Wed 31 Oct 2018
Photograph: Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images
On 11 November, as much of Europe marks the centenary of the armistice that brought the first world war to an end, Poland will celebrate 100 years since the re-establishment of an independent Polish state after more than a century of partition by foreign powers. In theory, at least, the commemorations should be a time to unify the nation in a way that next year’s 30th anniversary of the negotiated fall of communism in 1989 – the nature of which continues to divide Polish society – cannot.
Membership of the EU meant money and respect, but little attention was given to the transformation of Polish societyBut Poles are not so easily reconciled. Behind the flag-waving and patriotic banalities stands a divided and unhappy country. Throughout the 19th century and again throughout the communist period, many Poles yearned not just for their own independent state but for that state to fulfil the nation’s imagined destiny as an integral part of the west. But what did “the west” mean?
For many, including successive generations of Polish leaders after 1989, this meant anchoring the country in western political and security institutions and adopting the liberal democratic values that underpinned them. But others, who regard godless liberal rationalism as little more than a variant of Soviet social engineering, harboured the delusion that the west represented a kind of pre-Enlightenment medieval Christendom. As they have become disabused of this fantasy, so many are creeping towards the conclusion that they are stuck within a value system they do not believe in. Membership of the European Union meant money and respect, but little attention was given to the nature of the transformation of the Polish economy and society – and the ensuing obligations – that would accompany it.
In retrospect, it seems a miracle that liberal democracy took hold in Poland in recent decades in the way that it did. Contrary to national myth, which often confuses the long-held desire for national liberation with a genuine collective commitment to democratic values, the democratic tradition was never very deeply embedded in Polish society. Liberal democratic values in Poland have long had to contend not only with the legacy of communism but also with that of a peculiarly Polish brand of national Catholicism that shares with communism a commitment to hierarchy, dogma and ritual, and the associated authoritarian vices of ignorance, passivity and paranoia that have come to the fore in recent years.
Photograph: Jakob Ratz/Pacific Press/Barcroft Images
To see the dramatic shift in Polish attitudes towards the west, one needs only to look at the young. For those of a certain age, Poland’s hard border with the west before EU accession had immense symbolic power. It suggested that Poles were not yet to be trusted, that they were not yet to be considered as equals. The opening of its western borders in 2004 represented not just liberation and convenience, but also acceptance and respect. But for many younger Poles who have since left the country looking for work, Europe’s open borders have come to represent the collusion of Polish and European elites in the economic exploitation of the young. As a result, many have rejected liberalism and democracy and instead been drawn towards nationalism and the narratives of the far right.
This growing nationalist sentiment is expressed in the ever larger “march of independence” organised each year by parties of the far right. Although the march has been a fixture for several years, it is only in the age of Trump that it has received widespread attention in the international media. But while one must be vigilant about the increasing visibility of the extreme right, breathless commentaries about the rise of fascism in Poland overlook a much more immediate and realistic threat: the ongoing construction of a conservative autocracy underpinned by an authoritarian brand of Catholicism – Salazar on the Vistula.
As the Polish government’s present confrontation with European institutions shows, however, this new authoritarian order cannot be fully implemented as long as Poland remains in the EU. Not only does EU law not allow for the kind of authoritarianism that some in Poland want, but allowing such a direct and sustained challenge to the authority of that law threatens its very existence.
For some Europeans, the fact that the Polish crisis has reached this point constitutes proof that the country should never have been allowed to join the EU in the first place. This is deeply unfair – Poland should be judged on the achievements of the last 30 years, not the events of the last three. But it does serve as a reminder that it was never Poland’s “destiny” to be so deeply embedded in the west. It was a choice, and it is a choice that must be renewed by each successive generation if it is to be sustained. As the British are finding out at the moment, the decision to pursue a European future can be “unmade” more easily than you think.
As a result, the question of Poland’s long-term future – something that had long been thought to have been settled – will hang heavy over this year’s independence festivities. For many Poles there is something deeply, deeply maddening and shaming about the possibility that after centuries of struggle, culminating in the victory and international admiration of 1989 and accession to the EU 15 years later, their nation could have achieved so much, and yet proceed to throw it all away again in a fit of pique – the final confirmation of warnings from their ancestors that beneath the patriotic bombast, Poles will always be their own worst enemy.
But one cannot dismiss the possibility that this maddening and charismatic nation is still capable of unexpected and formidable acts of resistance. The emotion, the hypocrisy, the cynicism, the sense of bewilderment and frustration, the ability to rise up in anger one moment and to remain stubbornly passive the next – these are all inherent to the Polish soap opera.
For that reason, to be Polish – even only in part, as I am – is a kind of agony. Dragging you into its drama, it is a nation that never fails to give you hope, even as it lets you down. As I rage against it, I cannot escape the feeling that I am condemned to love it forever.
• Christian Davies is a journalist based in Warsaw
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