It is a historical given that the recovery of independence brings with it problems those struggling to achieve it had never foreseen or even believed possible. In Poland’s case, the usual problems were aggravated by the scale of the violence done to the country and the people over the preceding half-century, and above all by the psychological damage inflicted by decades of untruth and moral manipulation.
The government headed by Tadeusz Mazowiecki, often referred to as the contractual government, applied itself with remarkable determination to the immediate problems facing the country. The Finance Minister Leszek Balcerowicz employed shock therapy to bring inflation under control and introduced a package of reforms which in effect created a free market. The Minister of Labour and Social Affairs Jacek Kuroń energetically tackled the social costs of the previous decade. The Foreign Minister, Krzysztof Skubiszewski, set about repositioning Poland with regard to its neighbours and preparing for its admittance into the Council of Europe. The government did not neglect purely political issues, amending the constitution in December 1989, replacing the Citizens’Militia with a state police force, and establishing fully independent organs of local government. But it was soon overtaken by events.
On 9 November the Berlin Wall came down. The collapse of communist power in East Germany precipitated the ’velvet revolution’ in Czechoslovakia and similar upheavals in Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania, effectively bringing to an end the Soviet hegemony imposed on the area in 1945. As if in recognition of this, at the end of January 1990 Poland’s Communist Party (PZPR) dissolved itself.
Yet, while it was the Poles who had been the first to breach the Soviet system, Mazowiecki’s contractual government was wedded to the compromise which had brought it to power, and still contained former members of the PZPR, including the Interior Minister General Kiszczak, the Sejm contained an overwhelming majority of them, and the President was General Jaruzelski. Moreover, since there had been no spectacular overthrow of the existing regime, as in the German Democratic Republic, Czech oslvakia or Romania, the old security apparatus was still in place. Mazowiecki and his team therefore trod warily, fearful of overstepping their self-imposed bounds. They carried on with their economic reforms, eschewing radical political change in favour of stability.
Their fears were not entirely groundless. While the PZPR had dissolved itself, it had immediately re-formed as the Social-Democratic Party of Poland (SdRP), and this was a force to be reckoned with, if only on account of its huge financial clout. The PZPR had owned thirty-six limited companies created out of state assets, which passed to the SdRP, along with huge state funds abroad (there had been no formal delineation between the Party and the state), and control of the financial mechanisms which handled the repayment of Polish foreign debt before 1989. The ranks of the new state police were filled with former militiamen, who remained under the command of people who belonged to the communist camp. The same went for the army, the legislature and the media. The militia reserve, ORMO, had also been dissolved, but it formed itself into an association and remained an ominous presence.
Mazowiecki’s fears were magnified by a sense of powerlessness. His government was hamstrung by the fact that the entire administrative apparat was still in place. His ministers were at the mercy of the personnel of their ministries. And, with the ministries of defence and the interior in communist hands, a process of burning, shredding or rewriting of secret service files in order to obscure and reinvent the past was being implemented on a massive scale.
Mazowiecki and the former opposition elites, led by Adam Michnik and the independent newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, clung to the spirit of the round table, hoping that magnanimity would lead to reconciliation, and made it clear that a ’thick line’ would be drawn under the past. This sent the message to the former members that they had nothing to fear, and to the man in the street that the government had allowed itself to be drawn into the communist camp—a reasonable suspicion, since a majority of its members were renegades from the old apparat. While they argued for stability and gradual change, a disenchanted electorate clamoured for a clean break with the past and for social justice. And while Mazowiecki represented himself and his colleagues as the only legitimate opposition to communism, many disputed this and called for free elections.
Leading this chorus were the Confederation for an Independent Poland (KPN), formed by Leszek Moczulski as far back as 1979, and the Christian National Union (ZChN) founded by the veteran anti-communist and political prisoner Wiesław Chrzanowski. But in May 1990 the cry was taken up with stridency by the twins Jarosław and Lech Kaczyński, head of the Bureau of National Security, who called for ’acceleration’ and ’decommunisation’ under the leadership of Lech Wałęsa, demanding immediate elections, at least for the post of president.
Over the next months the hitherto united front of all those who had fought for the overthrow of communist rule disintegrated, to the accompaniment of name-calling and mutual recrimination. New parties and groupings sprang up, based not on ideology or specific political programmes, but on personal factors. Mazowiecki’s decision to stand as a candidate against Wałęsa when Jaruzelski agreed to step down was at least in part dictated by emotional reactions. The level of debate between them and their supporters in the run-up to the elections so disgusted the voters that in the first round, on 25 November 1990, in which turnout was no more than 60.6 per cent, the outsider Stan Tymiński, a former emigrant to Canada who claimed to have made a fortune and promised to make every Pole a millionaire, took second place after Wałęsa, knocking Mazowiecki out of the race. This placed Mazowiecki’s supporters in the unhappy position of having to vote for their rival in the second round, in which Wałęsa won, with 74 per cent of an even lower turnout.
