviour and responses.¹⁶ Analogies can serve as a recommendation for policy actions based on specific steps that succeeded or failed in the past.¹⁷ As suggested by Angstrom, historical analogies ‘set the boundaries of political choice’ and ‘make certain policies seem inevitable’.¹⁸ Finally, leaders use historical analogies as rhetorical tools to justify policy action, to give it meaning, and to mobilize public support for a particular course by invoking relevant sentiments and emotions.¹⁹ Historical analogies act as ‘strategic narratives’ that reveal potentially hidden motivations and preferences, provide legitimacy for some choices and delegitimize others, and enable one to define the problem, assess the stakes, evaluate various alternative solutions and gauge their chances of success, consider moral concerns and, finally, understand potential risks.²⁰

Analogies thus play a crucial role in shaping and constructing our understanding of the world and providing frameworks for policy formulation.²¹ One frequently cited analogy with significant policy implications is the analogy of the 1938 Munich Agreement, which implies either ‘appeasement’ or a ‘strong stance’ against an aggressor. Employed, for example, by US policy-makers to justify actions in contexts such as Korea, Vietnam and Iraq,²² the Munich analogy has contributed to shaping security narratives and delineating national interests by identifying adversaries, assessing threats and prescribing responses.²³

By invoking analogies, leaders draw on past events that are ‘available’.²⁴ The choice of historical analogies is usually limited ‘to some memorable, relatively recent events that happened during the formative years of policymakers' lives or are part of the well-known and unproblematized historical canon in which they are culturally embedded’.²⁵ In our setting, it is Soviet dominance and violence that has had a strong impact on the current generation of leaders in Poland and the Czech Republic. The fact that many policy-makers grew up and lived their formative years during the Cold War made the experience of Soviet occupation cognitively easily accessible. Thus, individual characteristics of a political leader, their personal experience, socialization and education are likely to determine which analogy would be deemed most applicable to the current event.²⁶

Analogical reasoning simplifies decision-making, but this comes at a substantial price. In his seminal work, May found that policy-makers typically

use history badly. When resorting to analogy, they tend to seize upon the first that comes to mind. They do not search more widely. Nor do they pause to analyze the case, test its fitness, or even ask in what ways it might be misleading.²⁷

Jervis observed that learning from history is a relatively superficial process for policy-makers, as they tend to focus more on what has happened rather than why it has happened.²⁸ Providing a shortcut to rationality, analogies are often used mechanically without considering differences between the cases. Thus, ‘Iraq becomes Vietnam due to single analogies conjuring images of “quagmires”; diplomatic engagement with Saddam Hussein becomes Chamberlain at Munich due to single analogies revolving around the dirty word “appeasement”’.²⁹ Analogical reasoning, therefore—especially if a single analogy becomes hegemonic—limits policy choices, and this ‘tyranny of metaphor’³⁰ can be a serious obstacle for pursuing alternative, even if more prudent, policies.

To sum up, scholarly analysis of the use of analogical reasoning in foreign policy decision-making predominantly focuses on the conditions under which policy-makers resort to analogies, the relevance of the overarching analogy employed, the objectives behind its use, the persuasive influence of particular analogies and the constraining impact of analogies on policy outcomes. Nonetheless, research in IR pertaining to analogies has primarily focused on explaining the employment of just a few, often well-established, analogies. As noted by Angstrom, ‘few have systematically analysed the pattern of competing analogies’ that policy-makers invoke during times of crisis.³¹ Thus, our understanding of the ramifications of employing multiple analogies in foreign policy decision-making, particularly when these analogies offer divergent outcomes, remains limited.³²

Czech, Polish and German responses to the invasion of Ukraine

On 24 February 2022, the day of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala stated that, ‘The unprovoked … invasion of Ukraine … can only be described as an act of aggression against a sovereign state.’³³ From the beginning of the conflict, Czech political elites have been unequivocally supportive of Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity, including President Miloš Zeman, who changed his previous notoriously pro-Russian position. In response to Russia's attack, the Czech Republic imposed sanctions on Russia relying on a legal framework that has been referred to as the Czech ‘Magnitsky Act’. The Czech Republic provided Ukraine with military assistance valued at around US$1.8 billion.³⁴ But probably even more important than the weapons sent to Ukraine by the Czech government was the speed of its response. Just days after the invasion, when many European countries, including Germany, were still only considering military assistance, the Czech Ministry of Defence began shipping materiel.³⁵ The Czech government also provided humanitarian aid, and the Czech public donated an unprecedented US$224 million to Ukraine for both military and humanitarian assistance.³⁶ Having accepted almost half a million refugees, the Czech Republic has the highest ratios of Ukrainian refugees per capita in the EU.³⁷ The Czech Republic also played an important role in shaping joint EU policies towards Russia. During the Czech presidency of the EU, from 1 July to 31 December 2022, the EU approved a series of sanctions targeting Russia and provided Ukraine with €18 billion in financial assistance.³⁸ The clear and vocal position of central and eastern European countries such as the Czech Republic became crucial to steering the EU and ‘old’ EU member states' response to the war, such that in August 2022, during a visit to Prague, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz declared that ‘the centre of Europe is moving eastwards’.³⁹

Perhaps the prime example of this ‘eastwards’ shift was Poland, which played a leading role in the European response to the Russian invasion. In the wake of Russia's invasion, Poland quickly became the leading contributor of military aid to Ukraine, providing to March 2023 military allocations worth €3 billion.⁴⁰ Poland also became a logistics hub for the delivery of international military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine. As of July 2024, it was home to nearly one million Ukrainian refugees, second only to Germany in terms of the number of Ukrainian refugees hosted.⁴¹ Diplomatically, Poland pushed for tougher sanctions against Russia and pressed European leaders, especially in Germany, to deliver heavy weaponry to Ukraine. Militarily, Poland has emerged as the key pillar of NATO/Europe's eastern flank. The Polish government plans to raise its defence spending to 5 per cent of GDP and to build a military of 300,000 troops by 2035.⁴² Importantly, despite the country's deep political polarization,⁴³ there has been a broad overall consensus within the country with respect to providing Ukraine with what it needs to repel Russia's aggression, especially during the early stages of the war.

