Nationalism and political competition in Central Europe: the case of Poland

Abstract

To explain nationalist politics in Poland, researchers and observers have sometimes speculated about the dispositions of the electorate, popular sentiments, public fears for the loss of sovereignty, the people's historically ingrained preference for nationalist rhetoric, and their feelings of discontent about the economy. This article argues that hypotheses about the existence of nationalist sentiments within the electorate have tended to eclipse an important question about the main producers of nationalist rhetoric: Why do certain mainstream parties at certain points in time decide to frame their program as nationalist, even when there is no objective reality that seems conducive to the creation of great public concern about typically nationalist issues? This article explores this question by looking at various campaigns for Polish parliamentary elections since 1997. My argument is that when seeking to explain the motivations behind major campaign turns toward nationalism we should not merely understand them as responses to voter sentiment and voting behavior. Instead, we should see them as crucially driven by the transactional logic of inter-party competition in a party system that is in constant flux.

Keywords:

• Poland
• nationalist politics
• party competition

Notes

For more analysis of how in Polish politics contestations of the European Union have, to some extent, been driven by strategic considerations related to inter-party competition, see Vermeersch (2010).

Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński was the primate of the Polish Catholic Church during communist times. His “theology of the nation” was a public creed that placed nationhood at the very center of Polish Catholicism. To create a mass movement, Wyszyński devised the Great Novena of the Millennium, a nine-year program of moral and religious rejuvenation that preceded the Polish millennium celebrations of 1966 (Paczkowski 2003, 307). Wyszyński was soon considered the “guardian of Polishness” (Walaszek 1986, 131), a man who did not believe in intellectual Catholicism or in the modernizing forces of the Second Vatican Council but in “the Church of the masses, the rural Church, rooted in the traditional world of paternalism and particularism” (Michnik 1993, 14). The mobilizing activities surrounding the millennium celebrations created an explicit link between loyalty to the nation and loyalty to the Catholic faith, or more precisely to a faith that reserved a large place for the old and rich Polish tradition of devotion to Mary. Political and theological as well as folk perceptions of the meaning of the Virgin Mary for Polish history had made the figure into a resonating and multi-interpretable symbol of national affiliation (Lewandowski 1982, Porter 2005). For the atheistic communists, the consequences of this religious invocation were far-reaching. The Church's claims to represent the Polish nation proved far more powerful than those of the communists, and the connection between anti-communism, Polishness, and Catholicism increasingly became a matter of course. The Church now truly began to function as “a haven for the political opposition and a beacon of moral inspiration” (Millard 1999, 124). Communism, on the other hand, was increasingly associated with national disloyalty. As Borowik summed up the matter, a “good” Pole was a Catholic patriot; a “bad” one was a communist (2002, 239).

The Karta Polaka (Pole's Charter) offers transborder Poles entry privileges, such as refunds on Schengen visas and access to Polish schools and an automatic permission to do business in Poland.

In December 2002, Lew Rywin, a film producer, had approached the company Agora, the publisher of Poland's liberal newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, and, suggesting that he represented people well-placed in government, requested a bribe in return for pushing through adjustments in a draft bill on electronic media that would be favorable to the publisher.

Miller was accused of having arranged, in 2002, the dismissal of the chief executive of the oil refiner and petroleum retailer Polski Koncern Naftowy Orlen, one of Poland's largest companies. According to a former state treasury minister in the government, Miller had sought to replace the dismissed CEO with someone favorable to the government.

As Zubrzycki (2006) has pointed out very clearly, what is seemingly a matter of ethnic Polishness is in Poland often understood or reframed as a matter of political choice. Not only is there a long tradition of considering the Polish Jews outsiders and even enemies of the nation (this anti-Semitism was arguably strongly empowered by the writings and political activities in the 1920s and 1930s of Roman Dmowski, who had constructed the idea of the Polak-Katolik, a hyphenated designation that served to convey the inseparability of religious orientation and national belonging), there has also been a tradition, of sorts, to deem certain Poles as un-Polish (and thus “Jews”) not because of their religious or ethnic background but simply because of their political allegiances and ideological positions.