Reddit mentions of Poland's Memory Wars: Essays on Illiberalism

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An Independence Day parade might sound uncontroversial, but in Poland it has proven anything but. The parade in question is a nationalist march in Warsaw organized by far-right groups that was scheduled to take place on Sunday to mark 100 years of Polish independence. That was before it became a political football surrounded by confusion and uncertainty—and a useful window deep into the Polish psyche.

On Wednesday, Warsaw Mayor Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz of the center-right Civic Platform party announced she would be canceling the march, citing as justification a history of previousIndependence Day marches marred by xenophobia and violence. “This is not how the celebrations should look on the 100th anniversary of regaining our independence,” she said. “Warsaw has suffered enough because of aggressive nationalism.”

Poland’s president, Andrzej Duda, a member of the ruling Law and Justice party, quickly declared he would now be organizing a state-sanctioned march along the same route the far-right groups had planned to take. “Everyone is invited, come only with red-and-white flags,” he wrote on Twitter, an allusion to the Polish national flag, and an indirect reference to the white-supremacist banners and slogans from last year’s Independence Day march.

But that was before a court overturned Gronkiewicz-Waltz’s ban. Sunday’s centennial events, which should ordinarily herald a day of national celebration, are now being awaited with dread—not least because many Poles believe their country’s president and prime minister, have done little or nothing in the past to discourage marchers calling for a “white Europe” and spouting anti-Semitic chants. In his announcement this week, Duda did not mention the reasons that Poles might doubt his sincerity—above all, Law and Justice’s long-running flirtation with Polish far-right groups.

The question is why, in Europe’s most economically successful post-communist country, has a ruling party ended up struggling to separate itself from openly extremist nationalists? In answering that question, and deciding what to do about it, it’s not enough to examine Law and Justice’s rise to power—one must also understand the peculiar culture of Polish nationalism that the party appeals to. In Poland, perhaps more than anywhere else in Europe, there is no necessary contradiction between a commitment to democracy and to the most extreme forms of nationalism.

123 years of subjugation

After enjoying the status of major European power in the 16th and 17th centuries, poor leadership and internal strife led to Poland being partitioned by the Austrian, Prussian, and Russian empires in 1795. The country that had produced Europe’s first written constitution and at its height spanned a territory three times the size of today’s Germany disappeared from the map for 123 years.

During this period, the Polish nation, bereft a sovereign state, immersed itself in the arts. The cultural soon became political as poets and writers strove not just to preserve Polish culture, but also to propagate the dream of an independent Poland, ultimately inspiring several unsuccessful insurrections in the 19th century. The Catholic Church also played a key role in preserving Polish culture and the dream of an independent state during this period. This marriage between culture, politics, and religion eventually birthed a new interpretation of “Polishness,” one that constitutes the core of that propagated by Poland’s present-day nationalists.

This new identity was summed up by Adam Mickiewicz, Poland’s foremost poet, who described Poland as the “Christ of nations.” The parareligious Messianic assertion of Polish exceptionalism portrayed Poles as a morally superior collective suffering iniquity at the hands of immoral others yet destined to ultimately triumph and save Europe from its sinful self.

By the time Poland finally regained independence in 1918, this interpretation of Polishness had firmly entrenched itself in wider societal consciousness, symbolized by a slogan always present at the Independence Day marches organized by Poland’s far-right groups: “God, Honor, Fatherland.”

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The much fought-for independence of 1918, however, was to prove cruelly brief, cut short by Adolf Hitler’s 1939 invasion of Poland. That was followed by Soviet occupation and the post-World War II transformation of the country into a Soviet satellite state. While Poles will officially mark their 100-year independence anniversary this Sunday, few consider Poland to have been genuinely independent during the communist era of 1945 to 1989. The communist era is important to understanding contemporary events in Poland, as that period familiarized Poles with the idea that a country could be formally independent without being truly autonomous.

But even totalitarian communism failed to reorient Poles toward an understanding of Polishness different from that popularized in the 19th and early 20th centuries. As Brian Porter-Szucs, a history professor at the University of Michigan, has observed, faced with the stubborn refusal of Poles to forgo the ideals of “God, Honor, Fatherland” in favor of an atheist internationalist communist identity, by 1956, Poland’s communist party had given up “any serious ambition to fundamentally transform Polish culture and society.”

Wladyslaw Gomulka, the communist party leader from 1956 to 1970, thus promised communism would be implemented the “Polish way.” In practice, this entailed blending nationalism with communism, the former aimed at reassuring Poles the national identity forged in the 19th century would be preserved in the new order. From the late 1950s, the red-and-white Polish flag thus “became much more prominent than the red communist flag,” while “state propaganda intensified the use of the adjective ‘Polish’ before standard communist slogans,” Porter-Szucs wrote.

The fact that Poland’s communists concluded that to sell communism to Poles, they needed to incorporate the vocabulary of Polish nationalism developed in the 19th and early 20th centuries shows how deeply it had permeated popular consciousness. It is also no coincidence that the Solidarity trade-union movement of the 1980s, which eventually triggered the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, was led by a figure like Lech Walesa. Walesa’s defiant victory salutes, ever-present Virgin Mary lapel pin, and repeated declarations of love for Poland captured the essence of Polish patriotism understood as loyalty to God, honor, and the Fatherland. When Solidarity eventually prevailed and communism collapsed in 1989, Poles roundly heralded their regaining of independence, just like in 1918.