„Hatred feeds us with a goblet”: the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s in geopolitical imaginations of the Polish popular music

The article focuses on the interference of Polish popular music and geopolitics after 1989. Songs selected from various trends of the Polish popular music made the source material of the text. The basic study method involved critical discourse analysis of the lyrics. The hierarchical East-West axis, which was also applied to the Balkans and Yugoslavia, was fundamental to Polish geopolitical perceptions. The musical image of Yugoslavia from the 1990s seemed repulsive with its strangeness and “Easternness”, which were proven by bloody wars and crimes in Bosnia and Kosovo. In the name of superiority of the Western world and geopolitical interests, musicians appealed to Western countries for military interventions in the former Yugoslavia. At the same time, they strengthened the direction towards the occidentalization of Poland as a condition for its security and development at the price of submission to the dominance of the West in the world and in Europe.