I've posted recently about Vladimir Putin's article in June on the Second World War, which focuses heavily on Poland's positions from the Munich Agreement of September 1938 that set up the German seizure of Czechoslovakia (which Poland taking a piece) to the weeks just after the German invasion of Poland a year later.
This is a part of a longer series of disputes between Poland and Russia in which the history of the Second World War have become a propaganda club on both sides.
Andrzej Duda was recently narrowly re-elected as Polish President. (Cornelius Hirsch, Poland’s presidential election — by the numbers Politico EU 07/15/2020) Duda is part of the ruling right-populist Law and Justice (PiS), with his support coming largely from rural areas and older voters, which have born the brunt of the downsides of Poland's post-1989 development, which has included more robust growth than countries like Bulgaria and Romania. The election had a 68% participation rate, high for Poland. (Jan Opielka, Polen: Kaczyński vor dem Durchmarsch? Blätter 8:2020)
PiS is clearly a hard right party with an ethno-nationalist inclination, and in this election they focused on using xenophobic rhetoric to compete for votes that might go to smaller rightwing parties. However, PiS also uses economic populist positions. Duda's opponent was Warsaw Mayor Rafał Trzaskowski of the Civic Platform (PO) party. Trzaskowski is a "liberal-conservative," a category that is not used in American politics. That means he supports liberal democracy and the rule of law but tends toward free-market fundamentalism in economics. PiS made a big issue in the elections out of problems in Warsaw transportation that they blamed on privatization of public services, which Trzaskowski supports, and even blamed German investors for being part of the problems.
The head of the PiS, Jarosław Kaczyński, is widely assumed to be calling the shots for the party and government policy. Poland is currently regarded as second to Hungary within the EU in moving away from liberal democracy and the rule of law, restricting press freedom and attacking by a clerical-conservative brand of politics. As reports, "Since the right-wing PiS party came to power in 2015, press freedom in Poland has deteriorated massively." (Nina Horaczek, Hoffnungslose Nachbarn Falter 28.07.2020) The 2020 Presidential campaign also featured the strongly anti-feminist, anti-LGBTQ themes of the PiS. And they are being taken seriously: Istanbul Convention: Poland to leave European treaty on violence against women BBC News 07/25/2020.
Duda first took office as President in 2015 in a surprise election victory and PiS took a majority of the seats in the parliamentary election later that year. despite winning only 38% of the popular vote. It was the first time since 1989 that a single party controlled the government without the need of a coalition partner. Along with them, the PiS brought a version of their preferred national historical narrative which they have been asserting ever since. As Jan Darasz explains:
The PiS government came to power in 2015 with a mission. This was to overturn the so-called [post-1989] Third Republic, the political and social order shaped by what it regards as a metropolitan, liberal elite that has foisted a debilitating and politically-correct liberalism onto Poland. In its view, a supine attitude towards the European Union; values undermining the rigor of Roman Catholicism, and an inferiority complex regarding the past characterized past Polish governments, especially that of PO and PSL from 2007 to 2015. With the fervor of a revolutionary, it is seeking to overturn the version of Polish history as it evolved since the 1990s. In short, it seeks to return to Poland some dignity and pride in its achievements. Governments have a social policy and an economic policy, and they should also have a historical policy, so runs the argument. [my emphasis]An example of the dubious nature of the PiS "historical policy" was a law they adopted in 2018 that included "the threat of jail terms for people who suggest the country was responsible for Nazi crimes." (Michal Broniatowski, Poland softens controversial ‘Holocaust law’ after backlash Politico EU 6/27/18) But they altered the law to remove the jail time provision later in the year in response to international criticism. "Under the amended law, the possibility of receiving a fine remains in place." (Poland strips back controversial Holocaust law Deutsche Welle 27.06.2018) Poland's foreign policy concern has for the last century focused heavily on Germany and Russia/the Soviet Union. That focuses goes back even further, though it previously also included the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Jan Muś writes (in "Foreign Relations in the Age of Kaczyński", Poland's Memory Wars: Essays on Illiberalism):
