Seventeen years after the dramatic events of June 1989 in Poland - when a European communist party bowed to pressure and, for the first time, allowed free elections - and two years after the country's entry into the European Union, its capital, Warsaw, appears prosperous and optimistic. The economy is growing and foreign firms are showing an increased interest in investment.
The city itself, almost wholly destroyed by the Nazis in revenge for the uprising of summer 1944, now boasts a multitude of fashionable shops and restaurants in the restored Old Town district around the red-brick royal castle. New glass tower blocks have risen since the end of communism to break the dreary monotony of the grey flats and offices erected in the 1950s, so familiar from the films of Andrzej Wajda and Krzysztof Kieślowski. Even the ornate Stalinist skyscraper, the Palace of Culture, long the architectural symbol of the rebuilt communist capital, has a festive look as it plays host to the annual three-day book fair, to which thousands of the city's inhabitants pour on a Saturday afternoon. Some Poles want to knock down the building, a symbol of Soviet occupation. Others, though, celebrate its idiosyncrasy, an architectural relic of bygone ideological battles.
But all is not well in a country that has had more than its share of troubles - abolished for more than a century in the tsarist and Prussian partitions of the 1790s; ravaged in the 1914-18 war and during the Bolshevik attempt to promote a European revolution in summer 1920; and, most of all, the victim of terrible suffering (which encompassed its own and much of Europe's Jewish and Roma populations) in the second world war.
The Poles have a reputation for being suspicious, spiky or, as the Economist not long ago put it, "prickly". But, like some other "prickly" peoples - the Iranians or the Serbs, for example - they have some good reasons in the history of the last century for so being.
Poland's touchiness today centres on four interrelated questions:
- the persistence of high unemployment (at roughly 17%, the highest in the European Union), and the subsequent exodus of up to 2 million Poles to western Europe since entry to the EU
- the persistent anger and outstanding sense of unrequited restitution felt against Poland's two main neighbours, Russia and Germany, for damage during the war and the Soviet period
- a widespread distrust of public institutions, particularly parliament, but also the European Union
- the unexpected arrival in power, after a confused election period in September-October 2005, of a group of rightwing populist politicians.
The political group is led by the Kaczyński brothers (Lech, the president, and Jaroslaw, the prime minister), who head Prawo i Sprawiedliwość (Law and Justice / PiS). After some months of apparently calculated caution, they are now engaged, with the support of the rightwing Catholic radio station Radio Maryja, in a widespread denigration of enemies, real and imagined. These enemies include not only the EU and foreign economic interests, but also - with various degrees of innuendo and implausible denial - feminists, Jews, homosexuals, domestic critics, anyone who makes fun of them and anyone even vaguely suspected of ties to the former communist regime.
Fred Halliday is professor of international relations at the LSE, and visiting professor at the Barcelona Institute of International Studies (IBEI). His books include Islam and the Myth of Confrontation (IB Tauris, 2003) and 100 Myths About the Middle East (Saqi, 2005).
Fred Halliday's "global politics" column on openDemocracy surveys the national histories, geopolitical currents, and dominant ideas across the world. The articles include:
"America and Arabia after Saddam"
(May 2004)
"Terrorism and world politics: conditions and prospects"
(March 2005)
"An encounter with Mr X" (March 2005)
"Iran's revolutionary spasm" (July 2005)
"Political killing in the cold war" (August 2005)
"Maxime Rodinson: in praise of a 'marginal man'"
(September 2005)
"A transnational umma: myth or reality? " (October 2005)
"The 'Barcelona process': ten years on" (November 2005)
"The United Nations vs the United States" (January 2006)
"Blasphemy and power" (February 2006)
"Iran vs the United States again" (February 2006)
"Terrorism and delusion" (April 2006)
"The forward march of women halted?"
(May 2006)
"Letter from Ground Zero" (May 2006)
"Finland's moment in the sun" (June 2006)
""A Lebanese fragment: two days with Hizbollah"(July 2006)
"In time of war: reason amid rockets"
(August 2006)
"Lebanon, Israel, and the 'greater west Asian crisis'" (August 2006)
"Fidel Castro's legacy: Cuban conversations" (August 2006)
The other Poland
Gazeta Wyborcza - the newspaper whose name (the Election Paper) reflects the events of seventeen years ago - is now the largest in Poland. Its founder-members, a small and courageous counter-elite that emerged from the Solidarity movement to launch the paper in 1989, are, in many cases, now wealthy shareholders in the project.
In a demonstration of how far the paper now represents the centre, and the national consensus, of post-communist Poland, its anniversary party was preceded by the awarding of a medal to Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Polish-born United States foreign-policy expert who headed the National Security Council during the Carter administration. In almost flawless Polish, Brzezinski recalled the country's "near miracle" of 1989 and delivered a forceful lecture on foreign policy, warning of the dangers of antagonising Russia and Germany.
Brzezinski's speech came against a background of worsening Polish relations with Moscow and Berlin. The Russians were already angered by Poland's overt support for the "orange revolution" in Ukraine before demands began to be raised for the erection of a monument opposite the Russian embassy in Warsaw to the victims of the 1940 Katyn massacre. After many years of Moscow blaming the killing (in which some 4,000 Polish officers and civilians were slain) on the Nazis, Mikhail Gorbachev conceded Russian responsibility in 1990. But the then-Soviet president's statement was not followed by a formal Soviet apology, let alone an offer of reparation. For its part, Germany has been alienated by new demands for reparation from Poland, and by hostility to German purchases of land and business in the former German territories acquired by Poland in 1945.
Brzezinski was introduced by Stefan Meller, the most recent foreign minister to resign from the PiS government. Some weeks later, all eight of Poland's post-communist foreign ministers criticised the president in an open letter after he cancelled a summit meeting with Germany and France scheduled for 3 July 2006 (Kaczyński pleaded illness, but speculation was rife that he was upset over a satirical article in a small-circulation German newspaper). The ministers' initiative was dismissed as unpatriotic and divisive.
