In the spring of 2018, I travelled from Warsaw to the town of Montrose, on the east coast of Scotland, to meet a fringe Polish politician who has dedicated his life to overturning Europe’s post-1989 political settlement.
A native of the southeastern Polish city of Lublin, he was the deputy leader of an overtly pro-Russian marginal political party calling for a radical re-orientation in Polish foreign policy. Describing itself as “the first non-American political party in Poland,” it was anti-capitalist, anti-Nato and anti-EU, and had ties both to the global extreme far-right and to foreign pro-Russian actors, including the Donbass rebels in eastern Ukraine and proxies for the Assad regime in Syria. This politician (who in this piece I need to keep anonymous) had moved to Scotland after his party’s leader was detained by Polish security services on suspicion of espionage on behalf of Russia and China. A specialist in political entryism, he started a new life in Aberdeen and—intriguingly—reinvented himself as a passionate advocate of Scottish independence.
As we sat over soup in a quiet corner of Montrose’s George Hotel, the politician outlined a radical vision for Poland’s future, one that involved renouncing its “civilisational choice” to join western political and security institutions after 1989 and instead returning to Russia’s warm embrace. For all you may have heard about the country’s authoritarian turn under the nationalist Law and Justice Party (PiS), this position remains a near-heretical stance. The standard Polish view is that the nation’s western vocation was ordained over a thousand years ago, when the first Polish king, Mieszko I, adopted Roman Catholicism in the year 966.
The conviction that Poland’s destiny lies in the west is rooted in centuries of historical experience. Having developed into mainland Europe’s largest state following royal and political unions between the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the 14th and 16th centuries, the so-called Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had been dismantled over the course of the 18th century by neighbouring authoritarian powers: the so-called “Holy Alliance” of Austria, Prussia and Russia. While all three powers suppressed Polish national aspirations to varying degrees, it is harshly autocratic Tsarist Russia, which crushed two Polish uprisings with overwhelming force, that features in the Polish imagination as principal villain
and tormentor.
In the 19th century, advocates of Polish restoration juxtaposed the democratic virtues of the freedom-loving, western-oriented Poles with the despotic barbarism of their Russian occupiers. This was not just a question of sympathy for an oppressed nation. If the extinction of Polish statehood had been a pre-condition for the Holy Alliance’s authoritarian hegemony over the continent, the thinking went, then Poland’s restoration must surely be a precondition for Europe’s liberation.
It was for this reason that the Polish Cause attracted passionate supporters ranging from Edmund Burke to—counterintuitively for modern Poles—Karl Marx, who argued in a speech in London in 1867 entitled “Poland’s European Mission” that “there is but one alternative for Europe”: “Either Asiatic Barbarism, under Muscovite direction, will burst around [Europe’s] head like an avalanche, or else it must re-establish Poland, thus putting twenty million heroes between itself and Asia and gaining a breathing spell for the accomplishment of its social regeneration.”
Twentieth-century history bore out the conviction that a Free Poland was a prerequisite for a Free Europe. Polish statehood was restored after the collapse of the various Holy Alliance powers in 1917-1918, then snuffed out again by the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939. Poland was in chains during the Cold War era, only shaking them off in 1989. In so doing it initiated the course of events leading to the collapse of the Soviet Union and an independent, western-oriented Poland taking its rightful place at the heart of a “Europe whole and free.”
The man with whom I was sitting in Montrose saw things differently. In his version of events, it is the west, not Russia, that has most threatened Polish statehood. Communism’s collapse had heralded not the departure of Russian despotism, but the arrival of American militarism and capitalist exploitation. While no advocate of communism itself, he contrasted the “civilisational leap” that Poland had achieved during the communist era with the “alienation and confrontation” that he regards as inherent to the liberal capitalist model of the post-1989 regime, known as the Third Republic: “We believe that Poles love freedom, and Russians are kind of slaves. Well, I have observed Polish policy for 28 years of the Third Republic, and I believe that we are slaves, and we are afraid of any change.”
Rather than emulating the west, he argued, Poland’s model for post-communist transition should have been poor and authoritarian Belarus (which recently forced the grounding of a Ryanair flight to get hold of a dissident), a “peaceful, open nation” that stayed out of foreign conflicts and offered a middle way between western capitalism and the rigged privatisations of pre-Putin Russia. Poland had to make a “civilisational choice,” with “straight, simple, geopolitical answers.”
It would be easy to dismiss my interviewee as a marginal figure espousing fringe views. His party had negligible public support; most Poles, even when questioning the direction of western societies, are still instinctively wary of Kremlin machinations. And yet, over the past five years, Polish politics has shifted unmistakably in his direction, raising fears in European chancelleries that strategically important Poland could one day follow Viktor Orbán’s Hungary in effectively abandoning its pro-western orientation even as it remains a member of the EU and Nato.