Yet the most remarkable transformation caused by Russia's invasion happened in Germany. Only days after Russia's attack, Chancellor Scholz announced a Zeitenwende,⁴⁴ or ‘turning of the times’, which envisioned a change in Germany's defence policy, including massive investments in the military and the reversal of policies banning a transfer of arms to conflict zones in order to assist Ukraine. The Cold War era of Ostpolitik, a policy of seeking accommodation with the USSR, and the post-1991 policy of engaging Russia by Wandel durch Handel (change through trade) lay in tatters following the invasion. However, it would be premature to conclude that Germany was completely turning away from its post-1945 pacifist tendencies. The ruling coalition has been divided on the question of support for Ukraine. Dialogue with Russia and limited investment in Germany's security have been deeply rooted concepts in the policies of Chancellor Scholz's Social Democratic Party (SPD). As such, instead of supplying Ukraine with arms, many in the SPD would rather see Ukrainian leaders negotiate with the regime in Moscow without any preconditions. In contrast, the Greens and the liberal Free Democrats, Scholz's coalition partners, have been strongly in favour of supporting Ukraine with weapons. In opposition, the conservative Christian Democrats have not been too far from the position of the SPD. The far left and the extreme right Alternative for Germany (AfD) share a deep-rooted anti-Americanism and view the war as being provoked by NATO and the West. Downplaying and trivializing Russian aggression, these actors have opposed the provision of support—especially the military kind—to Ukraine.

This lack of a unified position among policy-makers has contributed to the reality in which, instead of assuming a leadership role in European security, Germany's strategy has been to ‘follow its partners' lead’.⁴⁵ At first, Germany only reluctantly introduced sanctions on Russian oil and gas exports and hesitated to provide heavy weaponry to Ukraine. However, in response to international and domestic pressure the German position towards Russia hardened and Germany became a supporter of tougher sanctions and a key provider of military materiel to Ukraine.⁴⁶ To sum up, Germany stands in solidarity with Ukraine: however, it took a while before it became actively involved in supporting the country. According to many European observers, including in central and eastern Europe, Germany thus missed the chance to become a leader in protecting European security.

Data and methodology

For this research, we assembled a corpus of content that encompasses publicly given official speeches or statements (labelled as ‘speeches’ for simplification) published between 24 February 2022 and 15 October 2022⁴⁷ through official channels (including as reported by media outlets) and made by the top political leaders in charge of foreign policy-making—presidents, prime ministers, ministers of foreign affairs⁴⁸—of Poland, Germany and the Czech Republic. In our analysis, we included only those speeches that employed historical analogies and that made explicit mentions of historical events, personalities or phenomena that functioned as references for commenting on or interpreting the Russian invasion. The final sample contained 74 processed cases, and its internal distribution in terms of national subcorpora, speakers and source typology (all in terms of the number of speeches) is illustrated in table 1.

Table 1:

The cases and their distribution

National subcorpora	No. of speeches
Germany	35
Czech Republic	24
Poland	15
Speaker (political leader)	No. of speeches
Olaf Scholz (Germany)	17
Jan Lipavský (Czech Republic)	12
Frank-Walter Steinmeier (Germany)	12
Mateusz Morawiecki (Poland)	8
Petr Fiala (Czech Republic)	7
Annalena Baerbock (Germany)	6
Miloš Zeman (Czech Republic)	5
Andrzej Duda (Poland)	4
Jarosław Kaczyński (Poland)	2
Mariusz Błaszczak (Poland)	1
Outlet type	No. of speeches
Official website	52
Media	11
Social media	11

Following the data collection, our analysis relied on a standard qualitative coding methodology. Our primary goal was to capture the distribution of topics and themes across the individual cases in our corpus.⁴⁹ The procedure which produced our codebook was threefold. In the first step, we instructed the coders, who were Polish, Czech and German native speakers, to inductively sketch the predominant historical references in their respective material. In the next code review round, the authors revised the previously produced proto-codes and, considering the existing literature, organized them into a salient ontology. We arrived at a hierarchically organized codebook of 128 items.⁵⁰ All the codes were accompanied by clear definitions, which ensured coding consistency across the three datasets and served as a conceptual basis for the resulting analysis.⁵¹ The codebook design proved to be robust, and the last round of revisions, carried out after the main coding process, brought only eleven new codes and necessitated only a minor coding revision to produce the final analytical dataset. The outcome of the qualitative coding reflects the mapping of the landscape of themes which serve as historical analogies, accompanied by frequency analysis in the next section.

Our coding procedure also aimed at capturing the relationships between historical analogies by marking and classifying them in the form of short semantic chains between two codes. First, we devised a taxonomy of seven relationship types which we intended to include the final analysis as a typology (Assimilation, Differentiation, Metaphors, Metonymies, etc.). Our analysis showed that the overwhelming majority of historical analogies used by political leaders rest on a simple positive similarity statement (‘X is the same as Y’, ‘A is similar to B’). This demonstrates that historical analogies operate beyond the domain of metaphors, usually emphasized by the literature in this context. Following this observation, in our analysis, we further comment on different types of relationships only when the respective statements manifest opposites (‘X is different from Y’).

As a result, we were able to produce relatively complex visualizations of weighted networks among our codes.⁵² Unlike the more widespread semantic network analysis approach, where relationship-producing co-occurrence is counted when two codes simply appear in a designated textual unit of analysis (e.g. a sentence or paragraph), we used a deep qualitative insight to mark them only when the analogy explicitly manifested itself in the text. This type of coding provided us with a grounded understanding of the broader structure of the historical narratives within and across the case-studies, even over a limited sample. The following section presents our results along with the semantic network visualizations.