The election campaign had brought to the fore the worst aspects of Polish politics. The debate had been personal rather than political throughout, and all sides had resorted to populism and xenophobia. In a grotesque echo of 1968, people denounced each other as ’cosmopolitans’ or ’Jews’, epithets which bore little relation to racial origins, but were meant to suggest lack of patriotism and communist atavisms.
When Wałęsa was sworn in, on 22 December 1990, he was handed the pre-war presidential insignia and seal of office by the president of Poland in exile, who had flown in from London to bestow on this first freely elected president the legitimacy handed down consecutively by the last one. But this symbolic reconnection and legitimation did not presage a new harmony. Wałęsa appointed as prime minister Jan Bielecki, a non-partisan liberal whose main concern was the economy and the preparation of the first free parliamentary elections. He kept on Balcerowicz as Finance Minister and Skubiszewski in foreign affairs, which provided continuity in those vital areas. But endless disagreements about technicalities delayed the elections until the autumn of 1991, which allowed time for frequent confrontations between a Sejm still made up mainly of former communists and Wałęsa, goaded on by the head of his chancellery, Jarosław Kaczyński.
In preparation for the elections, new groupings and parties were formed from fractions of disintegrating ones, against an uncertain international background: after a failed coup in Moscow that summer, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Ukraine declared their independence from Russia. Comecon was formally dissolved in June 1991, and the Warsaw Pact soon after that, but there were still large numbers of Russian troops based in Poland. At the same time, the opportunity provided by the first free elections precipitated a free-for-all, with over a hundred parties contesting them.
The result of the elections, held on 27 October 1991, was predictably inconclusive. The party which came out on top, Mazowiecki’s Democratic Union (UD), won no more than 12.3 per cent of the vote, and only seven of the twenty-nine parties represented in the Sejm took more than 5. An ominous sign was that the PZPR, restyled as the SdRP and now as the Alliance of the Democratic Left (SLD), came second, with 12 per cent of the vote.
It took nearly two months for a centre-right coalition to be cobbled together and to form a government, under Jan Olszewski. And although this had a genuine mandate, it found itself paralysed in various areas by the post-communists who still infested the administration and all state services, and who had become emboldened by the lack of any attempt to hold them to account for past crimes, as well as by the electoral success of their party. It also came under vicious attack from the post-communist controlled media and from Michnik’s Gazeta Wyborcza, whose staff and contributors vented their bitterness on their erstwhile colleagues.
A burning issue was whether people who had committed crimes against the Polish nation under the communist regime should be called to account. Popular feeling demanded it, reinforced by the knowledge that many were making careers for themselves, and that even those members of the former security services who had retired or been dismissed were getting higher pensions than ordinary citizens. But many of the former post-Solidarność camp were opposed to raking over the past, on the grounds that it would divide the nation. The issue was soon personalised, and rather than focusing on those who had murdered AK members or perpetrated serious crimes, attention was shifted onto the altogether more interesting subject of who among living public figures might have worked for the secret services as informers. Ministers who had access to secret service files leaked gobbets of unverifiable information, and even Wałęsa was accused of having been an informer. The issue brought down Olszewski’s government in a welter of accusations and recriminations, and after lengthy negotiations, a new centre-right coalition was formed under the premiership of Hanna Suchocka, the first woman to hold the post.
Her government was buffeted by the consequences of a world recession, which produced unemployment of up to 20 per cent in some areas, giving rise to strikes and, at the beginning of 1993, the rise of a peasant organisation called Self-Defence, under the leadership of Andrzej Lepper. While the governmwnt struggled with the economy, discussion in the Sejm and outside was dominated by such questions as the role of the Church in political life and the unresolved issue of calling to account the criminals and informers of the communist era. Wałęsa, who had lost his way politically and squandered much of his authority by making absurd off-the-cuff statements, was growing increasingly dictatorial, and weaved about supporting the government one day and opposing it the next. Public anger mounted, and at the end of May 1993 Suchocka’s government fell.
