Poland, Ukrainian refugees, and the fight to preserve democracy in the European Union

Piotr Kosicki is concerned that Poland’s importance in the NATO coalition supporting Poland’s neighbor Ukraine is causing Western leaders including President Biden to downplay the real backsliding in the democratic system of Poland. He sketches the history of how the ruling Law and Justice Party has moved the country in a distinctly authoritarian direction, especially since 2015.

Full post: https://brucemillerca.substack.com/p/poland-ukrainian-refugees-and-the

Christmas partisanship, in which God sides with refugees

The Gospel of Matthew recounts the story of Mary and Joseph fleeing from Judea to Egypt to escape from King Herod's order to kill all male infants under age two in the area of Bethlehem to eliminate the Messiah who had just been born there.

"De vlucht naar Egypte" (The Flight Into Egypt")

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Biblical scholars generally regard this as a mythological element of the story, because there is otherwise no historical substantiation of such an incident, also known as the Massacre of the Innocents, taking place at that time. And the story in Matthew has King Herod learning about the birth of the Messiah from the three wise men from the East telling Herold about it, which is also a mythological element of the story. The Three Wise Men are warned in dreams not to go back to Herod in Jerusalem after seeing Baby Jesus in Bethlehem.

Matthew also cites Jewish messianic prophecies in which the Messiah would come out of Egypt in this context. (The story of the birth of Jesus and the flight to Egypt appear in the first two chapters of the Book of Matthew.)

The German theologian Eugen Drewermann treats mythological elements as legitimate parts of Christian theology in the "depth-psychology" approach he applies. So he discusses the flight into Egypt and the massacre of the innocents as legitimate elements reflecting the reality - not of the specific historical events in the story itself, but of the fallen world in which we live. In the first volume of his Das Matthäus-Evangelium: Bilder der Erfüllung (1992), he writes about the centrality to the Christian message of striving to ultimately do away with war and to reduce violence against others.

And he reads the Christmas story in that context:

The message of Christmas in the sense of Matthew's Gospel would not be difficult to understand [in Drewermann’s perspective]. It would just be important to follow the images of one's own dreams as consistently as the "magicians" [the Three Wise Men] do. Warned by the message of an angel, they sense the danger posed by "Herod" and they "escape" from him back to their homeland. If there were only people who blindly followed the evidence of humanity like the magicians, many things that we still consider quite normal and correct today would not be possible. And yet it is necessary to save the divine life in us and literally flee from "King Herod". It is better to spend long years as if in exile, like strangers in the midst of an almost incomprehensible world, than to want to keep our "home" at the price of un-life, where there has no longer been "home" for a long time. [my translation]

This portion of the Christian story in Matthew is not just a way of giving a mythological aura to the story of the birth of Jesus. It is a polemic for refugees against those who do violence to them. In this view, the Christian faith is partisan in the sense of defending the former against the latter.

So the actions now being taken by at the border of the supposedly Christian nation of Poland, actions that have been backed by all other nations of the European Union that claims to be the defending of democratic and "European" values derived from Christianity, needs to be seen in that perspective: Anna Alboth, Helping refugees starving in Poland’s icy border forests is illegal – but it’s not the real crime Guardian 12/08/2021.

Other predominately Christian nations like the USA and Australia would do well to rethink their current policies on refugees in this light.

The EU tries to put a better face on its support for Poland's treatment of refugees on the border to Belarus

Wolfgang Münchau's Eurointelligence reported last week on a move by the EU, apparently meant to soften its previous support for Poland's refugee policy in the face of Belarus' ploy of sending a few thousand refugees across the border into Poland. (EU and Poland at odds over migrants 12/2/2021; scroll down)

EI describes Poland's practice this way: "Poland took the toughest stance against the migrants at the border. It criminalised irregular border crossings, and used its state of emergency to prevent humanitarian organisations and the media from coming close to the border. They also are accused of pushing back migrants, so-called refoulement, which is prohibited by EU and international law." (my emphasis)

The EU proposed extension of the time limits Poland has been applying for refugees to register asylum claims. "Amnesty International dismissed the proposal too, saying the current [official rules than Poland should be following] rules worked fine, and that this is a weakening of migrants protection for political purposes."