Mapping historical analogies

Which historical analogies do Polish, Czech and German policy-makers use when addressing Russia's war against Ukraine? Our analysis shows that in the three national discourses two main themes emerge—the Second World War and the Cold War—but their internal distribution differs substantially across cases. In the Polish discourse (see table 2), the most prominent analogy used by leaders is the Second World War; 18 per cent of all historical references we coded used this analogy. A typical example are the words of Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki:

We are facing a resurgent empire with totalitarian tendencies. 83 years ago, Poland was the first to refuse submission. It chose allegiance to freedom, allegiance to the founding values of western civilization. And it was betrayed by its allies. We return to this history not just to remember, but to avoid making the same mistakes we made then.⁵³

Table 2:

Use of historical analogies in Poland

Codes	Proportion of coverage (%)
Second World War	18
Cold War/USSR	15
Nazism	13
Older history—other/Polish-Ukrainian conflicts	9
Older history—other/Stalin	9
Cold War/transition to democracy	4
Older history—other/Polish-Russian conflicts	4
Soviet crimes/Holodomora	4
Other	24

Note:  ^a Holodomor refers to the man-made famine of the early 1930s which claimed the lives of approximately 4–5 million people, predominantly Ukrainian peasants.

The second most frequently invoked analogy is the Cold War, during which Poland was a member of the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact. On the 23rd anniversary of Poland's accession to NATO, President Andrzej Duda drew a direct line between the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia by arguing that:

[Russia] wants the same thing it wanted in 1939 and 1940 when it acted in alliance with Hitler's Germany, and in 1945–1991 when it ruled over our countries independently. Russia always wants power over all central and eastern Europe.⁵⁴

The third most common analogy is Nazism and Nazi crimes, from which Poland suffered immensely. Partly triggered by Putin's rhetoric of ‘denazifying’ Ukraine, Polish leaders compared Russia's ideology and actions to those of the Nazi Germany. Russia is compared to ‘imperial Nazi Germany’, and its behaviour in Ukraine is labelled ‘genocide’, ‘total war’ and ‘barbaric killing’—all terms that are typically invoked to describe Nazi behaviour during the Second World War.

Quite surprisingly for a country that has become the leading force in the pro-Ukraine international coalition, another common analogy is the history of past Poland–Ukraine conflicts. Poles and Ukrainians share a long history of coexistence and cooperation, yet over the past hundred years the relationship has often been overshadowed by violence and oppression on both sides. After the collapse of the Habsburg empire, Poles and Ukrainians fought a bitter war for control of Eastern Galicia (currently western Ukraine), in which Poland defeated the West Ukrainian People's Republic and absorbed its territory. In the interwar period, the Polish state engaged in often violent repression of Ukrainian dissent while Ukrainian radical nationalists attacked Polish state agents, government institutions and settlements, and carried out a series of assassinations of Polish high-ranking officials. During the Second World War, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army carried out a brutal ethnic cleansing campaign targeting the Polish population of Galicia and Volhynia, in which more than 70,000 civilians died. After the war, Poland forcibly resettled about 150,000 Ukrainians from the eastern parts of the country.

That Polish leaders would highlight the past Polish-Ukrainian violence while simultaneously being Ukraine's main champions in NATO and the EU is counter-intuitive. Strategic geopolitical considerations alone would have led Polish policy-makers to downplay past conflicts with Ukraine, because invoking this history might turn Poles against Ukraine and undermine the Polish government's efforts to provide support to its counterpart in Kyiv. But these references illuminate the key themes of Polish foreign policy narrative, namely victimhood and constant historical insecurity. The reference to the past violence also highlights the Poles' generosity and willingness to help despite the traumatic history of relations. Poland's support for Ukraine, therefore, is not just due to sympathy for Ukrainians, both countries' aligned goals, positions and values or norms of international law. Rather, Poland supports Ukraine primarily because Ukraine stands between Poland and another potential victimization. The key concern is not Moscow's violence as such, but any anti-Polish violence, regardless of its source.

Since the Czech postwar history of victimization by, and relations with, the USSR and post-Soviet Russia is rather similar to that of Poland, one might expect similar historical analogies to be employed. Yet, while fears of Russian expansion might be similar in the two states, the analogies that their leaders prioritize do differ. For Poles the leading historical analogy is the Second World War, but for Czech leaders it is the Cold War, which accounts for more than 40 per cent of instances of the use of historical analogies—a much greater proportion than in the Polish case (table 3). Thus, when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky delivered a speech to the Czech parliament, Prime Minister Fiala's introductory remarks warned against imperial ambitions of Russia by stating that ‘we need to be reminded again that if Ukraine falls, Putin's Russia will move on. Putin's least ambition, the ambition he talks about publicly, is the de facto restoration of the Soviet Union and its European satellites'.⁵⁵ Furthermore, 16 per cent of the Cold War analogies mentioned by Czech leaders invoke the Prague Spring—the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968—thus linking the Russian war in Ukraine to a very particular Czech experience. In his op-ed for the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Czech Minister of Foreign Affairs Jan Lipavský explained that:

Historical experience also obliges us to take a principled stand. We still have a vivid memory of the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Soviet troops. Even then, the Kremlin claimed that it was coming to the aid of the citizens of our country, when in reality it only wanted to cut off their desire for freedom. Twenty years of totalitarian agony followed, from which we emerged only in 1989. That is why we can empathize with the natural desire of Ukrainians to live according to their own wishes and not those of a totalitarian power.⁵⁶

Table 3:

Use of historical analogies in the Czech Republic

Codes	Proportion of coverage (%)
Soviet crimes/invasion of Czechoslovakia	16
Cold War/Soviet imperialism	14
Cold War	12
Nazism	8
Soviet crimes	8
Cold War/transition to democracy	6
Second World War	6
Other	30

Thus, to explain their states' policy of supporting Ukraine, both Polish and Czech strategies effectively erase the difference between violence aimed at Ukrainians and violence targeting the Czechs or Poles.