The rhetoric emanating from Warsaw under the PiS has become indistinguishable from the toxic reactionary agenda pushed by Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin. At the same time, senior ministers have warned of the dangers associated with the “mixing of races,” while pro-government media outlets peddle conspiracies about George Soros flooding the country with non-white migrants. PiS leader Jarosaw Kaczyski has warned of “parasites and protozoa” carried by refugees, and described “LGBT ideology” as a threat to the very existence of the Polish state.
In parallel, the country has endured an anti-democratic counter-revolution, with democratic institutions established since 1989 slowly strangled by the assertion of direct ruling party control. Polish state media spews propaganda that would make alt-right trolls blush, while the independence of the judiciary, long since destroyed at an institutional level, rests solely on the conscience of individual judges prepared to risk their careers and even their liberty to incur the wrath of the political authorities.
Poland’s authoritarian turn, the consequences of which have been exacerbated by ham-fisted diplomacy and a series of deeply damaging attempts by outsiders to impose PiS’s reactionary narratives on everything from climate change to Holocaust scholarship, has affected the country’s relations with almost all of its once-friendly western allies. Regularly censured and sanctioned by European institutions, ignored by western decision-makers, and now deprived of a political ally in the White House, the nation has gone from poster child of post-communist transition to a scorned and resentful pariah at the heart of the EU.
“The rhetoric emanating from Warsaw has become indistinguishable from the toxic, reactionary agenda of Putin’s Kremlin”
As a reporter based in Warsaw, I witnessed this rapid decline in Poland’s democratic governance and international standing at close quarters. But what struck me most was the spectacular outpouring of anti-western sentiment that accompanied it—a visceral hatred vented by political leaders that echoed, often word-for-word, the anti-western propaganda of the communist era.
It is a sentiment aired too by the government’s allies in Poland’s ultra-conservative Roman Catholic church. Strong because of its continuing hold over a significant proportion of the Polish electorate, but weakened—potentially fatally—by a succession of abuse scandals and collapsing attendance among the young, the church has grown increasingly assertive and desperate in its political interventions even as its moral authority ebbs away. An institution that once served as a vehicle for Poles’ western and democratic aspirations now stands as the greatest obstacle to their realisation.
Are Poles really rethinking the “civilisational choice” they made after 1989? And if so, what are the consequences for Europe? The Polish Question—which until very recently appeared to have been settled once and for all—is back.
In 2017 Piotr Gliski, Poland’s right-wing minister of culture, wrote a letter to the president of the European parliament to complain about the core exhibition of the House of European History in Brussels, an EU-funded museum devoted to “interpreting history from a European perspective.”
“The role of Christianity, which has been the basis of the European civilisation for centuries… is presented in a very selective and negative way as the source of oppression and the cause of suffering and discrimination against millions of women,” Gliski wrote. “The period of European development before the French Revolution has been presented as a period of enslavement by monarchies and oppression by the church… no attention is paid to the roots of 20th-century totalitarianism, which can be found in the practices and views of Jacobinism.”
Gliski’s letter exposed a philosophical disconnect between Polish conservatives and mainstream western political thought. Whereas many in the west—as well as Poland’s many liberals—revere Enlightenment principles as the foundation of modern conceptions of equality, democracy and human rights, much of the Polish right sees—perhaps always saw—such conceptions as inherently suspect, even sinister.
This disconnect was of lesser importance during the Solidarity era, when Polish liberals and conservatives had been united by a common enemy in the communist regime. Even as the old Solidarity alliance descended into bitter infighting after 1989, there remained a consensus within the elites that Poland’s destiny lay in aligning with the west. Liberals got a democratic constitution designed to protect minority rights, while religious conservatives were sated by a legislative-constitutional “compromise” that severely restricted access to abortion. Crucially, the Polish Catholic church, following the lead of the Polish Pope John Paul II, gave its blessing to this new consensus by acting as a strong advocate for EU membership ahead of accession in 2004.
But whatever consensus there may once have been has frayed, as Polish conservatives respond with rising horror to the steady liberalisation, secularisation and globalisation of Polish society since the country’s democratic transition. They had imagined a different western ideal—not “equality for all” but something more akin to a fantasy version of medieval Christendom: a society divided into clear hierarchies, where women submit to men and men to God; where public life is constructed around the teachings and authority of the church, where racial and religious minorities are expected to be grateful for being “tolerated,” while LGBT people are barely tolerated at all.
In response, they railed against modern notions of democracy and human rights, portraying them as sinister concepts deployed by “leftists” to impose secular totalitarianism through the back door. They drew a direct line, as Gliski does, from the Enlightenment to the French revolutionary excesses of “Jacobinism”—as well as on to the twin totalitarianisms of fascism and communism that ravaged Poland in the last century, using issues like abortion to equate progressive advocates of less restrictive laws with communist mass murderers.