Relief Web provides the AI press release (EU: ‘Exceptional measures’ normalize dehumanization of asylum seekers 12/2/2021):

In response to today’s proposals from the European Commission which would allow Latvia, Lithuania and Poland to derogate from EU rules, including by holding asylum-seekers and migrants at the border for 16 weeks with minimal safeguards, Eve Geddie, Director of Amnesty International’s European Office said:

“The arrival of people at the EU’s borders with Belarus is entirely manageable with the rules as they stand. Today’s proposals will further punish people for political gain, weaken asylum protections, and undermine the EU’s standing at home and abroad. If the EU can allow a minority of member states to throw out the rule book due to the presence of a few thousand people at its border, it throws out any authority it has on human rights and the rule of law." [my emphasis]

A turn toward resolving the Belarus-Poland crisis

Christian Jakob in the German paper Jungle World comments on the problem and weakness the EU displayed in the refugee stunt that Belarus pulled this year, Humanitär aus dem Weg räumen 18.11.2021.

It looks like the immediate crisis Belarus manufactured at the Polish border is being resolved now and some lives saved. (Thomas Mayer, Migranten in Belarus: Realpolitik an der Grenze Standard 18.11.2021)

Deutsche Welle reports, Belarus begins repatriation of hundreds of migrants 11/19/2021:



As DW also reports, the problems for the refugees isn't over yet, Humanitarian crisis deepens on Poland-Belarus border 11/20/2021:



It took Germany and France working out an arrangement with Russia and Belarus. The EU as such wasn't capable of resolving it.

The opening paragraph defines the problem, although it's muddled a bit by what seems to be a superficial understanding of the position of immigration expert Gerald Knaus:

Der österreichische Politikberater Gerald Knaus, bekannt als »Erfinder des EU-Türkei-Deals«, gilt vielen als Stimme der Vernunft in den heißlaufenden Asyldebatten. Dass der »Deal« für viele Flüchtlinge vor allem hieß, dass sie seit 2016 Syrien kaum mehr verlassen können, die EU durch die türkische Regierung unter Präsident Recep Tayyip Erdoğan erpressbar bleibt und sich auf den Ägäis-Inseln seither eine ausgewachsene humanitäre Katastrophe abspielt, hat am Urteil über Knaus nichts geändert.

[The Austrian political consultant Gerald Knaus, known as the "inventor of the EU-Turkey deal", is regarded by many as the voice of reason in the hot-running asylum debates. The fact that the "deal" for many refugees meant above all that they have hardly been able to leave Syria since 2016, that the EU remains subject to blackmail by the Turkish government under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and that a full-blown humanitarian catastrophe has been taking place on the Aegean islands since then has not changed Knaus' verdict. (my translation)]

This is a superficial take on Knaus' position. He conceived of the 2016 EU-Turkey deal as something that would only work properly if the EU then implemented a process by which significant numbers of refugees in Turkey have their asylum petitions considered by the EU and the successful ones accepted for residence in the EU.

The EU has not done that in the nearly six years since the EU-Turkey deal was concluded. And Knaus has been one of the most prominent critics of the EU's inaction and violations of law and human rights in its treatment of refugees in the years since. In his book Welche Grenzen brauchen wir? (2020), he discusses the concept behind the EU-Turkey deal and its antecedents. Christian Jakob is right that that there is a humanitarian crisis in the Greek Aegean islands with refugees. But that is not directly an effect of the EU-Turkey deal as such. It's another aspect of the EU's let-ignore-the-problem-and-hope-it-goes-away attitude toward the refugee crisis.

Knaus links on Twitter to Jakob's article and comments in a generous but critical way on it. Knaus calls attention to how widespread the mishandling of immigration issues is in the richer countries:

But the policies to which his criticism boils down are being implemented by any democracy, any country in the world. Currently, all 27 EU countries support Poland's policies. Under Biden, not Trump, just in September, 100,000 were deported from the United States without asylum. In the rest of the world, hardly any state grants asylum.

Like Jacob, a majority in Germany wants a humane policy without deaths. But he doesn't show a way to get there. This is more urgent today than ever.