Wałęsa dissolved the Sejm and called an election, to take place in September. In emulation of Piłsudski, he created a Non-Party Bloc of Support for Reform,but this onlywon 5.4 per cent of the vote. The highest scorer, with 20.4 per cent, was the post-communist SLD, followed by the Polish People’s Party (PSL). The despised former communist government spokesman Jerzy Urban reappeared on television, clutching a bottle of champagne and sticking out his tongue at the viewers—and at the whole post-Solidarność camp.
There followed four years of post-communist rule, first under the laconic PSL leader Waldemar Pawłak, then SLD’s Józef Oleksy, followed by Włodzimierz Cimoszewicz. Emboldened by their party’s victory at the polls, creatures of the communist regime who still staffed ministries and state enterprises at every level inaugurated an orgy of corruption, facilitated by the start of a far-reaching privatisation of the state sector. Earlier privatisations and private-public partnerships had provided golden opportunities for the old nomenklatura, but the programme of wholesale privatisation that began in 1994 offered far richer pickings. Friends or clients were placed on the boards of privatised businesses, usually for a financial consideration, while other businesses were sold off to them at grossly undervalued rates. Fortunes were also made on insider trading in the course of privatisation by those close enough to the politicians and heads of enterprises. A number of politicians also became involved with organised crime, which burgeoned in the prevailing climate.
Such levels of corruption shocked the electorate, as did the disclosure, in December 1995, that Prime Minister Oleksy was still on the payroll of the Russian secret service as an active agent. But the post-communists were competent and, in contrast to the post-Solidarność governments, did not ceaselessly quarrel amongst themselves, as a result of which things did get done. President Wałęsa’s attempts to call them to order took the form of often poorly planned attacks that ended in conflicts which he usually lost, further undermining his authority.
At the next presidential elections, in November 1995, Wałęsa lost to the SLD candidate Aleksander Kwaśniewski, winning 48.3 per cent of the vote to the latter’s 51.7. Kwaśniewski was a former PZPR ideologue singled out in the 1980s as a rising star, but it was not this that won him the presidency. His comparatively youthful looks, the image of a smartly suited, tennis-playing, cosmopolitan new man he projected, and not least his conveniently media-friendly wife, contrasted with those of the garrulous, slightly crude and provincial Wałęsa, and appealed to the soap-opera-conditioned middle electorate.
Kwaśniewski was also a cunning politician with a gift for achieving his goals, and he cut a statesmanlike figure that permitted him to distance himself from the growing stink of corruption (although he was heavily implicated). He pushed through the new constitution, a compromise which inspired little enthusiasm on either side of the political spectrum, in May 1997, and vigorously promoted the process of Poland’s accession to the European Union and to NATO.
Eager to avoid a repetition of the defeat they suffered in 1993, largely as a result of their lack of a unified voice, the post-Solidarność parties prepared for the parliamentary elections of September 1997 by coalescing in a Solidarność Election Campaign (AWS). This duly won the elections, polling 33.8 per cent of the vote, and formed a government under Jerzy Buzek, who was to be the only premier to remain in office for a full parliamentary term.
Buzek’s party was little more than an uneasy alliance, and it had to form a coalition with the Union of Freedom (UW), which was to prove a shaky partner. He faced the challenge of having to bring the country into line with European norms as part of the process of preparing for EU membership and to implement a series of reforms in the health service, education, pensions, the civil service and local government, which infringed interests and were bound to cause hardship. His government was bedevilled by strikes and demonstrations organised, ironically, by the very trade union movement that had brought him to power. While Buzek did manage to carry through a number of sensible reforms, his government was unloved. The only member who achieved a measure of popularity was the Minister of Justice Lech Kaczyński, whose tough line on crime was seen to produce results.
The presidential elections of October 2000 were another triumph for the post-communists, with Kwaśniewski winning in the first round with nearly 54 per cent of the vote, and Wałęsa failing to win a single percentage point. As the next parliamentary elections drew near, the disintegrating AWS alliance splintered. In the centre the Union of Freedom was replaced by the Citizens’ Platform (PO). On the right, a new party, the League of Polish Families (LPR), grew out of a number of traditionalist Catholic and nationalist groupings, and in the centre-right the Kaczyński brothers formed the Law and Justice party (PiS). But these new parties failed to stem the triumphant progress of the post-communists, who won over 40 per cent of the vote at the elections in September 2001. An alarming development was that the rabble-rousing Lepper’s Self-Defence party won over 10 per cent of the vote, and the League of Polish Families nearly 8.
