The Many Faces of Tolerance

Attitudes toward Diversity in Poland

Ewa A. Golebiowska

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136693953
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book presents a systematic account on Poles' attitudes toward ethnic, religious, political, and sexual minorities. It investigates Poland's reputation as an intolerant, anti-Semitic, and homophobic country. Counter to a simplistic image of Poland as a hotbed of intolerance, the book shows that Polish intolerance has many faces. For one thing, Poles' attitudes toward diversity vary from one group to another. For another, the extent to which Poles' attitudes are more or less negative depends on the right or activity they are asked to support and who the respondents happen to be. The book is the most comprehensive and empirically sophisticated synthesis of Poles' attitudes toward diversity to date. Previous research tends to describe Poles' attitudes toward a single minority at a time and only examines subgroup differences in their thinking about diversity.

The Many Faces of Tolerance is a multi-faceted analysis of Poles' sentiments toward historically and currently discriminated against groups that assesses Poles' acceptance of different minorities and authoritatively analyzes its sources. As part of this endeavor, the book develops a ranking of influences on Poles' tolerance, undertakes a forecasting of future changes in tolerance in Poland, and proposes practical strategies to ameliorate existing intolerance.

1
Introduction

Poland—an almost uniformly Catholic and ethnically Polish country, which experienced a lengthy period of authoritarian rule in the post-WWII period has a reputation for being intolerant, anti-Semitic, and homophobic. For better or worse, this reputation is an important part of Poland’s country stereotype. Like all stereotypes, country stereotypes can be conceptualized as generalized beliefs that contain at least a kernel of truth (so one theory goes). Be that as it may, even if the stereotype is somewhat accurate in this case, this alone tells us little about the climate of tolerance and intolerance faced by minority groups and individuals in present-day Poland.

My principal goal in this book is to confront the stereotype of Polish intolerance with the reality of attitudes captured in nationally representative public opinion surveys and thereby systematically shed light on the attitudes of Poles toward several political minorities. In addition to describing Polish attitudes and outlining some changes that may have taken place in those attitudes over time since Poland’s democratization began, I also investigate the etiology of tolerance in different domains in order to draw broad conclusions about the dynamics of tolerance in contemporary Poland. To these ends, this book relates the results of my systematic examination of Polish attitudes toward national, ethnic, and religious minorities, women, political dissenters, and gays and lesbians.¹ Women are included in this investigation because, even though they are a numerical majority in Poland, they nonetheless constitute a political minority in both elective and appointive office.

For a variety of reasons, the question of the scope of these groups’ rights and liberties did not arise under the communist regime. In the interest of promoting ethnic homogeneity, national and ethnic minorities in communist Poland were generally not allowed to engage in activities and practices that fostered or promoted their identity. The Catholic Church was the only religious organization allowed to register with the state. The state’s official ideology embraced the abstract precept of gender equality, even though women did not in practice enjoy the same access to political power as men did. Because the authoritarian state suppressed all political dissent, the rights of groups on the fringes of the political mainstream were a non-issue. And, while homosexuality was not criminalized, the subject was taboo and the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered (LGBT) Poles were not politicized. In democratic Poland, in contrast, the parameters of all these groups’ rights and liberties have provided fodder for heated debate within government and society that has ultimately led to myriad institutional changes protecting the legal status of many groups.

My in-depth analysis of tolerance in one particular recent entrant to democratic governance goes beyond the conclusions of multi-country studies of tolerance, which have given short shrift to the nuances of tolerance in individual countries. It also goes beyond previous research by offering a multi-faceted synthesis of Polish sentiments toward several groups that have been discriminated against historically and, in some cases, still continue to be discriminated against now. My approach results in a more comprehensive assessment of the attitudinal milieu in which minority groups function in contemporary Poland. Finally, this book extends previous research by systematically modeling the causal structure of these sentiments. Previous researchers who have studied tolerance in democratic Poland have tended to limit their attention to subgroup differences in Polish tolerance and have primarily focused on socio-demographic differences in Polish views. Building on their research, I consider a more comprehensive set of predictors of tolerance and, most importantly, analyze the relative significance of each hypothesized influence in the context of multivariate analysis.