Jakob, he points out, has advocated for an "open borders" solution.

But as far as it goes, this part of Jakob's critique is on point:

Denn für den westlichen Teil der EU ist die Flüchtlingssituation – wieder einmal – überaus verfahren: Kaum etwas fürchtet man mehr, als dass die Aufnahme der etwa vierstelligen Zahl festsitzender Geflüchteter als »Pull-Faktor«, also als Anreiz für weitere Flüchtlinge, diesen Weg zu nutzen, politisch ausgeschlachtet wird. Genau diese Botschaft aber senden Rechtspopulisten ständig, seit die vom belarussischen Diktator Alexander Lukaschenko produzierten Bilder an der östlichen Außengrenze täglich in den Medien zu sehen sind.

Dass die EU sich damit so erpressbar gemacht hat, ist ihre eigene Schuld. Bis heute hat sie keinen Plan, mit Ankommenden so um­zugehen, dass deren Rechte und die eigenen moralischen Maßstäbe gewahrt werden. Stattdessen hat auch die EU jahrelang die »irregu­läre Migration« als Bedrohung dämonisiert und jetzt auch noch die eskalierende Formulierung vom »hybriden Krieg« übernommen, die von der rechten autoritären Regierung Polens benutzt wird.

[For the western part of the EU, the refugee situation is – once again – extremely complicated: Hardly anything is feared more than that the admission of the approximately four-digit number of refugees as a "pull factor", i.e. as an incentive for more refugees to use this path, will be politically exploited. But this is exactly the message that right-wing populists are constantly sending since the images produced by Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko on the eastern external border can be seen daily in the media.

The fact that the EU has thus made itself so blackmailable is its own fault. To this day, it has no plan to deal with arrivals in such a way that their rights and their own moral standards are upheld. Instead, the EU has for years demonized "irregular migration" as a threat and has now adopted the escalating phrase of "hybrid war" used by Poland's right-wing authoritarian government.]

Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, the most senior Catholic official in Austria, calls both Belaurus' conduct in using refugees this way as well as Poland's response in their brutal treatment of the refugees, "cynical and shameless." (Kardinal Schönborn über Belarus: "zynisch und schamlos" Heute 19.11.2021)

Gerald Knaus is one of the participants in the English podcast, Fortress Europe: Who gets to come in? BBC News 11/20/2021.

It would be nice to think that there would be some kind of meaningful negative repercussions for Poland from the EU for their criminal treatment of the refugees on their border. But I doubt it.

How to make the EU look pitifully weak and irresponsible: send a few thousand refugees across the border and watch the EU panic

There's a real crisis on the border of Poland to Belarus. It results most directly from Belarus - often called "Europe's last dictatorship" - committing air piracy in May on a flight crossing its territory in order to kidnap a prominent critic of the government and his girlfriend.

The EU understandably imposed sanctions on Belarus for it. Because if the Belarusian government is going to commit air piracy on civilian flights, that not only a breach of international law and agreements, it's a very practical problem for commercial flights in that part of Europe. Although the incident touched on internal Belarusian politics, the sanctions were in response to a very practical problem for international air traffic, not an intervention in internal Belarusian affairs. (The EU had earlier imposed sanctions on Belarus that were directly related to issues involving the 2020 Belarussian presidential election and treatment of the opposition. See also: EU Sanctions Map-Belarus 06/24/2021)

So, knowing that the EU is still pitifully weak in its crisis planning for unexpected refugee flows, Belarus starting flying asylum seekers from the greater Middle East into Belarus and sending them across the border. On cue, Poland freaked out and violated international and EU law with brutal retaliation against the refugees themselves.

This round of confrontation began in May. Which could and should lead regular citizens to ask, why is this only now becoming a prominent story? See my earlier posts, Belarus' aircraft hijacking and its repercussions 05/26/2021; The EU and the political cisis in Belarus 08/14/2020

Turkey cooperated with sending refugees to Belarus, because it sees an interest in reminding EU countries that it can generate a new 2015-style refugee crisis any time it wants. The EU has had almost six years since the original signing of the EU-Turkey agreement in 2016, under which Turkey is currently housing about 3.5 million refugees, to work on the then-anticipated systematic admission of large numbers of those immigrants into EU countries. Instead, the EU has been merrily kicking the can down the road ever since.