A new government was formed under Leszek Miller, a man of the old order who had already been implicated in a number of shady financial deals during the previous spell of post-communist rule. He was perhaps a fitting figurehead for a time when a nationwide opinion poll revealed that no more than 28 per cent of the country’s inhabitants were satisfied with their lives and only 9 with their country. Levels of criminality had reached unprecedented heights, with the number of reported crimes more than doubling since 1990, and with organised crime reaching impressive proportions. Miller himself was mixed up in two corruption scandals, one relating to the media, the other to an oil company, and stepped down in May 2004. He was replaced by Marek Belka, who presided over the final stages of a regime that became synonymous with corruption and criminality. Its activities brought back on the agenda the question of calling people to account for crimes against the Polish people, and meant that the next election campaign would be fought on moral and ideological ground.
This signalled the end for the post-communist parties, with the SLD getting just over 11 and the PSL under 7 per cent of the vote. The winner was the Kaczyński twins’ Law and Justice party, closely followed by the Citizens’ Platform, and since they had campaigned on a similar ticket and had vowed to support each other after the elections, the fact that they had polled more than 50 per cent of the vote between them suggested that the country might expect four years of stable centre-right government.
The two parties began negotiations on a coalition, but strains appeared as the concurrent presidential elections loomed. When Lech Kaczyński beat the PO leader Donald Tusk, with 54 per cent of the vote to 45, the latter’s ill-concealed disappointment and his rival’s triumphalism aggravated disagreements on minor points of policy between the two parties. The Kaczyńskis formed a minority government under Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz, with the tacit support of the populist Self-Defence, which had polled 15 per cent of the vote. Over the next months, PiS brought Lepper and the leader of the League of Polish Families into the coalition, thus isolating and offending the Citizens’ Platform, which it treated as a political rival. The move also alienated many within PiS, resulting in the protest resignation of Foreign Minister Stefan Meller and undermining its cohesion.
The inclusion of such elements in the coalition skewed the PiS programme to a populist left in matters concerning agriculture and local government and to an extreme traditionalist Catholic stand on the family, education and other areas of social policy. This only compounded a process of decline in the quality of its politics as Marcinkiewicz was shunted aside to make way for Jarosław Kaczyński, who became prime minister in July 2006, creating the bizarre situation of twin brothers holding the two highest offices in the land.
While the PiS government did achieve some notable success in curbing crime and corruption, it failed to tackle many other issues, and expended its energies on picking unnecessary quarrels with the opposition and creating a febrile atmosphere which drove people to take extreme positions. The issue of answerability for past crimes, or rather accusations of collaboration with the communist regime, was used as a political weapon to destroy rivals. The constant vicious infighting at the top created a mood of exasperation in the country at large, encouraging many younger people to escape by finding work abroad, contributing to an economic emigration of well over a million, despite the existence of jobs at home.
The Kaczyński brothers gave the impression of being increasingly embattled against various real or imaginary foes, and in a mood of mounting paranoia saw traitors in their own ranks, dismissing a number of their ablest ministers, such as the Defence Minister Radosław Sikorski. The coalition eventually fell apart in August 2007, leading to fresh elections in October.
A real sense of crisis could be felt during the run-up, and for the first time since 1989 a large number of younger voters took the trouble to take part. The result was a resounding victory for Donald Tusk’s Citizens’ Platform, which took over 41 per cent of the vote, and PiS, which, although it was knocked into second place, increased its share of the vote to over 32 per cent, while the left scraped just over 13 and the People’s Party less than 9. Lepper’s Self-Defence and the League of Polish Families, with just over 1 per cent each, failed to reach the threshold for representation.
These elections represent something of a watershed in the history of the Third Republic. The hundred-plus parties which had contested the elections of 1991 had been reduced over the intervening years to no more than half a dozen, the dozens represented in the Sejm to no more than four. The demagogues, single-issue politicians and post-communists who had preyed on an inexperienced electorate had finally been voted out of the picture. At no stage during that time was the democratic process ever questioned, even by extremists, and the process of parliamentary democracy had firmly established itself at the centre of Polish life in a way it had not in the 1920s. Yet serious flaws can be detected in the mechanisms of Poland’s democracy, most of them inherent in its origins.
In Poland, democracy was not imposed on a neutral country; it was won by the efforts of the oppositionists of 1947, the striking workers of Poznań in 1956, the students of 1968, the dockyard workers of 1970, the Radom workers of 1976, by the activists of KIK, KOR, ROPCiO, by Solidarność and all those, inside the country and out, who struggled for the overthrow of Soviet domination. They included left-wing workers who were traditionalist Catholics, right-wing but populist and egalitarian peasants, intellectuals of every orientation, and traditional middle-class conservatives. Most of them had been conditioned by the communist world in which they had been brought up to reject such fundamentals of democracy as property rights, the rule of law and personal answerability. That upbringing had also inspired in them a subversive attitude to the state and all organs of authority.
