A Cold War legacy of student politics and anti-communism: the contingency of Poland’s illiberal turn

ABSTRACT

This article offers a historical reflection on the roots of the populist-driven “illiberal turn” in Poland. Acknowledging the backsliding of recent years as the result of political contingency and the agency of a critical mass of disruptive political actors on the Right, the article argues that the “illiberal turn” was precipitated by the interplay of three historical factors, such as dynamics of Cold War era student politics, the demise of communism in 1989 with its echoes in the subsequent decades, and the implosion of the strong post-communist Centre-Left in the mid-2000s. These processes have ensured that Poland’s political trajectory has been more sui generis than understood through the general prism of the rise of populism and that it is more the result of an entrenched political class whose worldviews have been forged by the anticommunism of the 1980s and its legacy.

KEYWORDS:

• Poland
• student politics
• communism
• post-communism
• populism
• illiberalism
• anti-communism
• social democracy

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 846018.

Disclosure statements

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the HORIZON EUROPE Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions [846018].

Notes on contributors

Tom Junes

Tom Junes is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences and a former Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence. He holds a Ph.D. from the KU Leuven (Belgium) and as a postdoctoral researcher he has held fellowships in Poland, Austria, Hungary, Finland, Germany, Bulgaria, and Italy. His research interests cover Eastern European history and politics, Cold War history, the history of student movements, and the history of the Polish Left.