Turkey is playing its own cynical game. But Tayyip Erdoğan's government knows it can do so because of the sad state of EU immigration/refugee policy. So, for instance, if Austria or Germany wants to put limits on formal political and financial ties of the Turkish government to Turkish groups in their countries, or want to limit Turkish funding for dubious religious projects that could have national security implications (i.e., sponsoring radical Islamic activists), well, Erdoğan knows their governments are terrified of his refugee supply heading north.

Belarus, including under the current dictatorial President Alexander Lukashenko, has aimed in its foreign policy at balancing its relations between Russia and the EU. The EU has issues with Belarus over its political and human rights policies. But it also has an interest in not driving Belarus politically into a heavier dependence on Russia. That's the larger background against which the current deadly drama is playing out. And both Russia and Belarus are very aware that Europe's absurd panic reaction in the face of the "threat" of a few thousand extra refugees arriving can lead European politicians to make decisions that are short-sighted in terms of practical foreign policy and also make the EU politicians' propaganda use of their superior "European values" look like the most cynical hypocrisy.

Here are some reports on the current situation. It's worth watching in reports on this for how often they contain references to refugees as a national security threat, or how refugees are described in the terms of menace, including natural catastrophe metaphors like "flood" and military ones like "hybrid warfare."

Belarus has launched a hybrid war on Poland and Europe, using migrants as weapons. In response, Poland has created not just a humanitarian crisis but moral, legal, and administrative chaos. https://t.co/ipuA1w4tyv

— Anne Applebaum (@anneapplebaum) November 13, 2021

Although her own use of the term "hybrid war" there strikes me as misguided, Applebaum in the article also does rightly criticize Poland for that same kind of rhetoric: "Even on its own terms, [Poland's seriously illegal] “pushback” [of asylum-seekers] has failed disastrously. Lukashenko has not been deterred. On the contrary, Poland’s hybrid-war rhetoric seems to have encouraged him to find new ways to troll Polish border guards and pile in more Belarusian troops, as if this really were a war and they really were needed." (my emphasis)

Poland may call NATO for help with Belarus border crisis Deutsche Welle News 11/15/2021:

Also from Deutsche Welle, Turkey stops flying citizens of Iraq, Syria, Yemen to Belarus 11/13/2021:

‘Please save us’: Refugees face death at Poland-Belarus border Aljazeera English 11/15/2021

Warnings that Belarus migrant crisis risks military conflict BBC News 11/13/2021:

Jana Wolf, Härte und Humanität: Auswege aus dem Flüchtlingsdrama gesucht RP Online 14.11.2021

Gerald Knaus, Die teuflische Falle aus Minsk Standard 13.11.2021

Marcel Leubecher, „So könnte die EU Lukaschenkos Erpressungsversuch ins Leere laufen lassen“ Die Welt 13.11.2021

John Follain and Birgit Jennen, EU Backs New Sanctions Powers on Belarus Over Migrant Flows Bloomberg News 11/15/2021.

Andrew Connelly, Don’t Blame Belarus. Blame Brussels. Foreign Policy 11/11/2021

Belarus migrants: Poland PM blames Russia's Putin for migrant crisis BBC News 11/10/2021

EU to sanction Belarus as border crisis persists: Live updates Aljazeera 11/15/2012

Pawel Zerka, How half-hearted sanctions put the future of Belarus at risk European Council on Foreign Relations 09/30/2021

This is a dramatic case in which the EU's lack of a sensible immigration/refugee policy constitutes a real weakness for the EU, and gives adversarial powers the ability to promote disunity and a toxic form of political polarization within EU countries. In this case, it also gives Poland a way to blackmail the EU in its current legal conflicts with the EU itself with criminal cruelty against desperate refugees.

Republicans' memory laws against "critical race theory" (their current favorite bogeyman concept and conspiracy theory)

I've been saying that the "critical race theory" (CRT) slogan the Republicans are using as their political battle cry right now, and which they are using to try to ban any mention of white racism from school curriculums, is a code phrase for, "Scary Jews! Scary black people!"