While the political class that emerged triumphant in 1989 represented a wide spectrum of opinion and beliefs, it thought of itself as being on the ’right’, since it had fought against the communists, and believed itself to be united because it had stood shoulder to shoulder against them. The run-up to the first free elections in 1991 shattered this fictitious political unity and sense of solidarity as over a hundred parties joined the campaign. These were not based on coherent political manifestos; they were merely groups of like-minded people focused on personalities or single issues.
The political thinking and strategies of the post-Solidarność camp had been forged in protest and subversion, which they had underpinned with moral arguments. Those arguments became irrelevant when the oppressive regime had been overthrown and the time came to build a new Poland, and they did not have any ready substitutes. As they struggled to reposition themselves in the new reality, the various leaders became locked in an acerbic debate on what kind of Poland they should rebuild, conducted in moral, and therefore often extremist terms. This, as well as their subversive skills, invalidated them as politicians.
By contrast, the post-communists were pragmatic and efficient. They were not communists, not even socialists by conviction; they had joined the Party for opportunistic career reasons and been groomed to govern. Just as they were about to inherit the kingdom, in the late 1980s, it fell apart, leaving them stranded. With their managerial training and some experience of power, they were a natural governing class; their sense of discipline, connections and access to cash allowed them to form a successful political force.
All this created misunderstandings and contradictions. Supposedly right-wing governments carried through social-democratic programmes, thereby alienating not only their coalition partners but also their constituencies. As no genuine left-wing party emerged, those who would naturally vote socialist were confused, and often found themselves supporting parties which enacted capitalist policies. The post-communist SLD favoured the free market and was supported by middle-class conservatives who wanted order and stability. The ostensibly far-right PiS was supported by the poor, whom it seduced by its nationalistic, populist and socialist slogans.
At the time of writing, the Sejm was dominated by two allegedly right-wing parties, differentiated less by their policies than by their style and rhetoric. As both were formed by a coming together of earlier parties and splinter groups, they lacked a proper statement of their policy fundamentals, not to mention the internal democratic mechanisms regulating choice of leader, internal discipline, formulation of policy and so on. They were ultimately defined by the personality of their leaders, and it was a matter for conjecture whether they would exist at all under their current names in five years’ time.
In contrast to the less than glorious trajectory of Poland’s political development since 1989, her foreign policy has been surprisingly intelligent and consistent. This was a vital element in the re-establishment of the Polish state, considering both the Poles’ former dominance in the east and the lack of any settlement with Germany after 1945, not to mention the problem of developing a new relationship with Russia.
Given the history of relations between the two over the past five centuries, the re-emergence of an independent Poland could not be viewed in Russia as anything but a challenge, one that raised a great many questions and posed huge problems for the ailing Soviet Union. Particularly as, in this area at least, Polish political thought had progressed radically over the preceding decades.
The question of how Poles should regard the areas of the former Commonwealth lying beyond Poland’s boundaries had been exercising minds since 1795. But it was the events of 1918-21 and the horrors of the Second World War that turned the issue into a moral one for thinking Poles. The consequence was a wide-ranging discussion on the whole question of what a future Poland’s attitude to Russia, Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine should be. This discussion was carried on during the 1970s and 1980s, in word and print, in smoke-filled rooms and over the radio waves, both within Poland and in émigré circles, particularly in London and Paris, where the periodical Kultura, edited by Jerzy Gedroyc, led the debate. It was in many ways the kind of reassessment that former colonial powers were forced to make during the 1950s and 1960s, and it had three fundamental consequences. The first was that the Poles came to accept the necessity of taking territorial disputes and assumed wrongs such as the Volhynian ethnic cleansing of 1943 out of the argument. The second was that they grew used to treating the other nations as equals and their aspirations as legitimate. The third was an acceptance that the only way forward was through cooperation, at any cost.