In the eyes of the Polish right, modern western Europe has surrendered itself to the so-called “civilisation of death,” a Godless nihilism operating under the guise of a commitment to equality that will pave the way for a collective mass death: literally through widespread abortion and euthanasia, figuratively through the “death” of the family as a social construct—and ultimately, the “death” of white, European Christendom.
It is a view vigorously propagated both by PiS and the upper echelons of the Polish Catholic church, whose dominant faction regards the conciliatory Catholicism of Pope Francis with undisguised suspicion. In May, the archbishop of Pozna, Stanisaw Gdecki, who is also the president of the Polish Episcopal Conference, warned that a “moral crisis” had “covered Europe, and was now ruining Poland,” with people “misunderstanding freedom as debauchery.” Marek Jdraszewski, the archbishop of Kraków, has warned of a “rainbow plague” threatening the nation, while also maintaining that “abortion is even more evil than paedophilia” and claiming that European whites will be “living on reservations” by 2050.
Pumped out relentlessly by clerics, ruling party politicians and the pro-government media, these ideas have begun to take hold in the minds of many Poles who for a variety of reasons share this disillusionment with the realities of living in the modern west.
The contempt felt by many Poles towards modern Britain is a striking example of this. A very large number of Poles have, of course, made successful new lives in this country—something that is still the case even after the bitter blow of Brexit, which many Poles, not unreasonably, understood as an explicit rejection of their presence and contribution. But a significant proportion of those who have spent time in this country have long since grown embittered and disillusioned.
Life in the west—especially as a low-earner in modern Britain—was never going to match expectations. In many cases, these migrants were doing jobs far below what they were qualified to do. The British knew little about the world they came from, and it was far from clear how, as white Christian migrants, they fitted into national debates concerning migration and ethnicity. Many Poles feel they are an “invisible minority,” encountering much of the discrimination suffered by non-white migrants and minorities, while being almost completely ignored by British cultural elites.
Some Poles in Britain have responded by developing a dual antipathy. They resent the non-white Britons they often live alongside in working-class communities, whom they blame—nonsensically—for giving “deserving” migrants a bad name. At the same time, they resent the white majority, whom they accuse—not altogether nonsensically—of benefiting from their labour while making little effort to understand the experience of eastern Europeans living in Britain.
These people have become a fertile recruiting ground for the far-right both in the UK and on their return to Poland; one Polish far-right leader told me that the disillusionment of young Poles who had spent time in Britain contributed more to recruitment than any media campaign could ever achieve. This antipathy is reflected more widely in contemporary Polish right-wing discourse, which regularly seizes on events in the UK and other western countries, like the once staunchly Catholic Ireland, as evidence of how once-great cultures are succumbing to left-wing nihilism.
Witness a case in January, when a Polish man who had been in a coma in Plymouth with no prospect of revival had his life-support machine turned off with the approval of a British judge. The man’s death prompted a protest outside the British embassy in Warsaw, with demonstrators holding signs saying “don’t murder innocent Poles” and “England, don’t murder helpless Poles.” Ignoring the fact that the same outcome would also have been completely legal in Poland, several ruling-party politicians accused the British authorities of “murder”; education minister Przemysaw Czarnek accused British judges of “belonging to the civilisation of death.”
One often hears from liberal Poles that there are really “two Polands”—the one that votes for PiS, and the one that doesn’t. True enough, but the fact is that the country only has one president—the loathsome, gay-baiting Andrzej Duda—and one government, both of which have been re-elected, and both of which will have been in office for the best part of a decade by the time they eventually depart.
Ever since PiS started to dismantle the country’s democratic institutions, commentators have struggled to agree on how the state of Polish democracy should be described. Foreigners tend to lump it in with Orbán’s Hungary under the umbrella term of “illiberal democracy.” But whereas Orbán used a constitutional majority to construct a new authoritarian order, PiS has simply laid waste to what was there before—capturing, paralysing and occasionally liquidating institutional safeguards in an improvised and often chaotic manner. It is not that Poland is “no longer a democracy.” Rather, its government is akin to an authoritarian cuckoo in a democratic nest, poisoning the conditions that nurtured it. This is a defensive and nostalgic nationalism, less dictatorial grand design than institutionalised malice and half-arsery.
The concomitant rhetoric emanating from Warsaw has already seriously strained relations with Germany. That matters for the continent as a whole: western Europeans tend to underestimate the extent to which the Polish-German reconciliation and alliance still underpins the transformation not just of Poland but central and eastern Europe more widely—just as Franco-German reconciliation underpinned a similar post-war transformation in the west.
Successive generations of Polish authoritarians—communists and nationalists alike—have stoked anti-German sentiment to check the drift of liberal values from across the River Oder. It is amusing to observe the intellectual contortions of the present government’s propagandists as they attempt to convince their electorate that modern Germany is at once as avariciously imperialistic as the Third Reich, and yet so liberal that it threatens the very foundations of Christendom.