I model the influences on Polish attitudes largely on the basis of previous research on political tolerance in the United States, adapting my expectations about these influences on Polish tolerance to the specificity of the Polish environment. In this context, I inspect the links between Polish tolerance of the above-mentioned minorities and Poles’ socio-demographic (e.g., education), political (e.g., political interest), and psychological (e.g., authoritarianism) attributes, economic and political perceptions (e.g., respondents’ satisfaction with their finances), and intergroup contact (e.g., whether they know someone who is gay or lesbian). I conclude the book with a synthesis of my findings, an extensive discussion of their political implications and significance for the continuing well-being of Polish democracy, and an identification of unanswered questions for future research.

Institutional and Attitudinal Environment of Minority Rights

The groups on which I focus in this book have come a long way toward achieving legal equality in the over twenty years since Poland’s democratic revolution was set in motion—a point on which I elaborate in the background section of each chapter, which explores the case of each respective group. The rights of these groups have been greatly advanced by means of constitutional guarantees, statutory instruments, and Poland’s participation in international treaties. The institutional changes reflected in the guarantees of rights provided by Poland’s constitution, its statutes, and the international treaties to which it has been a signatory are one important gauge of the environment in which minority groups function in contemporary Poland. As I demonstrate in Chapters 3 through 6, the status of most of Poland’s minority groups is, by this measure, now relatively secure. Yet, while ample institutional safeguards are in place to provide equal treatment under the law for most of the groups on which I focus, other groups have yet to achieve full legal, political, social, and economic equality, a point to which I return in more detail in the remaining chapters.

The attitudes of ordinary people are, in any case, more resistant to change than the laws. Any comprehensive depiction of the climate of tolerance in democratic societies like Poland, therefore, needs to encompass not only assessments of institutional safeguards of minority rights but also parallel investigations of the “hearts and minds” of citizens, or their sentiments toward historically and currently discriminated-against groups. In the rapidly evolving institutional milieus of the sort that characterizes the period since the outset of Poland’s democratic transition, it is especially important to examine such attitudes because they may dictate far more frequently than the laws the actual degree of tolerance with which members of minority groups will meet. These examinations must include attention to the sources of the differences in the tolerance of outgroups because efforts to increase tolerance must be rooted in a solid understanding of its etiology to be successful. In short, against the backdrop of the many salutary institutional changes that have occurred in democratic Poland, it is important to analyze the actual sentiments of the Polish people toward minority groups.

Behavioral Intolerance in Contemporary Poland

The need to study Polish attitudes toward minority groups is also validated by the vast number of hate-driven incidents targeting minority group members or their symbolic representations (e.g., their places of worship or monuments commemorating their heroes) that have taken place in post-communist Poland. Polish non-governmental organizations (NGOs), including Never Again (Nigdy Więcej), Open Republic (Otwarta Rzeczpospolita), and Campaign against Homophobia (Kampania Przeciw Homofobi), have been monitoring bigoted activity in post-communist Poland and designing activities to prevent and combat it. Regrettably, their reports have identified a large number of anti-Semitic, xenophobic, fascist, racist, and homophobic incidents in every year under examination.

The work of these organizations demonstrates that incidents of vandalism targeting the property of minority groups have been common in democratic Poland. Most frequently, they have involved desecration of Jewish cemeteries, synagogues, and monuments.² For example, over a period of about two months in 2010, six incidents of vandalism of Jewish cemeteries took place in different locations in Poland. In an especially despicable act, the monument commemorating the wartime killing of Polish Jews by their neighbors in Jedwabne, documented in a controversial historical essay by Jan Tomasz Gross,³ was vandalized in August 2011 by perpetrators who have evaded capture. Anti-Semitic, racist, xenophobic, and homophobic chants and displays in soccer stadiums throughout the country are rampant. A scholar affiliated with Never Again estimates that at least several dozen such incidents take place in Polish stadiums every year.⁴ Hatemongering on the basis of ethnicity, race, religion, and sexual orientation is also pervasive on the Polish Internet and is a core component of lively extreme-right wing activity. In a somewhat surprising instance of intolerance, at least as it pertains to Americans, who are otherwise one of the most-liked national groups in Poland, the commissioner of human rights (Rzecznik Praw Obywatelskich) has recently been asked to investigate the case of a resort in south-eastern Poland advertising on its web site that it “does not provide any service to guests from the United States and Israel.”⁵

