Poland’s Illiberal Challenge

Abstract

Poland’s Illiberal Challenge Ellen Hinsey (bio) and Rafał Pankowski History, State-Building, and Patriotism A Dialogue with Rafał Pankowski Democracy in Poland is under threat. Since the conservative Law and Justice party (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość) won a parliamentary majority in the October 2015 elections, the country has been plunged into crisis. On a cool Sunday morning in Warsaw, I sat down to discuss this with Rafał Pankowski, a political scientist, author of scholarly works on nationalism, and editor at Never Again magazine. We met in an old wooden amphitheater on the twelfth floor of the Palace of Culture, the imposing brick skyscraper that was Stalin’s gift to the Polish capital. Since 1989, it has housed a range of new institutions, including the university Collegium Civitas, where Rafał is a faculty member. As we faced the steep rows of risers, we analyzed the relationship of Poland’s complex past and long subjugation to the recent series of political events. At the center of the controversy is what critics believe is the new government’s intention to undermine the country’s parliamentary democracy through its “capture” of the public media and the civil service, and most importantly, its weakening the authority of the Constitutional Tribunal, equivalent to the Supreme Court of the United States. The last decade has seen the rise of illiberalism and populism worldwide, and Poland is not alone in seeing its democracy threatened. By analyzing Poland’s roots as a nation, however, it is perhaps possible to understand how the country arrived at this junction after regaining its hard-won democracy after 1989. The following dialogue explores the dangers of the current political situation by placing it in historical context. ellen hinsey: Before we speak about recent political developments and how they relate to Polish state-building and identity, let’s take a brief look at Poland’s history. It’s impossible to understand the current situation without referring, for example, to the three eighteenth-century Partitions—or annexations—when Poland was divided up among the Great Powers: Russia, Austria, and Prussia. This meant that when Poland approached the twentieth century, it was not a sovereign state. Could you start by addressing these events and the Polish experience of national identity in the nineteenth century? [End Page 73] rafał pankowski: There are many paradoxes about Polish history and identity: one certainly concerns the Partitions. Without overcomplicating the matter, it’s true that modern Polish identity came into being under the conditions of the Partitions, the so-called “Nation Without a State.” This is not, however, an atypical model for Eastern European nation-forming. According to the “standard” perspective of European history, Western nations were formed with and by their respective States, while in Eastern Europe they were built on the basis of ethnicity rather than statehood. In this regard, Poland certainly belongs to the Eastern European model: in the late nineteenth century, when the idea of the modern nation-state gained ascendency across Europe, Poland was not a state. But the Polish national movement—or movements—did exist, and as a result of this historical process, the modern Polish nation came into being. That said, I think it would be wrong to see the creation of the modern Polish nation exclusively in this way. What was also significant for the construction of modern national identity was a strong memory of the tradition of Polish statehood that existed before the Partitions, up until the late eighteenth century. In fact, Polish statehood in some form existed under Napoleon, and then under the Czar. Until 1831, there were national state institutions in Poland. eh: What you are describing is essentially a double track, where there was a collective memory of the pre-Partition Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that existed from 1569 to 1795 (and which established one of Europe’s first parliaments), concurrent with the repression of national identity under the Partitions. Both of these are significant as we move closer to the modern period. rp: Exactly. I think that the memory of civic identity, including the memory of a state and state patriotism—that is, patriotism attached to the national...