That Poland's government has turned against the legacy of 1989 and those who won democracy for the country marks a major break in the political process. It was the imaginative slogan of the Gazeta Wyborcza editor, Adam Michnik, "The elections for us, the presidency for them", which broke the deadlock in the 1989 negotiations with the government. That breakthrough led not just to the free elections in Poland but - In the cascade of democratic transitions that followed - to the end of communism in east-central Europe and, two years later, to the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself.
Today Michnik and his colleagues are unsure where Poland is going. Rumour and denunciations dominate public discussion: as one of the editors of Gazeta Wyborcza put it, "The situation here is awful." The right-wing media attack them for their foreign links, and for having Jewish share-holders. While even former communists now acknowledge its role, the Solidarity movement that inspired strikes among the Danzig workers in the 1970s and 1980s has long dissolved. Its leader, Lech Walesa, was president for a time, but failed to retain authority.
One of the main rightwing accusations is that whereas in other east-central European countries, such as (the now former) Czechoslovakia or Hungary, there was a purge of state and security officials after the end of communism, and the drawing of a line under the past; in Poland, because of the nature of the 1989 transition, this did not occur. Now, amid a welter of charges and counter-charges - which, inter alia, forced the resignation of Zyta Gilowska, finance minister in the new government - even those who oppose communism are under attack. The government is preparing to place on trial General Wojciech Jaruzelski, the man who introduced martial law in 1981 and was the first president after the end of communist rule.
Michnik and his associates were imprisoned in the 1980s under martial law, but after the negotiations of 1989 he got to meet and know his former persecutor. Michnik is convinced that Jaruzelski acted out of a sense of patriotism and duty to Poland, believing - as is highly plausible - that if had he not imposed martial law to suppress Solidarity, the Russians would have invaded, with great loss of life.
Michnik's colleague and co-editor Helena Luczywo is vivid in retailing the tensions of those days, and of the determination of members of Solidarity to fight the Red Army if it intervened in Poland. There was even a danger of armed opposition to the imposition of martial law, something wiser heads within the movement prevented. In an observation that has wide relevance to many other conflicts in the world, and which is too often ignored in the name of radical nationalist and revolutionary rectitude, she remarks: "Violence is easy. It is non-violence which is difficult."
A new-old wind
The rivals whom Gazeta Wyborcza confronts are of a different character altogether and have, to some degree, come upon them by surprise, if not stealth. In the 2005 elections, the former governing social-democrats, the Sojusz Lewicy Demokratycznej (Democratic Left Alliance / SLD), saw its vote fall from 41% to 11%. The majority of votes were won by two parties that were generally expected to form a new centre-right coalition, the liberal Platforma Obywatelska (Civic Platform / PO), which gained 24% of the votes, and the PiS, which won 27%. This would have assured an element of continuity not only in the political character of Poland, but in economy policy at home and dealings with the EU and neighbouring countries abroad.
However, for reasons that were never entirely clear, negotiations between the two main parties broke down. Instead, PiS, under the hitherto little-known Kaczyński brothers, entered into a rightwing coalition with two small parties: the populist Samoobrona (Self-Defence), a descendant of an overtly anti-semitic party of the 1930s - which specialised in purging Jews from educational and intellectual life - and the Catholic, far-right Liga Polskich Rodzin (League of Polish Families / LPR).
Since coming to power, this coalition has altered the tone of Polish politics. Criticism of the EU has increased and, within its institutions, Poland has already acquired a reputation for conservative obstruction. Poland is opposing the voting system proposed in the draft constitution, resisting transnational investment, hinting at support for restoration of the death penalty (forbidden under EU law), flaunting its anti-feminism by opposing abortion and abolishing the ministry for women, as well as tolerating (when not fomenting) prejudice against Jews, gays and foreigners. Indeed within the governing bodies of the EU, Poland has now acquired the position once occupied by Greece: being the most obstructive member.
Kaczyński was in Brussels on 30 August, however, on a visit which Polish officials said was meant to improve the country's negative image within the EU. He met with European Commission president José Manuel Barroso, who later said he was reassured that Poland was not planning to seek reinstatement of the death penalty.
All of the controversy speaks to the attractions of a populist and at times xenophobic orientation in a Poland troubled by European entry and with a large, inefficient and vulnerable peasant sector. The new political elite around the PiS are not so much determined in their nationalism and illiberal campaigns as insouciant - or indeed ignorant - regarding the outside world and the values of the international bodies to which Poland belongs. Like their populist counterparts elsewhere, the Kaczyński brothers are introverted, religious, unashamed about exploiting popular fears and, given their positions, dangerous.
The triumph of peasant populism also points to the longer-run damage wrought on Poland by the person whom many Poles regard as their saviour, the late Pope John Paul II: it is his influence that did so much to revive the authority of Catholicism in Poland and to give it the rigid, illiberal character it has today. It is his influence, too, that accounts for the appalling policies of the Vatican in regard to the prevention of the spread of Aids and other global health issues where the use of simple forms of contraception could save so many lives.
It was against this background that I proposed to the audience attending a seminar on Islam in Europe that the greatest oppressor of women - and indeed one of the greatest criminals of our age - was none other than their beloved pope. The audience was duly shocked, with one participant suggesting that I should be imprisoned for such remarks. Later, in a break between sessions, a middle-aged woman translator told me that when I expressed this view, all the Poles in the translators' box had applauded.
In the words of Heinrich Heine, written in a poem to support the Polish nationalist uprising of 1830, "Polen ist noch nicht verloren!" - "Poland is not yet lost!" So it would appear.
