Oxford on the Vistula

photo: Arcaion (CC) www.pixabay.com

Glancing at Anglo-American media headlines about Poland since late 2015 one could be forgiven for thinking autocratic rule had returned to Warsaw after a 26-year hiatus. A tone of lofty irritation rises from those stories, asking questions like: Is this the Poland we wanted, helped create and, above all, funded? The rhetorical devices indicate what we will be fed: hard-right, xenophobic, or nationalistic. The use of the word populist – a term that itself has rarely been analysed or defined – to identify all opposition to prevailing orthodoxies has merely confused the situation.

Historian Timothy Garton Ash, for example, wrote in the Guardian in January 2016: “The voices of all allied democracies, in Europe and across the Atlantic, must be raised to express their concern about a turn with grave implications for the whole democratic West. And this needs to happen soon.” They have raised their voices but PiS is still in power and is still toying with its version of illiberalism – namely, attacks on the media, civil service, the Constitutional Tribunal, and restrictions on abortion rights and so on. The European Commission and others have called in vain for PiS to rein in its attacks. Yet like in the cases of Donald Trump and Viktor Orbán in Hungary, the more this “international elite” appeals and threatens, the more PiS’s base support digs in.

Defining the narrative

PiS and its attacks on the ideological and institutional foundations of post-communist liberalism is an interesting case – one that preceded Trump and, some argue, could also show the path out of collective and international impasse. Poland’s ex-finance minister in the previous Civic Platform (PO) government, Jan Rostowski, for example, says over coffee in Warsaw that Poland – as the first actor into what he called “a populist cycle” – could also be the first out. “It was a progenitor of the populist trend, but had to pretend to be less populist than it really was,” Rostowski said. “They hid [Defence Minister Antoni] Macierwicz and [PiS leader] Kaczyński, both of whom have massive negative approval ratings, from the limelight. [President Andrzej] Duda and [PM Beata] Szydło were presented as fresher faces – one a pleasant young man, the other a motherly, middle-aged woman. People voted for a better version of PO and got a worse version of PiS.”

The mainstream western media is not fake news, as some might have it, but it certainly has its favourites, its ideological predilections and, of course, rarely admits to being in any sense ideological. The more egregious examples of this kind of reporting have been many and varied since PiS came to power in October 2015, but a few structural strands run through the narrative body. The Financial Times, the Economist and the Wall Street Journal tend to follow the markets’ reactions to PiS’s apparent market illiberalism (taxes on banks, retailers, and higher spending on welfare), concur with warnings from ratings agencies and find common cause in dismay emanating from Brussels and London with investments on hold. And so on. 

On the social wing of the liberal critique of PiS, meanwhile, one sees Poland’s favourite foreign historians Norman Davies, Timothy Snyder and Timothy Garton Ash fretting about Poland falling back into bad old ways. “He [PiS party leader Jarosław Kaczyński] is behaving like a Bolshevik and a paranoid troublemaker,” Davies said in April 2016. Poland, then, in subtle ways becomes a child in the eyes of worried parents, a place seen through idealised lenses, as if PiS were somehow a symptom of some collective pathology, not as an expression – however clumsy – of a healthy organism. 

The mainstream western narrative appears to assume, above all, that Poland is a place in which a Whig version of history is – or should be, with “our help” – destined to win out in the end. It should be a victory of process above outcome, and individual freedom over state-power – defeating goal-based, theological and statist ideologies. Oxford would make it to the Vistula at last. 

The apparent lack of self-reflection on the part of many in the western press therefore has grated against a Poland that reared its head in the form of PiS (and others). This “other” Poland – like the “other” UK after Brexit and the “other” US post-Trump – is apparently a relic of the past, a place of backwardness, of failure. A mixed bag of labels has been used loosely and often interchangeably: the transition’s losers, the marginalised, rural, populist, Catholic, nationalist, backward, elderly, provincial, “Poland A” and “Poland B”. These might get a mention somewhere at the end of an article, perhaps a brief aside to explain to newcomers the context of those who had not gained from the painful post-1989 transition, implying the majority had been winners. This “cut and paste” approach is reminiscent of the ways in which Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn were – initially at least – treated by most media in the US and UK respectively. Adjectives like socialist, radical, or far-left were often used in order to avoid deeper explanation. This creates a shortcut, conjuring up our own dismal images, ranging from Mao Tse Tung to British car strikes in the 1970s.  