Because that's what it is. The thin conspiracy theory narrative on which it is based blames German Jewish Marxists of 90 years ago for making white people in America have to reconsider their racial attitudes in 2021.

Henry Abramson discusses the impact of the anti-CRT laws Republican legislatures are passing in Banning critical race theory will gut the teaching of Jewish history JTA 07/08/2021:

The bans on teaching with a critical race theory framework aren’t really against history per se, which is in the past and therefore stubbornly resists regulation. Rather, these decrees fall more precisely within the category of what are called “memory laws.” Historian Timothy Snyder described these laws as “government actions designed to guide public interpretation of the past… by asserting a mandatory view of historical events, by forbidding the discussion of historical facts or interpretations or by providing vague guidelines that lead to self-censorship.” [my emphasis]

Abramson argues that the anti-CRT laws are similar to laws currently being used to promote jingoistic, ehnonationalist history by rightwing authoritarian governments, including Vladimir Putin's in Russia:

Putin ... pioneered a new approach to memory laws: Rather than protecting the weak, they also can be weaponized to strengthen the powerful. In the context of Russian history, the counterpart to American slavery is the Holodomor, a terrible famine that killed millions of Ukrainians from 1932-1933. Beginning in 2008, Russia’s Duma assembly passed legislation that forbade the discussion of Russian government policies that contributed to the genocidal nature of the famine, and established entities like the “Presidential Commission of the Russian Federation to Counter Attempts to Falsify History to the Detriment of Russia’s Interests” (an ideological antecedent to the now-defunct 1776 Commission, then President Trump’s last-minute attempt to promote a “pro-American curriculum”).

This is the intellectual home of the CRT bans. They share educational space with Poland’s ridiculous, offensive and dangerous 2018 law that criminalizes the suggestion that Poland bears any responsibility for the crimes committed by the Germans during World War II. The object of Poland’s memory law is not to prevent the resurgence of extremist antisemitism; it is to prevent Poles from confronting the complex legacy of collaboration with the Nazi occupation. [my emphasis]

I posted about Poland's memory laws in The "historical policy" of the ruling Polish rightwing party PiS 07/31/2020, in which I also note Timothy Snyder's phrase for such narrow nationalist approaches to history, "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."

Abramson explains how the Trumpista approach now becoming embedded in state laws by Republican legislatures would affect teaching about anti-Semitism:

Despite the 1776 Commissions promise to “unite, inspire, and ennoble all Americans,” these laws will chill honest engagement with hard truths, forcing teachers to lie to their students, even if only by omission.

Furthermore, anyone teaching Jewish history will be challenged to find a way to present the legacy of antisemitism without running afoul of these regulations. The historical linkage between Catholic theology and the persecution of Jews, for example, is rife with difficult topics. They range from the medieval charges of host desecration and the horrendous blood libel to the pope’s kidnapping of 6-year-old Edgardo Mortara in 1858 (we could, unfortunately, continue at length). Protestants would also be discomfited by Martin Luther’s anti-Jewish screed, “On the Jews and their Lies” (1543). The list of countries where Jews have lived in their diaspora is pretty much identical to the list of countries that have discriminated against Jews. [my emphasis]

Another JTA article (Eleanor Stern, When Holocaust education meets critical race theory: A partisan history debate unfolds in Louisiana 07/07/2021) describes how rightwing Republicans proposed a law that nominally advocated teaching about the Holocaust in Louisiana schools as a stalking-horse for a rather singular view of history:

The Holocaust education bill seemed potentially uncontroversial when Hodges introduced the measure in April. The original text simply called for “instruction regarding World War II and the Holocaust for middle and high school students and training for teachers relative to such instruction.”

Many Jewish groups have called for exactly that kind of requirement, arguing that education is the key to increasing tolerance and preventing genocides in the future. Currently, 17 states require some form of Holocaust education in schools. Louisiana, which one study pegged as having one of the lowest percentages of Holocaust-aware young people in the U.S., is seen as especially in need of similar mandates. The state also recently became the new home of the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience, boosting the visibility of Jews in the region.