In contrast to Poland, however, Nazism and the Second World War play only a very limited role in Czech usage of historical analogies, with 8 per cent and 6 per cent of coverage respectively. When using analogies linked to the Second World War, Czech policy-makers mentioned similarities between the Nazi and Russian military strategy by invoking the Blitzkrieg and the Russian war propaganda, which was compared to the rhetoric of Joseph Goebbels. The Russian practice of forcibly transferring children from Ukraine to Russia was compared to the behaviour of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. The Munich Agreement analogy is also occasionally invoked. Munich, noted Lipavský,

left Czechs with a deep sense of injustice that we were betrayed by the western Allies in the face of the unacceptable demands of Hitler's Germany in the interests of ephemeral peace … The result was a world war. This history lesson suggests that aggressors do not retreat, and appeasement does not bring peace.⁵⁷

At the same time, given both the global prominence of the Munich analogy, and its place in Czechs’ own historical experience, it is surprising that, overall, this analogy is a rather marginal one.

Although Germany's history and relations with Russia and the USSR differ from those of Poland and the Czech Republic, the most widely used historical analogy in Germany—as in Poland—is the Second World War (see table 4). Together with related topics, namely Nazism and the Holocaust, references to the Hitler era and the violence it unleashed account for one-third of all analogies employed. ‘Never again’ is often invoked as the important lesson learned from the Second World War, and the war in Ukraine is seen as a catastrophe which has brought back brutality unseen in Europe since 1945. Chancellor Scholz, in a speech in May 2022, stated: ‘It is all the more painful to see how today, 77 years after the end of the Second World War, brute force is again breaking the law in the middle of Europe’.⁵⁸ Because of its Nazi past, Germany is presumed as having a special responsibility to stand with Ukraine because, as mentioned by President Frank-Walter Steinmeier on the same occasion: ‘this is also a lesson of May 8, 1945: … Nationalism, hatred of nations, and imperial delusion must not be allowed to dominate the future of Europe. We must prevent that!’⁵⁹ The legacy of the Holocaust was also common in the statements of German leaders, with Scholz stating in September 2022 that ‘with Putin's invasion of Ukraine, with the massacres in Bucha, Irpin, and Mariupol, abysses have opened up again in Europe’.⁶⁰

Table 4:

Use of historical analogies in Germany

Codes	Proportion of coverage (%)
Second World War	15
Holocaust	10
Nazism	9
Cold War/transition to democracy	7
Cold War/Soviet imperialism	6
Cold War/Iron Curtain	5
Cold War/solidarity	5
Nazism/German anti-Semitism	5
Cold War/Berlin Airlift	4
Cold War	4
Other	30

The second most important, though less prominent, frame of reference for German political leaders is the Cold War and its various aspects. German policy-makers recalled the blockade of West Berlin in 1948–9 by the Soviet Union and the airlift by American and British air forces which ‘saved West Berlin from Soviet annexation’. The ‘Berlin Model’, argued Scholz,

must remain our model. … Giving away Ukraine would not bring peace, quite the opposite … That's why it's the same as it was back then: the free world didn't give up West Berlin because it would have given itself up, and so we cannot and must not give up Ukraine today.⁶¹

Combined, the Cold War analogies account for almost one-quarter of all analogies used by German foreign policy-makers. In that regard, German discourse is closer to that in the Czech Republic than to Poland. With just two key themes—the violence during the Third Reich and the Cold War—dominating the historical analogies landscape, the German discourse is also more consolidated in its use of historical analogies compared to the other two cases.

Whereas past Russian/Soviet crimes and victimization of Polish and Czech civilians (rather than more general category of Russian/Soviet invasions) are not the most prominent themes in these countries' discussions on the war in Ukraine, these topics are used as historical analogies. This is not the case in Germany, despite the widespread violence against civilians—first and foremost, sexual violence and looting—that was commonly practised by the troops of the Red Army. If anything, German policy-makers are more likely to cite Russian and Soviet past violence against Poles and Czech civilians (as well as the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956) as analogies than victimization of Germans—with the Soviet blockade of West Berlin being an important exception.

Mapping relationships between historical analogies

In addition to presenting the entire landscape of themes reflected in each case, we examine the relations within the whole set of historical analogies. This helps us to understand not just which analogies the German, Polish and Czech leaders have used, but also how they have invoked them. For practical reasons, we limit ourselves to examining the relationship strength⁶² around the most important codes for the network.⁶³ By using this subnetwork (which still contains the vast majority of all the codes relevant for our analysis), we can understand the relationships between the key elements of our coding—that is, the actors, events and phenomena that form the analogies.⁶⁴

Looking at the Polish case (see figure 1), we clearly see that ‘Russia’ plays an absolutely central role in the network of codes.⁶⁵ Coded to represent the contemporary state–actor and, eventually, ‘Russians’ as a collective actor (in a minority of cases), ‘Russia’ binds together the multiple historical analogies that encompass various and rather different historical events and phenomena such as the Second World War, the Cold War, Polish-Ukrainian conflicts, or even German Nazism, as we show in the previous section. It is also linked to past actors and their actions (USSR, Tsarist Russia, Joseph Stalin) to illustrate the negative perception of Russia today. As discussed in the previous section, the discourse of Polish political leaders extended back to yet older historical periods, which exemplify the perpetual nature of Russian oppression and aggression. Importantly, this list of historical analogies is composed predominantly of experiences integral to the Poles' own hegemonic national historical narrative, and very rarely employs analogies from beyond these boundaries.