The Other, as it were, thus works both ways: if PiS divides the world into us and them, then the western media tends to divide Poland into those with PiS and those with “us”. 

Of course, the things the western reporter will see and write down are seemingly true, in the sense that they were objectively reported and widely agreed upon both in Poland and elsewhere. Suggesting that PiS is a more complex beast and that Polish society – like all others – is not amenable to simple dichotomies does not preclude the possibility that what they report has much truth to it. Analysing its rhetoric and actions, PiS is demonstrably illiberal. It arguably has certain anti-democratic and socially regressive tendencies. So, the question is: how did the western media and its readers get it so wrong?

Controlling the narrative

Many Anglo-American reporters who come to Poland do not speak much Polish, and when confronted with stories that require some knowledge of the language they will tend to follow what they think they already know, ask someone they know to interpret or translate for them or simply avoid reporting on a subject that takes them away from established English-language sources.

Talking to ordinary Poles who do not speak much English sometimes evokes a set of primary emotional responses among subjects: fear, shame or pride. Non-English speaking Poles will tend to have less affection for the outside world, or so it will appear to the untrained eye, while many translators and interpreters will also want to spin Poland in a certain light for foreign interlocutors. The Warsaw expat bubble is somewhat removed from ordinary Polish lives. That much appears standard in most foreign reporting.  International journalists tend to be locked out of the domestic debate. This is not to blame Polish journalism, although at times it does tend to be rather inward-looking. Even the liberal order of [Newsweek Polska editor-in-chief] Tomasz Lis and [Gazeta Wyborcza editor-in-chief since 1989] Adam Michnik (two very different personalities) tend to flock together when faced with outsiders who may have different ideas.

Gazeta Wyborcza, at first the bastion of the intellectual liberal-left after 1989 and then the neoliberal  centre after around 2003, is often a rather glib, Polish version of the Guardian in its social if not its economic sympathies, appealing to the new, modern (European) middle class. This is a secular, socially liberal Poland that is about creating new wealth, catching up with the West, educating its children to lose those ancient Polish complexes and show the world a different face. But in their haste to re-join Europe they forgot to take many fellow Poles with them. Wyborcza writes for, and is largely also written by a new generation of Poles: English-speaking, educated, well-travelled and impatient; they want what their parents did not get. They often see themselves as superior to fellow Poles as they are to outsiders brazen enough to believe they have a right to comment on Poland. But their confusion and de-politicisation – anti-PiS but pro-nothing – reflects a wider sociological change and, in particular, perhaps the end of the often precarious alliance of workers and intellectuals in public life, a place that the founders of the newspaper had once traditionally occupied.

Most Polish reporters just want to get ahead, get along as best they can, as we all do. They rub shoulders with international advisers and lawyers keep fit in the same gyms and send their kids to the same schools. This in turn has an effect in terms of how the news is produced. The western reporter may not even see the ways in which he is being manipulated and becomes partisan, vain and incurious often without even realising it.

Who’s watching whom?

Thus, the challenge for the outside world is to understand whether Poland has actually changed or if PiS reflects a set of societal values that have remained largely unchanged but publicly latent – a sphere not apparently occupied only by nationalist football hooligans, one that is also made up of neighbours, friends, work colleagues, family and even spouses. What is more, a certain paradox has emerged with this government’s approach. While PiS wants to scrap the Third Republic that was built out of the agreements of the 1989 transition, in order to draw a line with the communist past, some believe what is in fact happening is a return to key elements of that past. Brian Porter-Szűcs argues, in a chapter in the book The Triumph of National Communism, that on the one hand PiS presents itself as the most uncompromising opponent of communism, but on the other hand many liberal and leftist critics have described the past year as a resurrection of the Polish People’s Republic. 

“Just below the surface of this undeniable anti-communism, PiS has indeed perpetuated a strand of Polish politics that has roots in the communist era,” Porter-Szűcs notes. He argues that the legitimacy of the communist workers’ party, the PZPR, was never recognised by the Catholic Church. The party downplayed many of socialism’s goals, but they could never entirely abandon the foundational anticlericalism and the scientism of the Marxist project and “given the importance of Catholicism to 20th century Polish nationalism, Gomułka’s National Communism was doomed,” he suggests.