Monitoring efforts also demonstrate that hate crimes directed at LGBT Poles, and sometimes heterosexuals presumed to be gay or lesbian, are an especially tenacious problem in contemporary Poland.⁶ Polish LGBT individuals are frequently victims of verbal taunts, threats, blackmail, bullying, physical violence, and, in some cases, sexual violence.⁷ Verbal assaults on LGBT people are common in politics too. A city council member in a town called Tomaszów Mazowiecki, for example, publicly argued that a local lesbian reporter running for office had no chance whatsoever of getting elected because of her homosexuality. Additionally, he injected sexism into his rhetoric as well when attacking the reporter’s stand on gender parity legislation by proposing that she should think with “her head, not ovaries.”⁸ Another politician criticized an art exhibit at Poland’s National Museum because it was going to include homo-erotic art. In a letter of protest to the museum’s director, the politician “compared gays to necrophiles, pedophiles, and zoophiles” and described homosexuality as a “deviance, sexual perversion, and aberrance.”⁹ Most recently, in the context of the Polish Parliament’s consideration of proposed domestic partnership legislation, right-wing politicians in the Sejm, the lower chamber of Polish Parliament, launched an unabashed crusade against homosexuality and any laws that might confer equal rights on Poland’s LGBT individuals (more on this in Chapter 6).

In a different twist on the same theme, traditional gender stereotypes have played a visible role in Polish politics, most recently and vividly in the parliamentary debate on gender parity legislation. Proposed gender parity would have mandated equal access for women and men to the electoral lists of political parties, an essential precondition of electability. As I discuss in Chapter 5, a watered-down version of the proposal, gender quota legislation, was recently implemented instead. The initial introduction of the parity legislation bill by the Women’s Congress, an organization devoted to monitoring and improving the status of women in Poland, triggered an avalanche of jokes about the proposal’s anticipated consequences, such as the suggestion by some male politicians that as a result of the passage of the proposal, women would have to ride tractors and men would have to breastfeed.¹⁰ Displaying a commonly-held attitude about traditional gender roles, a member of Parliament from the center-right Civic Platform (CP) party (Platforma Obywatelska) bluntly explained his opposition to allowing women equal access to elective office by opining that “a woman’s natural role is taking care of the home and a man’s to earn money to support the home.”¹¹ Another Member of Parliament responded to pressure from the Women’s Congress by dismissively describing their arguments as “charming.” A Civic Platform leader, finally, rationalized his opposition to the parity legislation by arguing that it would be humiliating to women because it would show that they could not make it on their own in politics.¹²

On a related note, negative sentiments toward minorities have been exploited in Polish elections to promote or impede an individual’s or a group’s access to political power. Much evidence exists that ethnic prejudice and homophobia in particular have been used as a political card in Polish elections in the post-communist period.¹³ Rumors about a candidate’s ethnicity, typically “by nomination”—that is, by asserting that a candidate secretly belongs to some minority group with which he or she has never disclosed any actual affiliation—have been the principal vehicle through which ethnic prejudice has been unleashed in Polish electoral campaigns. Regardless of their actual ethnicity, targets of this ploy have most commonly been “nominated” as Jewish or accused of hiding their ethnic identity. The latter allegation, in turn, has been typically interpreted as tantamount to hiding their Jewishness.¹⁴ Factually incorrect rumors about political enemies are of course a time-worn aspect of politics, whether in Poland or elsewhere. However, factually inaccurate campaign rhetoric that unleashes racial, ethnic, religious, or other group-based prejudices is most insidious because it contravenes the principle of equality irrespective of one’s group membership.¹⁵ I discuss the electoral uses of ethnic baiting in Polish campaigns further in Chapters 2 and 7.

Finally, even though hatemongering on the basis of race or ethnicity is prohibited under the law—a point on which I elaborate in subsequent chapters—it has rarely been prosecuted with any zeal by the country’s prosecutors and courts, even when the perpetrators have been known.¹⁶ For example, in a fairly typical decision, a regional court in Wrocław, a city in western Poland, dismissed the charges against four members of the extreme right-wing organization National Rebirth of Poland, which was accused of inflaming racial hatred. Th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Theoretical Framework and Analytical Strategy
• 3 Ethnic and Religious Tolerance
• 4 Attitudes toward Women in Public Life and Politics
• 5 Tolerance of Political Dissenters
• 6 Attitudes toward Gay and Lesbian Rights
• 7 Summary and Conclusions
• References
• Index