Figure 1:

Historical analogies network: Poland

The Czech case presents us with a different view of the coding association (see figure 2). Unlike in Poland, where ‘Russia’ is used as on overarching term that encompasses different states, actions and ideologies, in the Czech discussion four key nodes emerge. Czech leaders not only distinguish between ‘Russia’ and ‘USSR’, but also pay more attention than Polish leaders to specific ideologies and actions, rather than actors. They distinguish between ‘Soviet imperialism’, and ‘Russian expansionism’ (denoting aggressive policies of Russia even after 1989). For the Czechs, Russian and Soviet policies are linked but are not identical, and the Russian post-1989 expansion is rhetorically related to—but not precisely the same as—Soviet-era expansionist policies. In terms of variety of historical analogies, the Czech discourse puts much more emphasis on comparing the current actions of the Russian state to the Cold war era, Soviet interference and, specifically, the Czechs' own experience of the Prague Spring (mentioned explicitly, or through an implicit allusion to ‘Soviet imperialism’).

Figure 2:

Historical analogies network: Czech Republic

The visualization of the German subcorpus (see figure 3) shows three strongly connected nodes—‘Russia’, ‘Russian expansionism’ and ‘Nazism’. Yet importantly, and counter-intuitively, for German leaders the connection between ‘Russia’ and ‘Russian expansion’ is not direct; it is Germany's history of Nazism that connects Russia to its own expansion. Comparing the character of German historical analogies to the Polish and Czech themes, we can observe an overwhelming presence of the Second World War and of experiences related to the Nazi era, which serve as analogies for current Russian military actions as well as the values and strategies of the present-day Russian state. Here, we should also add that the speeches of German leaders are typically framing their discourse about the current war on Ukraine within the broader narrative of German historical responsibilities, but if this general framework is not directly used as a historical analogy, it does not manifest itself in the graph.

Figure 3:

Historical analogies network: Germany

Finally, we can overlay the three graphs presented above to visualize the combined network of relationships related to historical analogies (figure 4). The shading represents an ‘ownership’ of a specific relationship by one of the national subcorpora—if more than 50 per cent of the overall number of the analogies were made in one of the national cases, it gains the respective shade of light or dark grey. If none of the three cases prevailed, the relationship becomes shared, and is denoted in striped grey. The combined view clearly demonstrates that ‘Russia’ as a state is the primary object of historical comparisons. This is to be expected, for Russia is waging an aggressive war. However, the attention that Russia receives in the three countries' discourse as compared to Ukraine is stark. In essence, the discussion in all three national cases centres on what to do about—or how to stop—Russia, rather than on how to help the victim—Ukraine—as such.

Figure 4:

Historical analogies network: combined view

The way in which the three countries' leaders talk about Russia and the analogies they invoke also show distinct national patterns. In all three cases, when talking about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, leaders talk about their own countries' formative experience of violence, even if the violence itself did not emanate from Moscow. In the case of Poland, the discussion is dominated by a linking of the Russian invasion to the Second World War and the Nazi attack on Poland—the country's most traumatic experience. For the Czechs, the key frame of reference is imperialism and expansion, exemplified most vividly by the 1968 Soviet invasion. For German leaders, the discussion centres on violent, anti-democratic expansionist ideologies, both the current Russian and the German Nazi past (though, unlike in the Polish case with the analogies of the Second World War and Nazism, it does not ubiquitously essentialize Russia in such manner). The three national discourses share the analogical comparison of ‘Russia’ to the ‘USSR’, thus pointing to the shared perception of continuity between those states in terms of their presence and negative role in terms of international relations.

The network graphs align with the coding analysis in the previous section. They demonstrate that there is a set of highly central codes shared in all three cases. At the same time, these codes form quite different configurations of relationships in the respective subcorpora. In this respect, the graph analysis deepens our understanding of the issue beyond the simple count of the occurrences of themes represented by codes. In addition to emphasizing the different relationship structures of key codes, the three national cases also produce a very different set of marginal, but still visible and well interconnected codes, which would be an interesting case for further exploration using a larger dataset.

Conclusions

This article has focused on the historical analogies employed by the leaders of Poland, Germany and the Czech Republic to justify and formulate their countries' responses to Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. More specifically, rather than focusing on one overarching historical analogy, as the existing scholarship overwhelmingly does, we sought to map the entire spectrum of analogies used by the three countries' leading policy-makers.

As we demonstrated, studying historical analogies and mapping their entire spectrum helps to better understand the world-views, motivations and use of history by political leaders. We found that German, Czech and Polish political elites did indeed act as ‘intuitive historians’, relying on past events to explain and justify contemporary foreign policy decisions. But at the same time, even though the three countries' leaders used similar, often identical historical events to justify largely aligned policies, the messages they sent and the sentiments they invoked to garner support for helping Ukraine differed substantially across their respective cases. The second key finding of the article is that even though European reactions to Russia's invasion were often presented as being driven by respect for international law and as countering the threats to the rules-based international order as such, the analogies that Polish, Czech and German leaders invoked revealed that their policies were heavily influenced by the respective countries' particular historical traumas, experiences and fears.

Our findings are in line with the existing scholarship's belief that leaders act as ‘intuitive historians’. Yet, contrary to the suggestion of previous research, we show that the events which are employed as analogies are largely neither recent nor personally formative for these leaders. The most recent of key analogies, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, took place in 1968. The often invoked Second World War took place before today's Polish, Czech and German leaders were even born. Rather, the historical events invoked by the leaders are national-level experiences and traumas that resonate beyond specific age-groups, and which can be imbued with multiple meanings depending on context, audience and policy goals. Finally, we show that the use of historical analogies is multifaceted and that policy-makers use a wide range of historical analogies, rather than settling on a single dominant one—an implicit, but empirically problematic premise of the existing scholarship.