But as lawmakers held hearings on the bill, it became clear that many of its supporters had a different vision — starting with [Valerie] Hodges, an evangelical ex-missionary and prominent conservative who has served in the Louisiana State Legislature for a decade. Hodges initially accepted, then declined, an interview with JTA.

On her professional Facebook page during the bill’s debate period, Hodges shared an image of Hitler with a caption calling him “everything today’s liberal craves.” Another post compared Nazi Germany to critical race theory and the New York Times’ 1619 Project, writing, “World War II was about RACE, yet liberals objected to it being included in my bill … Hitler had been laying the groundwork for at least 15 years before the Holocaust. It began with the organization of college students who would be the ones to help him implement his reign of horror.”

During hearings, Hodges made her arguments while seated beside David Barton, founder of the Texas-based advocacy group Wallbuilders, which aims to promote the idea that the U.S. is an inherently Christian nation founded on biblical principles. The Southern Poverty Law Center identifies Barton as an “extremist” who is “a key bridge between the mainstream political right and radical-right religious ideology.” [my emphasis]

If you design things around crackpot notions, it shouldn't surprise anyone that results wind up being cracked pottery.

The "historical policy" of the ruling Polish rightwing party PiS

"In Poland’s culture wars, history has been weaponized," writes Jan Darasz. ("The History Men" in Poland's Memory Wars: Essays on Illiberalism, Jo Harper, ed., 2018.

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.

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]

Poland's current posture toward Russia has developed in the context of important events over the last two decades:

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.

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]

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:

A win for EU law and democracy in Poland

Wolfgang Münchau's Eurointelligence Professional Briefing (Public Section) 10/31/2018 has an optimistic take on Poland's response to an important ruling by the European Court of Justice (EJC) in A further move in Warsaw to submit to the ECJ’s authority (scroll down).

The case in question had to do with a move made by Poland's authoritarian government to undermine the judicial independence of the Polish Supreme Court. As Jon Stone reports (European Court of Justice orders Poland to stop purging its supreme court judges Independence 10/19/2018):

Since coming to power in 2015, Poland’s right-wing populist Law and Justice governing party has pushed through a series of controversial changes to judicial appointments that critics say put too much power in the hands of the government and endangers the independence of the judiciary.

The numerous changes give the governing majority in parliament greater power over judicial appointments, while another new law also forced around a third of the country’s supreme court judges into retirement earlier this year.

This was a critical step by the Polish government in departing from the minimal standards of democracy required by the European Union for member states. Both Poland and Hungary are currently under "Article 7" investigations for such violations of EU democratic standards, the actions against the Supreme Court being the most pressing concern in Poland's case. (Maïa de la Baume and Dvid Herszenhorn, EU unpersuaded by Poland’s defense at rule-of-law hearing Politico EU 06/27/18)

The ECJ ruled that the changes violated European law. And the Polish government has agreed to abide by the ruling for now. The judges the government forced into retirement are now back and work and recruitment for their replacements has been halted.

A previous Eurointelligence briefing (Poland's local elections reveal deeply-split country 10/25/2018) noted:

The government in Warsaw continued as in the past to respond with mixed signals, saying on the one hand that it would respect EU law – and therefore the ECJ’s injunction - while trying to get Poland’s supreme court to invalidate the ECJ's ruling. Its argument is that the Polish constitution supersedes the ECJ's treaty-based powers in this case. We note that this dispute is not specific to Poland: the conflict about the primacy - or not - of the national constitution over EU treaties has for instance been brought repeatedly before Germany’s supreme court. The judges in Karlsruhe judges have until now responded with deliberately ambiguous judgments, maintaining a prudent judicial truce, and evading a clear decision about its own possible subjection to the ECJ. Will the Polish judges risk a fundamental conflict their German peers have until now done everything to avoid? And, if yes, how will the EU respond? What is at stake here goes way beyond the preservation of fundamental norms in Poland. [my emphasis]

As the 10/31/2018 briefing puts it, the represents a win for "a common view of the proper order of things" within the EU:

What if this common view is no longer shared to a sufficient degree by political majorities in each member state of the EU? Three things can happen. States can choose to leave. Disintegration can occur from within. Or the common view becomes a common order imposed and successfully enforced from above in a classic process of state formation. It is the third response that is at work in the EU — forget all the analysis being written about how EU integration has come to a halt.