The Church in Poland, he argues, saw communism as the culmination of the evils unleashed by capitalism and democracy. “It stood at the very bottom of the slippery slope down which humanity had been descending since the Enlightenment,” he adds. And given this, the collapse of the post-communists, the Democratic Left Alliance (SLD), happened precisely when PiS emerged as a political force, Porter-Szűcs notes. “I am not arguing that Kaczyński is a communist. But many in Poland did not want that sort of revolution back in the 1980s. They wanted a state that would preserve the PZPR’s commitment to social cohesion, cultural homogeneity and nationalism, but imbue it with a Catholic rather than a leftist conceptual vocabulary.”

Porter argues therefore that in this light, PiS is a blend of the post-1956 PZPR (shorn of any ties to the Marxist tradition) with the pre-1939 nationalist regime, known as “Endecja”.

The centre (-left) cannot hold

“What happened, not only in Poland, was that at the very moment you needed a social democratic kind of regime, which said ‘we’re going to protect: we know this transition is going to create a lot of losers as well as some winners, but our duty is to try and hold society together,’” Neal Ascherson tells Jan Darasz in an interview found in The Triumph of National Communism. “The parties of the left in Poland committed themselves to neo-liberalism. This left a political vacuum in a most sensitive place and it is not surprising that eventually somebody moved into this vacuum: an ultra-nationalist, highly conservative, traditionalist party. That poses as a party of the losers, a protectionist party to some extent.”

Political scientist Mark Blyth from Brown University says that this historical sociological breakdown is a key element across the western world. “Labour parties worked because there was an alliance of the intellectual left (middle and upper classes) and the working class. The working class had power in that they could hurt the profits of capital and legislate in their interests. Globalisation of labour markets killed the former and left-wing parties gave away the second,” he said.

Wolfgang Streeck, emeritus director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, explained to me that the end of the alliance of intellectuals and workers has led to the current situation in Poland as well as elsewhere. Relations between intellectuals and workers during the communist era in Poland underwent a series of alliances (most clearly in 1980 and 1989) and schisms (most clearly in 1970), but seem to have broken down completely during the 1990s. This has its own dynamics but was in part also driven by the western press that echoed the demands of western capitalism and the rigours of EU membership.

New normal

 “The reason these more conservative, some would say xenophobic, attitudes are coming to the fore now is not because they did not exist before, but because the discourse on Western Europe has changed over the past two-three years,” says Remi Adekoya, a Guardian journalist. “Until then, the likes of Gazeta Wyborcza were successful in persuading regular Poles that in order for Poland to be as successful as Western European nations, Poles needed to shed some of their cultural identity and act more like the French and the British. Poles, generally enamoured with the economic success of the western model, went along. However, the eurozone crisis at the beginning of the decade combined with the recent spate of terrorist attacks and increased reports of problems assimilating minorities in some major European countries have led many Poles to start questioning the western model, and some to even assert that the feelings they had been reluctant to publicly admit to for years were actually common sense opinions,” he says.

In some crucial respects, therefore, the return of PiS cannot wholly be thought of as a return. It speaks to a set of forces that have been grinding away below the surface of public life since 1989, and of unfinished business. PiS never “wasn’t there”, in other words.

Thus, this “new normal” that we see is a lot like the old normal. Defined against a geopolitical background of insecurity and threat, perhaps PiS is just faster than its rivals in understanding its electorate, however unpalatable the latter’s views may be. The first stage of the post-communist transition was perhaps an interlude, not the destination at all, as many had thought or hoped. Or maybe the destination is indeterminacy itself? Disorder and apparent chaos or stasis, depending on how one approaches it, are real enough after all. Without a road-map provided by PiS itself, however, it is too difficult to tell.

Jo Harper is a freelance journalist and academic based in both Warsaw and Bonn. He has a PhD in Polish politics from the London School of Economics and is the author of the upcoming book Poland’s illiberal revolution. Essays on PiS, which will be published later this year by Central European University Press.

PiS, Poland, transformation