Consolidating Democracy In Poland

Raymond Taras

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429719554
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A comprehensive analysis of politics in a young European democracy, this book describes the principal features of Poland's democratic system-the political institutions, parties, elections, and leaders that have shaped the transition from communism. Raymond Taras examines the complex Walesa phenomenon; the comeback of the communists; and the uneasy

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Historic Discontinuities: Dynasties, Republics, Partitions

Early in the nineteenth century, the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin remarked that the history of Poland was and ought to be a disaster. In 1939, Russia’s Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov contemptuously referred to Poland as the bastard offspring of the Versailles Treaty. Both observations came at a time when Poland had been dismantled as an independent state. After Pushkin’s death, Poland was not to reappear on the map of Europe until 1918. Polish historians today debate whether the country did not also disappear from the political map of Europe during the Soviet-imposed communist period.

A nation’s history does not end when it has lost its statehood and independence. Historical revindications often serve as a powerful force of national mobilization in contemporary movements. The cynical eighteenth-century partitions of Poland, just like the forcible mid-twentieth-century incorporation of Poland into the Soviet political bloc, remain points of reference for many Poles and color their world outlook.

Relations with Russia and attitudes toward socialism have certainly affected Poland’s political development in this century, but the nation’s efforts at establishing constitutional rule, checking the power of its leaders, and reacting to foreign threats also need to be examined if we are to make sense of the character of the postwar communism regime, its prolonged crisis and sudden collapse, and the system that came to take its place—the so-called Third Republic. Before examining the Phase I antecedent communist regime, this chapter sets out to describe the many other regimes—monarchies, republics, and foreign occupations—that Poland has experienced in its long history.

Dynastic Poland

The Polish language belongs to the western group of Slavic languages that includes Czech and Slovak. Poles form part of an even wider Slavic world that encompasses an eastern linguistic group—composed of Russian, Belarus, and Ukrainian—and a southern group—Serbo-Croatian, Slovene, and Bulgarian. Much historical evidence suggests that the original home of all the Slavs was territory that came to be ruled by Polish kings between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries.

The ancestors of the Poles were drawn from such different ethnographic groups as the Polanie (literally, “dwellers of the plain”), Pomeranians (“coast dwellers”), Mazovians, and Silesians. The conditions initially promoting physical security for these tribes also retarded the establishment of a unified state. As the historian Oskar Halecki writes, “Dwelling in the center of the Slav world, removed from the routes of the great migrations and even from the great trade routes, the tribes which were to form the Polish nation only experienced later the grave difficulties and dangers that beset their neighbors.”¹ But when the Germanic danger became acute, the various tribes accepted the leadership of the Polanie, and this name was soon employed to designate all of these groups. Relative security together with the geographical dispersion of the tribes delayed the founding of a Polish state until the second half of the tenth century—about a century after Slavic states had emerged in Carinthia (in what is now Austria), Moravia, Kievan Rus, and Bulgaria.

Polish history is generally considered to have begun in 966, the year Mieszko I of the Piast dynasty converted to Christianity and became the nation’s first king. External relations during Mieszko’s twenty-six-year reign—he died in 992—prefigured much of Polish history. His conversion was designed to strengthen Poland’s alliance with Bohemia in the face of a Germanic threat, yet it was a Rus invasion in 981 that stripped the country of much of its land. Mieszko then turned to the Apostolic See for protection and obtained its recognition of Poland as an independent church province and separate kingdom. But it was his son Bolesław Chrobry (967–1025) who did most to consolidate Piast rule over the Polish tribes, symbolized in his coronation on Easter Day 1025. Accordingly, Poland’s first chronicler, Gallus Anonymus, described Bolesław as “the father of these lands, defender, lord.”²

The last ruler of the Piast dynasty, Kazimierz the Great (1310–1370), helped usher in Poland’s Golden Age. Kazimierz’s achievements included the establishment of Central Europe’s second university in Kraków in 1364 (a university had been established in Prague in 1348), the first codification of Polish law, the promotion of trade and commerce between Polish cities, the settlement of previously uninhabited regions, increased protection for oppressed peoples (such as Jews fleeing persecution in Western Europe and peasants threatened with famine), the construction of fortified castles along Polish borders, and the creation of a permanent force of mercenaries to defend these borders. Kazimierz also confronted the Order of the Teutonic Knights at the height of its power and was able to conclude a favorable peace treaty that restored Pomerania to Poland and gave the country access to the Baltic Sea. The Polish saying that Kazimierz inherited a Poland built of wood and bequeathed to posterity a Poland made of stone is more than just figuratively true.