Our findings have both analytical and practical implications. Analytically, our study demonstrated the value of looking at historical analogies that leaders invoke to reveal their thinking and preferences and uncover the motivations behind foreign policy actions. At the same time, scholars and analysts should not assume that the same historical analogy would have the same meaning across different contexts, even if it is invoked to justify similar policies. For instance, while both Polish and German policy-makers rely heavily on the Second World War analogy to justify their support for Ukraine, the signal this analogy sends, and its domestic interpretation, vary greatly in each country.

Analysts should also look at the entire spectrum of past events invoked by leaders. Thus, in the Polish case, an uncritical focus on the predominant Second World War and Nazism analogies might suggest fear of aggressive war as such and might interpret Polish support for Ukraine as an outcome of Poland's perception of the danger the Russian invasion poses to the geopolitical order writ large. Yet, supplementing this narrative with the less prominent, but still common references to the history of Polish-Ukrainian violence would show that, if anything, Poland's support for Ukraine is less about the rules-based international order, Ukraine, or even Russia, and is more about Poland itself, its traumas, historical victimhood narrative and a constant sense of insecurity. In the German case, supplementing the most frequently invoked Second World War analogy with less prominent analogies that focus on Nazism and the Holocaust demonstrates that the key driver of German policies vis-à-vis Russia and Ukraine is neither the threat of war and aggression as such, nor the fear of Moscow, but Germany's own history as a perpetrator of mass violence and anxieties associated with this formative past.

Our research thus highlights the importance of studying analogies in understanding the drivers of foreign policy decisions and the use of (often traumatic) pasts in foreign policy discourse and debates, especially those aimed at domestic audiences. Yet more research is needed to unpack the connection between motivations and leaders' usage of analogies in other settings—political, geographic or temporal. An especially promising avenue for further research would be to combine the analysis of historical analogies with the scholarship on ontological security, the political impact of a traumatic past, and collective memory, which all seek to understand how historical experience influences foreign policy actions and debates.

Footnotes

1

Robert Jervis, Perception and misperception in international politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976); Alex Mintz and Karl DeRouen, Understanding foreign policy decision making (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

2

David Patrick Houghton, ‘The role of analogical reasoning in novel foreign-policy situations’, British Journal of Political Science 26: 4, 1996, pp. 523–52 at p. 524, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007123400007596.

3

Yaacov Y. I. Vertzberger, ‘Foreign policy decisionmakers as practical-intuitive historians: applied history and its shortcomings’, International Studies Quarterly 30: 2, 1986, pp. 223–47, https://doi.org/10.2307/2600677.

4

Andrew Mumford, ‘Parallels, prescience and the past: analogical reasoning and contemporary international politics’, International Politics, vol. 52, 2015, pp. 1–19, https://doi.org/10.1057/ip.2014.40; Jeffrey Record, ‘The use and abuse of history: Munich, Vietnam and Iraq’, Survival 49: 1, 2007, pp. 163–80, https://doi.org/10.1080/00396330701254628; Dominic Tierney, “‘Pearl Harbor in reverse”: moral analogies in the Cuban Missile Crisis’, Journal of Cold War Studies 9: 3, 2007, pp. 49–77, https://doi.org/10.1162/jcws.2007.9.3.49.

5

See Robert Jervis, Perception and misperception in international politics: new edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976); Ernest R. May, ‘Lessons’ of the past: the use and misuse of history in American foreign policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973); Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May, Thinking in time: the uses of history for decision makers [1986] (Simon & Schuster, 2011).

6

Dovilė Budrytė, “‘A decolonising moment of sorts”: the Baltic States' vicarious identification with Ukraine and related domestic and foreign policy developments’, Central European Journal of International and Security Studies 17: 4, 2023, pp. 82–105, https://doi.org/10.51870/YPIJ8030; Maria Mälksoo, ‘The postcolonial moment in Russia's war against Ukraine’, Journal of Genocide Research 25: 3–4, 2023, pp. 471–81, https://doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2022.2074947.

7

Alexander M. Haig, ‘Gulf analogy: Munich or Vietnam?’, New York Times, 10 Dec. 1990, https://www.nytimes.com/1990/12/10/opinion/gulf-analogy-munich-or-vietnam.html.

8

See Aristotle, Rhetoric, in Artistotle in 23 volumes, vol. 22, translated by J. H. Freese, https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3atext%3a1999.01.0060, n.d.

9

Susan Sontag, Illness as a metaphor & AIDS and its metaphors [1989] (London: Penguin, 1991).

10

Houghton, ‘The role of analogical reasoning in novel foreign-policy situations’ (emphasis in original).

11

Robert Jervis, Perception and misperception in international politics, 1st edn; Yuen Foong Khong, Analogies at war: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and the Vietnam decisions of 1965 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); May, ‘Lessons’ of the past; Vertzberger, ‘Foreign policy decisionmakers as practical-intuitive historians’.

12

William Flanik, ‘Analogies and metaphors and foreign policy decision making’, in Oxford research encyclopedia of politics, publ. online 24 May 2017, https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.524.

13

Akos Kopper and Tamas Peragovics, ‘Overcoming the poverty of Western historical imagination: alternative analogies for making sense of the South China Sea conflict’, European Journal of International Relations 25: 2, 2019, pp. 360–82 at p. 365, https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066118780996.

14

David Patrick Houghton, ‘Analogical reasoning and policymaking: where and when is it used?’, Policy Sciences, vol. 31, 1998, pp. 151–76, https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1004355215177; Neustadt and May, Thinking in time.

15

Darren C. Brunk, ‘Curing the Somalia syndrome: analogy, foreign policy decision making, and the Rwandan genocide’, Foreign Policy Analysis 4: 3, 2008, pp. 301–20 at p. 304, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1743-8594.2008.00071.x.

16

Keith L. Shimko, ‘Metaphors and foreign policy decision making’, Political Psychology 15: 4, 1994, pp. 655–71 at p. 661, https://doi.org/10.2307/3791625.