The EU’s nascent fight against dark money and corruption, the halt to Poland’s judicial reform – these are just two of the manifestations of European power expanding its reach and moving to assert control in important and unprecedented ways. Is it a struggle? Of course it is. An easy one? Of course not. But it is a sign of the EU responding to challenges of a kind that were always going to be inevitable in a hugely expanded Union of 445 million inhabitants and 27 States, with more power rather than new weakness. [my emphasis]

Poland had regional elections last month, and the results were mixed. But they were certainly not a sweep for the rightwing populists.

The rigtwing populist Law and Justice Party (PiS, from the Polish initials) under its Chairman Jarosław Kaczyński is the dominant party at the national level. The 2018 regional elections were the first time in three years the PiS faced the voters' judgment. The results came out with 32% for the PiS and 44% for the two largest opposition groupings: Citizens Coalition with 27% and PSL (Polish Farmers Party) with 17%. (Clara Mode, Polen, wo bei einer Wahl alle Parteien gewinnen und keine verliert Standard 30.10.2018)

The current Polish President is Andrzej Duda of the PiS, elected in 2015. But Kaczyński is widely regarded as the power behind the throne.

The May 2019 EU elections are already getting a lot of attention. The rightwing populist parties In Europe have ironically used the EU Parliamentary elections as a way to build an anti-EU message and get recognition for their leaders. So hopefully the other parties will take the EU elections more seriously than in the past. And that seems to be happening at the moment. May will be a big milestone in current EU politics.

Ivan Krastev wrote earlier this year ("Eastern Europe's Illiberal Revolution" Foreign Affairs 97:3 May/June 2018):

Poland's government has also sought to dismantle checks and balances, especially through its changes to the constitutional court. In contrast to the Hungarian government, however, it is basically clean when it comes to corruption. Its policies are centered less on controlling the economy or creating a loyal middle class and more on the moral reeducation of the nation. The Polish government has tried to rewrite history, most notably through a recent law making it illegal to blame Poland for the Holocaust. [my emphasis]

He also notes that the rightwing populist regimes currently in power in Hungary and Poland display "a Janus-faced attitude toward the EU." That is, they bitch and moan about the EU. But they get a lot of money from the EU: "Poland is the continent's biggest recipient of money from the European Structural and Investment Funds, which promote economic development in the EU'S less developed countries."

This is at least analogous to the phenemenon we see in the US, where the Democratic states tend to be net contributors of federal revenue while Republican ones are net recipients, even though the Republicans actually want to reduce those transfers significantly.

See also:

• Jennifer Rankin and Christian Davies, Poland's first openly gay politician says progressives can win Guardian 10/23/2018
• Christian Davies, Don't judge Poland by what has happened here since 2015 Guardian 10/23/2018
• Bartosz Dudek, Lech Walesa: Poland's current leaders 'are either traitors or complete fools' Deutsche Welle 29.09.2018
• Pawel Sobczak and Pawel Florkiewicz, Defiant Kaczynski says Poland must avoid EU's 'social diseases' Reuters 09/02/2018

What does a democracy under internal threat look like?

This week's Profil (15.10.2018) has a story, "Abrisshirne" by Martin Staudinger and Robert Treichler, that I found really irritating. Which in this case, turned out to be a good thing, because it made me concentrate on the points they are making.

The topic is whether there is a world trend toward similar populist-authoritarian movements and governments. The title pages feature phots of Rodrigo Dutere (Phillipines), Jair Bolsonaro (Brazil), Nicolás Maduro (Venezuela), Matteo Salvini (Interior Minister and de facto head of government in Italy), Viktor Orbán (Hungary), Hein-Christian Strache (Vice Chancellor of Austria and head of the far-right FPÖ), Donald Trump (of course!), Tayyip Erdoğan (Turkey), and Andrés Manuel López Obrador, aka, AMLO (President-elect of Mexcio).