The foreign policy of a number of “middle-weight” European states has historically been determined — whether they liked it or not — by more powerful neighbors. For Finland and the Baltic States, it was Sweden, Russia, and, to a lesser degree, Poland; for Slovakia it was Hungary; for Hungary and Serbia it was the Ottoman and Habsburg empires; for Belgium and the Netherlands it was Germany and France; for Portugal it was England and Spain.Poland's current posture toward Russia has developed in the context of important events over the last two decades:
What frames Polish foreign policy is the Berlin-Moscow axis and the proximity of these two powerful and ambitious states. The two world empires, that is, great powers, have directly threatened the very existence of the Polish state and the Polish nation itself at many points in the past. Consequently, any politician, whether liberal, social democratic, conservative, green, red, or yellow, populist or non-populist is forced to take this into consideration. [my emphasis]
After Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000, Russia managed to regain its internal stability, and the multifaceted crisis that the West ran into a few years later inclined Russia to embark on a policy aimed at altering the status quo and to bring it a stronger position in the international system. This was made plain in President Putin’s speech delivered at the Munich Security Conference in February 2007. The events which followed — the Georgian–Russian War in August 2008, the escalation of the Ukraine crisis beginning late 2013 and Russia’s annexation of Crimea in March 2014 — reinforced in Poland the sense that Europe was reverting to the former ‘Hobbesian’ paradigm based on rivalry, conflict, the primacy of national interests, power, and the division of the world into spheres of influence. This led to a greater emphasis in Poland’s security policy on actions aimed at reinforcing the country’s military capabilities, strengthening the NATO alliance, and containing and deterring Russia. [my emphasis] (Justyna Zajac̨, Poland’s Security Policy: The West, Russia, and the Changing International Order 2016)The historian Timothy Snyder had an encounter with the politicized PiS view of history, which he describes in Poland vs. History NYR Daily 05/03/2016. He had been an official advisor in the development of the Museum of the Second World War in Gdansk. He wound up resigning because after PiS came to power in 2015, they were pressuring the museum to make drastic changes to reflect a more narrowly nationalistic and celebratory PiS narrative of Polish history. (The museum opened in March 2017.)
Although the particular PiS plan Snyder criticizes was not fully realized, his article gives an idea of how PiS approaches history:
Yet the current Polish government, led by the conservative Law and Justice party, now seems determined to cancel the museum, on the grounds that it does not express “the Polish point of view.” It is hard to interpret this phrase, which in practice seems to mean the suppression of both Polish experience and the history of the war in general. The new government’s gambit has been to replace the nearly completed global museum with an obscure (and as yet entirely non-existent) local one, and then to claim that nothing has really changed. The substitute museum would chronicle the Battle of Westerplatte, where Polish forces resisted the German surprise attack on the Baltic coast for seven days in September 1939. Heroic though it was, substituting this campaign for the entirety of World War II means eliminating the record of how Poles fought for their country and their fellow citizens over the succeeding five-and-a-half years. Such a move also means throwing away a historic opportunity to redefine the world’s understanding of the war.Snyder uses a concept to describe the kind of purely instrumental history that authoritarian governments favor, "the 'politics of eternity': a displacement of the real challenges of the actual world with a myth of a sacred past that must be protected." (Take it from a historian. We don't owe anything to Confederate monuments Guardian 07/23/2020) He discusses it in this 11-minute video, Timothy Snyder Speaks, ep. 14: Politics of Eternity, Politics of Inevitability 06/09/2018:
As István Deák has stressed in his recent study of the war, Europe on Trial, appeasing Hitler before the war led to collaborating with Hitler during the war; Stalin’s choice to placate Hitler in 1939, he notes, was not exceptional but emblematic. In its impressively sober approach to the issue of collaboration, the Gdansk museum presents wartime societies as groups of individuals who had to make decisions, even when the range of possible choices was limited to bad ones. Some degree of accommodation is an almost universal experience of war, the more so when the occupation is unusual, as these were, in the depth of the occupiers’ political and economic ambitions. That the same populations — including Poland’s—often collaborated with multiple regimes might challenge our intuitions about good and evil and the importance of ideology. But it is also an everyday truth about war that emerges from an approach that takes account of all the different aggressors and occupations. [my emphasis]
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