17

Robert Axelrod and Larissa Forster, ‘How historical analogies in newspapers of five countries make sense of major events: 9/11, Mumbai and Tahrir Square’, Research in Economics 71: 1, 2017, pp. 8–19, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rie.2016.08.001; Dominic Tierney, “‘Pearl Harbor in reverse”’.

18

Jan Angstrom, ‘Mapping the competing historical analogies of the war on terrorism: the Bush presidency’, International Relations 25: 2, 2011, pp. 224–42 at p. 238, https://doi.org/10.1177/0047117811404448.

19

Roland Paris, ‘Kosovo and the metaphor war’, Political Science Quarterly 117:3, 2002, pp. 423–50, https://doi.org/10.2307/798263; Mumford, ‘Parallels, prescience and the past’.

20

Khong, Analogies at war, p. 10.

21

Shimko, ‘Metaphors and foreign policy decision making’.

22

See May, ‘Lessons’ of the past (for Korea); Khong, Analogies at war (Vietnam); and Record, ‘The use and abuse of history’ (Iraq).

23

Jutta Weldes, Constructing national interests: the United States and the Cuban Missile Crisis (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), pp. 13–15.

24

Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic and Amos Tversky, Judgement under uncertainty: heuristics and biases (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

25

Kopper and Peragovics, ‘Overcoming the poverty of Western historical imagination’.

26

Stephen Benedict Dyson and Thomas Preston, ‘Individual characteristics of political leaders and the use of analogy in foreign policy decision making’, Political Psychology 27: 2, 2006, pp. 265–88, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9221.2006.00006.x.

27

May, ‘Lessons’ of the past, p. xi.

28

Jervis, Perception and misperception in international politics, p. 228.

29

Mumford, ‘Parallels, prescience and the past’, p. 9.

30

Robert Dallek, ‘The tyranny of metaphor’, Foreign Policy, 12 Oct. 2010, https://foreignpolicy.com/2010/10/12/the-tyranny-of-metaphor. (Unless otherwise noted at point of citation, all URLs cited in this article were accessible on 4 Sept. 2024.)

31

Angstrom, ‘Mapping the competing historical analogies of the war on terrorism’, p. 226.

32

Some articles look at the use of conflicting analogies by policy-makers. See, for example, Houghton, ‘The role of analogical reasoning in novel foreign-policy situations’; Paris, ‘Kosovo and the metaphor war’; Asaf Siniver and Jeffrey Collins, ‘Airpower and quagmire: historical analogies and the second Lebanon War’, Foreign Policy Analysis 11: 2, 2015, pp. 215–31, https://doi.org/10.1111/fpa.12029.

33

Petr Fiala, ‘Statement by Prime Minister Petr Fiala on the Russian invasion of Ukraine’, Government of the Czech Republic, 24 Feb. 2022, https://www.vlada.cz/en/media-centrum/tiskove-konference/statement-by-prime-minister-petr-fiala-on-the-russian-invasion-of-ukraine--24-february-2022-195797.

34

‘Czechs have sent 89 tanks, hundreds of pieces of heavy machinery to Ukraine—PM’, Reuters, 22 Feb. 2023, https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/czechs-have-sent-89-tanks-hundreds-pieces-heavy-machinery-ukraine-pm-2023-02-22.

35

Tereza Šídlová, ‘“Volal Zelenskyj, chce nějakou točku-ju.” Jak Česko začalo zbrojit Ukrajinu—Seznam zprávy’ [‘Zelensky called, he wants some ballistic missiles, yes.’ How the Czech Republic started arming Ukraine—Seznam News], Seznam Zprávy [Seznam News], 7 March 2023, https://www.seznamzpravy.cz/clanek/domaci-volal-zelenskyj-chce-nejakou-tocku-ju-jak-cesko-zacalo-zbrojit-ukrajinu-227111.

36

Jiří Vokřál, ‘Dopady války na Česko. I po roce stojí Češi jasně za Ukrajinou’ [The effects of the war on the Czech Republic. Even after one year, Czech are clearly behind Ukraine], Seznam News, 24 Feb. 2023, https://www.seznamzpravy.cz/clanek/fakta-jak-valka-na-ukrajine-zmenila-cesko-cesi-jsou-nejsolidarnejsi-v-historii-226309.

37

Eurostat, ‘Temporary protection for persons feeling Ukraine—montly statistics’, 5 Sept. 2024, https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Temporary_protection_for_persons_fleeing_Ukraine_-_monthly_statistics.

38

‘Results of the Czech presidency of the Council of the EU’, Czech Presidency of the Council of the EU, 2023, https://czech-presidency.consilium.europa.eu/en/programme/results-of-the-czech-presidency-of-the-council-of-the-eu.

39

Steven Erlanger, ‘Ukraine war accelerates shift of power in Europe to the East’, New York Times, 26 Jan. 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/26/world/europe/eu-nato-power-ukraine-war.html.

40

Kiel Institute for the World Economy, ‘Ukraine support tracker’, https://www.ifw-kiel.de/topics/war-against-ukraine/ukraine-support-tracker/.

41

Eurostat, ‘Temporary protection for persons feeling Ukraine—montly statistics’.

42

Giulia Carbonaro, ‘Poland said its army will soon be the strongest in Europe. But is that possible?’, Euronews, 6 Sept. 2023, https://www.euronews.com/2023/09/06/poland-said-its-army-will-soon-be-the-strongest-in-europe-but-is-that-possible.

43

Hubert Tworzecki, ‘Poland: a case of top-down polarization’, The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 681: 1, 2019, pp. 97–119, https://doi.org/10.1177/0002716218809322.

44

The German Federal Government, ‘Policy statement by Olaf Scholz’, 27 Feb. 2022, https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-en/news/policy-statement-by-olaf-scholz-chancellor-of-the-federal-republic-of-germany-and-member-of-the-german-bundestag-27-february-2022-in-berlin-2008378.