Within weeks of its formation in September 1989, the contractual government’s Foreign Minister Krzysztof Skubiszewski opened up relations with the Soviet republics of Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine, as if they were sovereign states. Within a year he was signing bilateral agreements with Ukraine, ignoring a clamour there for a Polish apology for Operation Vistula and one in Poland for a Ukrainian apology for the Volhynian cleansing. Relations with Belarus were circumscribed by its closeness to Russia, while those with Lithuania were complicated by the vociferous Polish minority there, which demanded territorial revision or at least special minority status. In response, Skubiszewski declared that Poland would never seek to revise her frontier with Lithuania and did not consider Poles resident in that country to be anything other than Lithuanian citizens. This attitude to minorities beyond its frontiers was in stark contrast to the irredentism displayed by other states in the area, notably Hungary, Slovakia and Serbia. But relations with Lithuania remained tense, partly because from the start Lithuanian nationalism had defined itself in opposition to Poland, and partly because Russia was loath to relinquish its grip on the area.
Poland’s relations with the Soviet Union were bound to be strained. There were large bodies of Russian troops stationed in Poland (they would not leave until the autumn of 1993), and Russia was still hoping to keep the country within its sphere of interest. Both sides trod carefully; Poland refrained from bringing up the question of the troops and the Soviets made a formal admission that the Katyn massacre had indeed been perpetrated by the NKVD, a gesture greatly appreciated in Poland.
The break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991 marked a turning point. Poland was the first country to recognise Ukraine’s declaration of independence, and the second to recognise Lithuania. Matters were more complicated with respect to Belarus, which identified strongly with Russia, and where nationalists claimed large areas of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania.
Earlier, in February 1990, Wałęsa had met presidents Vaclav Havel of Czechoslovakia and Jozsef Antall of Hungary at Vyšehrad, in Prague, where they reached a tripartite agreement to provide a framework for united action and regional security. Poland proposed that they seek entry into the European Union jointly, but this was rejected by Czechoslovakia, which, being economically fitter, was hoping to be admitted earlier on its own. Poland also wanted the Vyšehrad group, as it became known, to act as a bridge to Europe for countries such as Lithuania, but this initiative was turned down too.
Although it was not always successful, Polish diplomacy in the 1990s was remarkably inspired, sophisticated and consistent, despite the frequent changes of government, and was largely responsible for the peaceful resolution of painful problems in the whole region, which might otherwise easily have developed as they did in the Balkans.
Another area in which demons from the past had to be con-fronted was the issue of Polish-Jewish relations over the course of the twentieth century. In May 1991, during a visit to Israel, Wałęsa made a public apology on behalf of every Pole who had ever harmed a Jew. More important, Polish historians initiated a sensitive and objective discussion of the subject, which forced the whole of society to reconsider their view of the past. An important element in this was their uncoupling of acts of violence perpetrated on Jews by Poles from the harm done by Jews to Poles, which had the effect of disabling the tit-for-tat arguments hitherto used by both sides to blame and justify. This went hand in hand with a revival of interest in Jewish culture and its place in Poland’s past.
Polish diplomacy faced a no less delicate subject as it opened relations with Germany. In 1945 Poland had acquired, by Stalin’s writ and the Western Allies’ acquiescence, a huge swathe of former German territory, and those who had been ousted from it joined German nationalists in a chorus demanding its return. Alarm bells began ringing in Warsaw in 1990, when the West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl showed reluctance to ratify the existing border and Poland was not invited to take part in the ’two plus four’ talks (the two Germanies and the four wartime allies America, Britain, France and Russia) on the proposed unifi cation of Germany. Poland demanded formal ratification of its western border, reminding all concerned that, when signing agreements with Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine, it had declared its unconditional recognition of existing borders and its refusal to encourage claims by minorities either within those countries or ousted from them. This put moral pressure on Germany, and, with the support of the United States, which was already viewing Poland as a strategic partner for the future, the existing borders were confirmed.
Poland submitted an application for EU membership in 1994, and was formally admitted on 1 May 2004. A more significant date for many Poles was 12 March 1999, when the country joined NATO, along with Hungary and the Czech Republic, as this act finally cancelled out the Yalta Agreement by placing Poland firmly outside the Russian sphere of influence.
Poland took NATO membership seriously and offered large contingents for every one of its operations, including, crucially, that in Iraq, where the Polish special force GROM played a vital role, capturing the oil terminal of Basra in an advance operation. This earned the country recognition in Washington, where in January 2003 President George W. Bush told his Polish counterpart Aleksander Kwaśniewski that Poland was America’s best friend in Europe—but not in Paris, where President Chirac described its behaviour as ’infantile’.
Relations with both of Poland’s major neighbours subsequently took a turn for the worse, and echoes from an ugly past reverberated across the region. In 2004 a demand for compensation for those expelled from former German areas annexed to Poland in 1945 resurfaced as a political issue in Germany, the Poles countered by raking up German atrocities in Poland, and public opinion in both countries took over from common sense. While diplomatic relations remained cordial, politicians on both sides could not resist getting involved. When, in September 2005, the German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder signed an agreement with Russia to reroute a gas pipeline which was to have gone through Poland under the Baltic Sea, there was talk of the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact.