The result is the concept of Germany, and by extension the EU and the west more generally, as a hostile foreign invader determined to impose liberal social and sexual mores by force. A “Homo Empire,” as the cover of a mainstream Polish conservative publication put it a few years ago, which seeks to eradicate religion and national identity in the 21st century as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union had sought to do in the 20th.
“The Polish government is akin to an authoritarian cuckoo in a democratic nest, poisoning the conditions that nurtured it”
On the campaign trail last year, for example, President Duda declared that “LGBT ideology” was more “destructive to man” than the Soviet-imposed communism endured by his parents. Not coincidentally, he also suggested that a German reporter covering the elections was part of a German plot to sway the vote in the favour of his liberal opponent.
A similar chauvinist paranoia underpins the years-long stand-off with the European Commission and the European Court of Justice over the government’s subjugation of the Polish judiciary. This really matters to Europe—or rather it should do. Because national judges are also responsible for upholding EU law in each member state, the entire system relies on mutual recognition of the integrity of each constituent part. The slow extinction of the independence of Polish judges therefore constitutes a direct threat to the EU legal system.
While the European Commission—abandoned by member states unwilling to directly confront an erstwhile peer—responds in a characteristically procedural way by repeatedly referring Warsaw to the EU’s Court of Justice, the Polish government portrays the standoff in civilisational terms, reprising the nation’s historic role as defender of western civilisation by resisting the imposition of “leftist” notions of racial and sexual equality in the form of migrant quotas and LGBT rights. The prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki, a Kaczyski placeman, has described the “re-Christianisation of Europe” as one of his government’s priorities, while Duda, ostensibly a pro-European politician, has disparaged the EU as an “imaginary community” and likened Poland’s membership to its experience of the 19th-century occupations.
The real problem for the EU is not that Poland’s leaders are Russophiles—they are not—or even that they have conservative views on sex and migration. Rather, it is that they do not accept, acknowledge, or even seem to understand the basic values of liberal democracy—the values upon which Poland’s status as a western country has been constructed. Like homeopaths at a medical conference, there is no common intellectual basis for co-operation. They are intruders; they have nothing to contribute; they do not belong.
The values of a leader and government do not necessarily reflect those of the population at large. Indeed, Polish politics has a militant edge precisely because so many citizens forcefully reject the apocalyptic worldview espoused by the authorities. But there remains a contradiction at its heart, namely that Poles support continued EU membership while electing leaders who do not respect the commitments on which that membership depends. There is no mechanism for ejecting Poland from the EU, and there is no evidence that Poles would choose to leave any time soon. But that does not mean that this contradiction can be sustained forever. Something will have to give.
That may well be Law and Justice itself. Optimists point to the fact that Duda’s liberal opponent came to within a percentage point or so of victory in presidential elections last summer. The electorate will tire of the present authorities by the time of the next parliamentary election, the argument goes, while heinous examples of overreach such as a draconian, near-total and unlawful recent ban on abortion are driving the development of a new, committed generation of progressives.
The government is also likely to suffer from the economic fallout of the pandemic. Much of PiS’s electoral support is based on being able to distribute some of the fruits of decades of growth—sometimes, as with generous child support payments, in ways that reinforce its emphasis on “family values.”
But even if defeated in 2023—something that remains unlikely so long as opposition parties continue in their present state of rudderless chaos—PiS and their fellow travellers won’t disappear quietly into the night. Their mentality reflects that of roughly half the electorate. Worse, they are paving the way for a new, more virulent strain of right-wing authoritarianism which is genuinely Russophile. That variant of the far right has already entered the Polish parliament and might in future find common cause with the present government’s hardliners once Kaczyski departs the scene. Unless the country undergoes a liberal counter-revolution—something that would require a total collapse in the authority of the Polish Catholic church—it is likely to continue to drift further towards the authoritarian right.
Rather than Poland making the “civilisational choice” to submit to Russia’s tender mercies, the real risk is that its leaders and their electorate become so alienated from the western mainstream that as well as threatening the EU’s legal and moral legitimacy, an isolated and pathologically disruptive Poland grows increasingly vulnerable to subtler forms of Russian penetration: the same Muscovite knotweeds of corruption, cynicism and institutional paralysis that allowed Tsarist Russia to bribe and coerce large swathes of the Polish nobility into submission over 200 years ago.
A Free Poland really is necessary for a Free Europe. But for Poland simply to exist is not enough—it must rediscover the moral purpose that inspired generations of Polish democrats, a moral purpose that once, if briefly, inspired the world. To paraphrase the question raised by the 19th-century poet Juliusz Sowacki in response to compatriots clamouring for the restoration of Polish statehood: Poland! Poland! But which one?
