‘Our Fatherland has found itself on the verge of an abyss’

Abstract

On the night of 12/13 December 1981, General Wojciech Jaruzelski introduced Martial Law in the Polish People's Republic, one of the state-socialist countries in the Soviet bloc. It was probably the first time, since the War Communism, when a communist government used the device of a state of exception. The aim of the paper is to look upon this event through the lense of Carl Schmitt's and Giorgio Agamben's concept of the state of exception, and to consider whether General Jaruzelski's dictatura was, in fact, a comissary or sovereign dictatorship, and whether the military takeover in Poland was an act of establishing a new constituent power.