Gas had become Russia’s new weapon, and she did not hesitate to use it as a reminder of her power and her interest in the area by cutting off the supply to Ukraine in February 2004. Poland continued to take a keen interest in Ukraine, despite a resurgence of anti-Polish nationalism there, and when the interference of Moscow and electoral fraud robbed Viktor Yushchenko of victory in the Ukrainian presidential election of November 2004, precipitating the so-called Orange Revolution, thousands of Poles, including Wałęsa and other leading figures, went to Kiev to support him. And it was Poland’s President Aleksander Kwaśniewski who played the decisive role in defusing the crisis and negotiating a settlement.
This had an immediate effect on Polish-Russian relations. Having previously revealed secret documents and admitted the truth about crimes committed against the Polish people in Stalin’s day, various Russian agencies now began to backtrack and to take the Stalinist line on subjects such as Russia’s involvement in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. In the autumn of 2005, a new Russian national day was instituted, 4 November, the date the Poles were ejected from the Kremlin in 1612, and the following day Russia banned the import of Polish meat on grounds of hygiene. Poland involved the EU in the trade issues, and in 2006 Prime Minister Marcinkiewicz suggested a European joint energy security pact in the face of renewed Russian threats to use gas supply as a weapon of coercion.
By then, Poland had developed a close relationship with the United States, which had come to view it, along with the Czech Republic, as part of its global security system. By calling for the admission of Ukraine and Georgia to NATO and building up links with Moldavia and Azerbaijan, Poland was also turning itself into the diplomatic pivot of NATO in the region. This placed it in the front line of America’s confrontation with Russia, but, ironically, probably made it more secure. Russia remained wedded to an oldfashioned sense of greatness, one that would be affronted by a confident sovereign Poland, whether it was in alliance with the United States or not.
Polish society has certainly not shown itself to be devoid of patriotism and a wish to enhance its international standing, but it has also, like other European societies, shown a greater interest in economic development. And in this it achieved a remarkable degree of success.
The transformation from a Soviet centrally planned command economy to a free-market one was bound to be slow and painful, and it was made more so by the catastrophic condition of the Polish economy in 1989. The new government inherited vast debts, a burdensome welfare system that could not cope with the demands placed on it, and inflation of 586 per cent. The Soviet-era flagship industries such as steel and shipbuilding were not only unable to pull the economy out of the crisis, they were haemorrhaging money.
The bold moves made by Balcerowicz in the first months convinced the outside world that Poland was serious, and in 1990 the IMF granted a credit of $700 million and the World Bank $1.5 billion. A number of state enterprises were privatised and a stock exchange was opened in Warsaw at the beginning of 1991 (in the redundant former Party headquarters). In March of that year nearly half of Poland’s foreign debt was cancelled. In the following year all state farms were sold off, and the first signs of improvement were visible, despite the difficult conditions created by the world recession. Industrial output rose in 1992 by 4 per cent and agricultural production by 12. In 1993, GDP grew by 3.8 per cent, half of it accounted for by the private sector. Inflation was down to 35 per cent and the people of Poland were accustoming themselves to personal income tax and VAT.
By 1995, when the zloty lost four zeros and the exchange rate was floated, GDP had reached 7 per cent growth. The break-up and privatisation of the large state enterprises were under way, and while a complicated regulatory and tax system discouraged it, foreign investment began to flow in—$33 billion over the next five years. The economy was damaged by the crisis in Russia in the late 1990s, weighed down by unemployment hovering between 15 and 20 per cent, and by the lack of firm direction and the difficulty of voting budgets attendant on weak coalition governments. Yet by the end of the decade inflation had fallen to 10 per cent and the zloty was rising steadily against the dollar and the euro. By then the private sector accounted for over three-quarters of GDP, and when, in 2002, inflation was brought down to 3 per cent, the country’s economy could be said to have come out of the woods.
Structural problems remained, and economic life was hidebound by overregulation and arcane practices left over from the past, which meshed with newly introduced EU regulation to create an expensive and time-consuming business environment. Although average income increased in real terms by 22 per cent between 1995 and 2000, large sections of the population, particularly the elderly and rural communities, did not benefit from the fruits of the changes, and continued to live in relative poverty. Yet the Polish economy was more broadly based than that in most post-communist countries, and a large middle class was beginning to emerge.