After Kazimierz’s death, the crown of the Piasts was offered to the Hungarian dynasty. A twelve-year-old Hungarian princess, Jadwiga, was given in marriage to the favorite of the Polish nobility, Jagiełło, Grand Duke of Lithuania. This union was profoundly to shape the subsequent political development of the Polish state. The creation of the Polish-Lithuanian union transformed the ethnically homogeneous state of the Piasts into a multinational one. The political union created new frontiers that extended from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Large populations of Ukrainians and Belarus were incorporated into the state. The structure of power within the new kingdom was also dramatically changed. Just as Jagiełło had been chosen by the nobility, so in future the Polish throne was to be subject to elective confirmation by this class. In 1386 Jagiełło was formally elected king, baptized into Catholicism, married to the initially disconsolate Jadwiga, and given an elaborate coronation ceremony. The dynastic transfer consummated in that year produced major territorial, ethnic, and structural shifts in the Polish state. It also made possible one of the most glorious military victories in Polish and Lithuanian history—the final defeat of the Teutonic Order at the battle of Grunwald in 1410.

In the second half of the fifteenth century, Poland’s internal politics shifted toward a type of democracy exercised by and for the nobility. At this time, regional assemblies (sejmiki) began to assert influence in central affairs, thereby increasing gentry encroachment on the power of the wealthy magnates. Although the nobility, or szlachta, had generally accepted the legal equality of everyone in its ranks regardless of individual wealth or power, this did not preclude political conflict between groups within this class. By 1493 the Sejm (or national parliament) had been divided into an upper chamber, or Senate, consisting of bishops and high-ranking magnates and a lower Chamber of Deputies representing the lesser gentry. This latter group made up close to 10 percent of the population and represented the largest enfranchised class in Europe (compared with 2 percent enfranchised in Russia and 1 percent in France). The Chamber also included token representation for the burgher class, drawn exclusively from Kraków. Conflict between the two chambers and the strata they represented became a regular feature of Polish politics.

The Polish nobility was a remarkably heterogeneous class at this time. As one Polish historian observed, “In it were the great lords, holders of the highest positions in the state, owners of substantial landed estates, possessors of considerable wealth…. At the other end of the spectrum were the poor gentry, descendants of medieval knights, warriors or courtiers, entitled to noble rank and privileges but frequently possessing little or no land.”³ Members of the first group, the magnates, disposed of exceptional power as a result of wealth and office. Accordingly, they “acted as the focus of political activity, as the center around which factions formed; they were the bridges between the central government and the provincial nobility…. In many spheres of activity they simply replaced the functions of the royal court and the central government.”⁴ Not surprisingly, the monarchy often sought out the lower nobility as allies to check the power of the magnates, but the royal pursuit of absolutum dominium was irreconcilable with the self-interest of the szlachta.

In the mid-fifteenth century, the country’s ruling gentry became conscious of Poland’s role as antemurale christianitatis—Roman Catholicism’s easternmost bulwark. Over the next centuries, this Polish version of manifest destiny or mission came to be interpreted in secular, political terms. Poland was viewed as the outpost of European civilization beyond which Russian and Asiatic culture began. As a country at the crossroads of Western and Eastern civilizations, Poland had to face threats both from the Teutonic Order and from the Mongols, Tatars, and Turks to the east. A philosophy emerged that became known as Sarmatianism. This name was derived from the ancient tribe that had lived on the banks of the Dneister River seven centuries before Christ. Jan Długosz, a historian of Poland writing in the fifteenth century, made this myth more credible as he described how these inhabitants of proto-Slavonic lands had conquered local tribes and come to be the ruling elite. The Sarmatian ideology claimed a special mission for Poland—a shield protecting Christianity from paganism. The crowning glory of this historic mission occurred in 1683, when King Jan Sobieski defeated the Turkish armies outside of Vienna, thereby saving Christian Europe from Islam.

The gentry in the Commonwealth of Poland invoked its supposed Sarmatian origins in assuming all the obligations associated with Poland’s manifest destiny. The Sarmatian was a heroic knight and a defender of the faith and the fatherland. The myth of the szlachta’s common ancestry contributed to the integration of otherwise diverse ranks of the nobility and made other differentiating factors such as language spoken, religion practiced, or wealth accumulated less important. Furthermore, the Sarmatian myth promoted cultural homogeneity within the Commonwealth and led to widespread Polonization of the gentry of Lithuania and Ruthenia (Ukraine).