Putting AMLO in that list is pretty silly. he won the Presidential election in July and takes office December 1. Why he was included in that particular group as part of the "Populist International," as the caption called them is a mystery. I didn't follow the campaign closely, but my impression is that it was more a conventional center-left campaign rather than distinctly populist. More importantly, he served for five years as Governor of Mexico City (Federal District of Mexico) and built a reputation as an good executive who fought corruption. How that makes him a Duterte or an Erdoğan, I have no idea. The only thing the article itself says about AMLO is that he's an "erratic populist." Erratic? Why? It's sloppy at best to lump him into this group.

Nicolás Maduro can legitimately be called a populist. But, to put it generously, the constant American polemics against Maduro and Hugo Chávez before him as dictators was always overblown. Prior to 2016, international observers of Venezuelan elections under both Chávez and Maduro, including the Carter Center, regarded their national elections as legitimate with strong safeguards against fraud. The US is openly engaged in a regime change effort against the current Venezuelan government and Trump has threaned to militarily invade the country. And the US government always become intensely concerned about human rights and democracy in countries that it is preparing to bomb and kill lots of their people. Also, not at all incidentally, Venezuela has the largest known oil reserves of any country in the world. Anyone who think that hasn't been the overriding concern of American policy toward Venezuela is disregarding the entire history of US dealings with Venezuela and the rest of Latin America. Venezuela is a petrostate heavily hit for years by falling oil prices and facing a protracted period of civil disorder that makes it particularly difficult to compare Venezuela's situation in 2018 with any of the other country's whose leaders feature in the Profil rouges' gallery.

But Staudinger and Treichler do ask their readers to think more closely about just what features of a government make it democratic versus not-so-democratic. For instance, they point to previous worries about apathy among voters in liberal democracies, and note that voter participation has been rising. Because of the interest generated by the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). Without diving into the voting numbers here, it's a valid point that needs to be considered when we look at the antidemocratic trends their article highlights.

Don't be superficial about it, in other words.

Unfortunately, the reader doesn't come out from reading the article with any real guidelines on how to go about making that judgment.

The EU has started a formal review of the status of democracy in the member states Poland and Hungary. The EU does have a variety of standards for a country to qualify for EU membership, including things like democratic elections, a stable rule of law including politically independent police and courts, recognition of basic civil liberties and human rights, equal voting rights for all citizens. The EU also has standards for business law and regulatory practices. Unfortunately, after the 2008 financial crisis, the EU was far more focused on enforcing bad neoliberal economic policies than they have so far shown about enforcing democratic standards on member states.

The very legitimate concerns that have been raised about Poland and Hungary have particularly to do with the independence of the judicial system and whether the election system has been rigged so that the ruling party in practice cannot be voted out of office. Freedom of the press is also a major concern in both countries.

Some of these considerations are region- and country-specific. For instance, in the United States, public television receives relatively little public money. And the major news outlets are also not publicly funded and are generally businesses and some nonprofits. Governmental actions clearly aimed at punishing or restricting the functioning of independent, i.e., non-govwernmental, news operations raise real concerns about inerference with press freedom. But the federal government deciding not to financially support public TV, while that may be a bad decision, would likely not significantly reduce news coverage of public affairs.

The situation in Europe is different. Publicly-funded news media, organizationally structured to be independent of day-to-day political interference, are a major source of public news. The BBC in Britain is generally seen as the model of this approach. Other such public news operations include ARD and ZDF in Germany and ORF in Austria. Drastically reducing their public funding or trying to turn them into partisan outlets would negatively affect the availability of professional, independent news available to citizens.

A different situation is presented by Latin American countries like Argentina in which news media is broadly in the hands of oligarchs and often present news with a strong partisan-political slant. In that situation, a center-left government that uses public media outlets for news and documentaries with a viewpoint friendly to, or at least not hostile to, the elected government couldn't be said in itself to suppress press freedom. Independent public news organizations on the BBC model would improve news coverage and expand freedom of the press in those situations.

A final observation on comparing far-right political movements is that looking at international connections and interactions between those groups and parties. Far-right parties in EU countries interact on an individual basis with one another. And there is an umbrella European party represented in the European Parliament that connects some of those parties in a more formal way. And Putin's Russia is actively encouraging the far-right populist parties in an effort to undermine the EU.

[01/24/2018: Updated for clarity.]