The whole process was beset by profound psychological and social problems. The overwhelming majority of those brought up before 1989 found it difficult to grasp that capitalism is not some kind of new doctrine but merely an extension of the rights to freedom and property. This had the effect of turning purely economic problems into political ones. That is why no government was willing or bold enough to return property confiscated by the communists or to compensate the owners. Aside from the dubious moral message this sent out, it meant that large tracts of central Warsaw were not developed and much investment was arrested. More importantly, this inability to grasp realities revealed the degree to which life under Soviet communism moulded the psyche and rendered people incapable of logical thought and action. This affected political and social discourse, which was regularly distorted by a tendency to direct it onto a supposedly moral plane which usually reverted to an ideological and fundamentally communist one.
At the same time, Polish society was being exposed through the media to Western consumerist culture and offered a bewildering variety of choice, which led to a splintering of the old solidarities based on shared deprivation, both moral and material. While some segments of society became caught up in a scramble for money and the attributes of a Western lifestyle, others retreated into angry nationalism or a Sunday-school Catholicism epitomised by the bigoted and xenophobic Radio Marya.
The cultural and educational scene which had been dominated by acknowledged masters and role models gave way to a free-forall, with new private schools and universities showing up venerable institutions such as the Jagiellon University, and minor television personalities garnering greater interest than established writers and artists. The Nobel laureate Wisława Szymborska and the Oscarwinning film director Andrzej Wajda still commanded notice as well as respect, but high culture was largely occluded by flashier imports.
It is therefore very difficult to expound with any authority on the state of Polish society and culture in the decades after 1989. In his order disbanding the AK in 1945, General Okulicki made it clear that the war was not over. ’You must not for one moment admit a doubt that this war can only end with the victory of the just cause, the triumph of good over evil, of freedom over slavery,’ he wrote. The war did end with the victory of that cause, in 1989. But the wounds inflicted on Polish society during those forty-four years were so deep, so varied and so complex that they would not heal easily.
Some of the most difficult to heal were inflicted in the 1970s and 1980s, when the communist regime forced hundreds of thousands of Poles to spy and report on each other. The Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), established in 1999 and entrusted with all the files of the communist secret services, failed to formulate any coherent policy on how this material was to be treated. Information was released to researchers on a largely ad-hoc basis, leading to the exposure of some without in any way clearing the air. While minor informers were denounced and hounded, usually for political reasons, former members of the security services with blood on their hands made successful careers and took their place among the wealthiest people in the country. This created a deep wound within society, one set to fester for some time to come
Pope John Paul II visited his country five times after 1989, and used these occasions to address some of the problems of Polish society. He was Poland’s greatest role model, not surprisingly, since the census of 2001 revealed that out of a total population of 38.6 million, 34.6 million were Catholics. But he was also revered and listened to by non-believers. His death on 2 April 2005 not only deprived the country of its greatest role model. It also robbed the Polish Church of its mentor.
After the fall of communism, the Church, which had been at the centre of the struggle for its overthrow and played a vital political role in it, struggled to redefine its mission and find a new place in Polish society. This would not have been easy even if many of its members had not developed a taste for political power and they had all been intellectually up to facing the challenges of a rapidly changing world. It got caught up in major political debates over everything from abortion to EU membership, which revealed internal divisions and damaged its authority.
The destruction of Poland’s intellectual, spiritual and social elites by the Nazis and the Soviets between 1939 and 1956, and their con—tinuing emasculation until 1989, had placed the Church in the position of being the only repository and trustee of the values they held dear. With the mission of upholding them and passing them on came great moral authority. Much of that was dissipated after 1989.
Throughout this period there was an evident longing on the part of younger generations for fresh role models and leadership, but no new elite recognised by wider sections of the population emerged. Given an educational system geared to little more than the achievement of grades, it is difficult to see how it could. Similarly, no sense of respect for public institutions was allowed to develop by the squabbles and scandals in the Sejm, the smell of corruption surrounding the media and the police, and, perhaps most important, the corporatism, inefficiency and ineffectuality of the legal system.
As a state, Poland faces geopolitical challenges very similar to those it faced over the past four or five centuries. As a society, it faces the same globalising influences and threats to identity and cohesion as any other, from the most developed and sophisticated to the most recently contacted peoples of Amazonia. Given its social and systemic problems, it would be rash to predict how Polish society will confront these, and whether it will be able to overcome them as successfully as it has survived the onslaughts of the past. Yet that past undoubtedly holds most of the answers.