Abstract
Poland is one of Germany’s most significant international partners and is characterised in German discourses as a neighbour, friend and ally. Nevertheless, recent changes in government in Poland have significantly impacted the relationship. Situating the German-Polish case within the literature on ‘special relationships’, this paper argues that these can be better understood through analysis of official narratives, and proposes a theoretical distinction between ‘essential narratives’ and ‘non-essential narratives’. Corpus analysis techniques are used to code the narratives and structure the in-depth analysis. The study finds that each official German narrative was adjusted to varying degrees in response to changing Polish governments. While ‘essential’ narratives were more stable and ultimately upheld the ‘special relationship’, ‘non-essential’ narratives underwent more significant change. As well as expanding the empirical literature on German-Polish relations, these findings demonstrate the potential of corpus-assisted discourse analysis and contribute to the theoretical discussion of what constitutes and sustains ‘special relationships’.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Number of pages | 26 |
| Journal | German Politics |
| Early online date | 21 Oct 2025 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | E-pub ahead of print - 21 Oct 2025 |
Bibliographical note
Copyright © 2025 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis GroupThis is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
Data Access Statement
The dataset used for the main empirical section is included in the references with a DOI under (Herring Citation2024).Funding
This research was carried out as part of the author’s PhD, which is funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council Doctoral Training Partnership Programme.