Foreign Affairs committee  Obviously this is the kind of analogy that is made quite often nowadays. I would be cautious. I would not use it too easily. We are not witnessing the 1930s. On the other hand it is impossible not to notice that there are elements of our social and political reality that can be compared to the 1930s.

Foreign Affairs committee  Again, national history has a lot to do with that. There is part of the Polish nationalist right that is traditionally pro-Russian, but overall, the historically motivated hostility towards Russia is also strong. Thus, you have both elements among the Polish nationalists. Many of them who publicly express their hostility to Russia at the same time are quite clearly modelling their political ideology on the current regime in Moscow.

Foreign Affairs committee  I think you are quite right to allude to what you might call the negative identity of those movements, which is much more powerful and much more important, frankly speaking, than are any of the positive proposals they are making. They definitely stand for a type of community defined through ethnonationalist ideology.

Foreign Affairs committee  I would like to stress that anti-Semitism is very important but it is not an isolated type of hateful discourse. Especially in central Europe I believe we have witnessed it for a long time now. We can notice that one type of hatred goes with other types of hatred, so we are rarely talking about isolated types of hateful discourse.

Foreign Affairs committee  Of course. I believe if there are any lessons that we can learn from the Polish case in the last few years, they are the following. First, the procedural constitutional framework of democratic institutions can be undermined by deficiencies in democratic culture. The second lesson, I believe, is the fact that the country's participation in the process of institutionalized regional integration, like the European Union, does not automatically guarantee progress in the field of intercultural understanding and inclusive identity, and such progress cannot be taken for granted.

Foreign Affairs committee  Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for your invitation. I am really honoured, and I am especially honoured to be invited alongside Anne Applebaum today. During your discussions over the last weeks, there is one term that has come up, and for good reason. It's a colourful term that has been making a revival in both academic and non-academic discourses in the last couple of years, namely, fascism.