45

Johannes Varwick of the University of Halle, quoted in Christoph Hasselbach, ‘Ukraine: what is Germany's strategy?’, Deutsche Welle, 30 May 2022, https://www.dw.com/en/war-in-ukraine-what-is-germanys-strategy/a-61977500.

46

Guy Chazan, ‘Germany to crack down on companies evading Russia sanctions’, Financial Times, 23 Feb. 2023, https://www.ft.com/content/6489d5a4-9c66-40be-bd3b-55b31e94542f.

47

The cut-off date was chosen for practical reasons only. We started working on this article and stopped adding new data to our corpus of speeches.

48

In the Polish case, we also added speeches by JarosławKaczyński, leader of the Law and Justice Party and de facto the most influential political leader in Poland during the 2019–23 government.

49

Gareth Terry, Nikki Hayfield, Victoria Clarke and Virginia Braun, ‘Thematic analysis’, in Carla Willig and Wendy Stainton Rogers, eds, The SAGE handbook of qualitative research in psychology (London: SAGE, 2017), pp. 17–37.

50

The result was a three-tier hierarchical codebook. The top level reflected our categorization of the codes and concepts (actors, states, historical references, etc.), further breaking down into a standard ontological two-level tree of codes, amounting to 128 codes in total. Both level 1 (general) and level 2 (specific) codes were used for coding.

51

Klaus Krippendorff, Content analysis: an introduction to its methodology, 4th edn (Los Angeles: SAGE, 2018).

52

Wouter de Nooy, Andrej Mrvar and Vladimir Batagelj, Exploratory social network analysis with Pajek [2005], 3rd edn (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

53

Mateusz Morawiecki, ‘Aktualność historii II wojny światowej’ [The relevance of the history of the Second World War], Government of Poland, 12 Feb. 2022, https://www.gov.pl/web/bulgaria/mateusz-morawiecki-aktualnosc-historii-II-wojny-swiatowej (authors' translation).

54

Andrzej Duda, ‘Fundament bezpieczeństwa i polska racja stanu. Uroczyste zgromadzenie posłów i senatorów z okazji 23. rocznicy przystąpienia Polski do NATO’ [The foundation of security and the Polish raison d'état. Esteemed assembly of MPs and senators on the occasion of the 23rd anniversary of Poland's accession to NATO], Sejm, 11 March 2022, https://www.sejm.gov.pl/sejm9.nsf/komunikat.xsp?documentId=E6205C8ACD29798BC1258802005A0E9B (authors' translation).

55

Petr Fiala, ‘Projev premiéra Fialy u příležitosti vystoupení ukrajinského prezidenta Volodymyra Zelenského před členy Parlamentu ČR’ [Speech by Prime Minister Fiala on the occasion of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's address to the Members of the Parliament of the Czech Republic], Government of the Czech Republic, 15 June 2022, https://vlada.gov.cz/cz/clenove-vlady/premier/projevy/projev-premiera-fialy-u-prilezitosti-vystoupeni-ukrajinskeho-prezidenta-volodymira-zelenskeho-pred-cleny-parlamentu-cr-197108 (authors' translation).

56

Jan Lipavský, ‘Appeasement agresory nezastaví’ [Appeasement won't stop the aggressors], MZV.gov.cz, 9 May 2022, https://mzv.gov.cz/munich/cz/bilateralni_vztahy/jan_lipavsky_appeasement_agresory.html (authors' translation).

57

Jan Lipavský, ‘Appeasement won't stop the aggressors’.

58

Olaf Scholz, ‘Am Jahrestag des Endes des Zweiten Weltkriegs in Europa’, 8 May 2022, https://www.bundesregierung.de/resource/blob/992798/2037608/427e1ba2d412d530769ed1db2f5788da/2022-05-08-bk-ansprache-8-mai-pdf-data.pdf?download=1.

59

Frank-Walter Steinmeier, ‘Eröffnung des 22. ordentlichen Bundeskongresses des Deutschen Gewerkschaftsbundes’, Bundespraesident.de, 8 May 2022, https://www.bundespraesident.de/SharedDocs/Reden/DE/Frank-Walter-Steinmeier/Reden/2022/05/220508-DGB-Bundeskongress.html.

60

Olaf Scholz, ‘Rede von Bundeskanzler Olaf Scholz’, Bundesregierung.de, 13 Sept. 2022, https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-de/service/bulletin/rede-von-bundeskanzlerolaf-scholz-2125572.

61

Olaf Scholz, ‘Rede von Bundeskanzler Olaf Scholz’.

62

The line's thickness represents edge weight based on frequency of connections; the stronger the relationship between the two nodes (codes), the thicker the line. Unlike the typical network graph analysis, for the purpose of a detailed discourse visualization, we display all relationships, including those where edge weight = 1.

63

As we are looking at a broader network, we used the betweenness centrality measures to calculate the size of the nodes. This metric represents how important the individual code is in interconnecting the network—how ‘central’ it is for all the possible relationships within the network.

64

There are only a few marginal relationships which remained disconnected from the main subnetwork presented in the visualizations here. Of those, the only one that reached an edge weight higher than 1 was a similarity seen between the codes ‘Russian propaganda’ and ‘Nazi propaganda’.

65

For the network visualizations, we use the Jaal open-source interactive network visualizing dashboard, created by Mohit Mayank: Mohit Mayank, ‘Jaal’, 2023, https://github.com/imohitmayank/jaal.

Author notes

The authors would like to thank Matěj Hrnčiřík, Lucas Tamayo and Wojciech Szymański for their efforts in collecting data for this article, and in the latter two cases primary coding of the material. We also thank Georgiy Kent for help with the text. We gratefully acknowledge funding from the Charles University Research Centre Program PRIMUS/22/HUM/011.