Two largely unintended consequences followed from the Sarmatian myth. First, Polish burghers and peasants were not treated as integral parts of the nation because their ancestry was considered different. As with Athenian democracy, the exclusion of certain people from the community and the denial to them of political rights were not seen as in contradiction with the notion of democracy. So long as all noblemen enjoyed equal privileges and responsibilities, the crucial test of szlachta democracy was passed. But not utilizing common ethnicity as the basis for nationhood was eventually to produce mixed foci of identity, divided loyalties, and political tensions within the Polish state.

The second by-product of Sarmatianism was, paradoxically, the ‘“easternization’ of Polish national consciousness,” as the historian Andrzej Walicki has contended. Collaboration between the Polish elite and the Polonized elites of Lithuania and Ukraine was pursued at the expense of contacts with the West. Moreover, according to Walicki,

The Sarmatian ideology developed the concept of a cultural uniqueness of “Sarmatia,” its fundamental difference from everything Western. The traditional view of Poland as the “bulwark of Christianity” ceased to be identical with perceiving Poland as a part and parcel of the West. On the contrary: the ideologists of Sarmatianism constantly warned their compatriots against Western royalism and moral corruption.⁵

Whereas republicanism seemed to locate Poland squarely in the Western European tradition, Sarmatianism pulled the country in the opposite direction. These countervailing tendencies have marked Polish society through to the present century.

Up to the time of the partitions in the late eighteenth century, Poland remained a kingdom, which would appear to be at odds with the idea of republican government. But the king’s role was severely constricted by the powers held by the gentry, and in some ways he was limited to functions not unlike those performed by a modern ceremonial head of state. The Polish nobility was convinced of the superiority of its democratic, representative, republican-style system, and the country became identified with szlachta democracy rather than monarchy. And despite the antemurale christianitatis myth, this form of democratic order also limited the influence of the Catholic church in state matters. As one scholar put it, “Szlachta democracy of the federalist republic of nobles frustrated both centralized absolutism and the identification of church and state. Early modern Poland became a haven for dissenting faiths fleeing generalized religious warfare in Europe.”⁶

When compared with some of the absolutist, monarchical, and theocratic systems found elsewhere in Europe at the time, Poland’s political system seemed exceptional indeed. The Latin term res publica (in Polish, rzeczpospolita) was used by nobles to indicate this political system’s direct descent from the Roman Republic, much in the way that Thomas Jefferson associated fledgling American democracy with Roman origins.

The historic controversy over the Sarmatian myth and the notion of antemurale christianitatis has a contemporary resonance. Poland’s postcommunist political and intellectual leaders have been engaged in a debate about what the country’s status in Europe should be. Although they couch it in different language, advocates of Poland’s speedy admission into organizations such as the European Union (EU) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) have in mind Poland’s role as a bulwark of Western civilization against the less civilized East. Those who advocate regional cooperation and integration stress common Slavic bonds—though few leaders in Poland today would go so far as to advocate some form of pan-Slavism. In urging Poland to rely on traditional Central European alliance structures the regionalists are, consciously or not, returning to central elements of Sarmatian ideology.

In light of Poland’s mixed success so far in becoming a full participant in European politics, the controversy over Sarmatianism has intensified. The historian Janusz Tazbir, for example, asks rhetorically how long the West expects Poles to continue to serve as an eastern bulwark of Western civilization. He questions whether Western Europe ever treated Poland as a full-fledged European country.⁷ He notes that in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries Polish kings eagerly waged wars against the Turks and in the seventeenth century Poland drove back successive invasions by Turks and Tatars. Yet the only recognition of these historic exploits by an ungrateful and cynical Western Europe was peripheral status providing little real satisfaction to Polish leaders.

Poles’ sense of marginalization from Europe increased with the final partition of the country and, later, the failure of the 1831 insurrection. Many were especially bitter toward France for lack of tangible support and considered French foreign policy shortsighted. Some expected France to be revisited soon by the “Cossacks”—pejorative for Russians—as had occurred in 1815, when Alexander I paraded down the Champs Elysée in triumph after his victories over Napoleon. Predictably, the negative heroine of the Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz’s Books of the Polish Nation and Polish Pilgrimage (Księgach narodu polskiego i pielgrzymstwa polskiego)—sometimes branded as a sourcebook for xenophobia—was not Russia but France.

According to Tazbir, the Wesťs indifference to Polanďs fate continued into the twentieth century. Pleas directed toward Franc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Approaches to Democratization
• 1 Historic Discontinuities: Dynasties, Republics, Partitions
• 2 The Functioning of the Communist Regime
• 3 Crises of the Communist System
• 4 Coalition Formation and Crisis Resolution
• 5 Democratic Structures of the Third Republic
• 6 Socioeconomic Development, Foreign Policy, and the International Political Economy
• Selected Bibliography
• About the Book and Author
• Index