The Origins of Modern Polish Democracy

M. B. B. Biskupski, James S. Pula, Piotr J. Wróbel

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780821418918
• eBook ISBN: 9780821443095
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

The Origins of Modern Polish Democracy is a series of closely integrated essays that traces the idea of democracy in Polish thought and practice. It begins with the transformative events of the mid-nineteenth century, which witnessed revolutionary developments in the socioeconomic and demographic structure of Poland, and continues through changes that marked the postcommunist era of free Poland.

The idea of democracy survived in Poland through long periods of foreign occupation, the trials of two world wars, and years of Communist subjugation. Whether in Poland itself or among exiles, Polish speculation about the creation of a liberal-democratic Poland has been central to modern Polish political thought. This volume is unique in that is traces the evolution of the idea of democracy, both during the periods when Poland was an independent country—1918-1939—and during the periods of foreign occupation before 1918 through World War II and the Communist era. For those periods when Poland was not free, the volume discusses how the idea of democracy evolved among exile and underground Polish circles.

This important work is the only single-volume English-language history of modern Polish democratic thought and parliamentary systems and represents the latest scholarly research by leading specialists from Europe and North America.

1

An Introduction to Polish Democratic Thought

Daniel Z. Stone

The present volume builds on an earlier publication, Polish Democratic Thought from the Renaissance to the Great Emigration: Essays and Documents, which was dedicated to the May 3, 1791, constitution and appeared shortly before its bicentenary.¹ The constitution provided a symbol of Polish determination to create a modern democratic state embracing all elements of the Polish nation through peaceful, or at least bloodless, action. These qualities were what made the eighteenth-century political philosopher Edmund Burke call it “the most pure . . . public good which ever has been conferred on mankind,” in sharp contrast to the bloodstained French Revolution, which Burke abhorred.² These qualities, in 1918, also led the newly independent Poland to choose May 3 for its national holiday. The Communist government shifted the holiday to nearby May 1 to celebrate the labor movement, but the May 3 holiday returned when Communism fell. Polish communities in the diaspora celebrated May 3 without interruption. The essays in the earlier volume discuss the period from about 1500 to the 1840s, with reference to later events, and significant laws and political manifestos in English translation and in the Polish or Latin original provide additional background. The essays in the current volume cover the period from the 1860s to the present.

In both volumes, the term “thought” is taken in its broadest sense to include both the written word and the organizational activities needed to put abstract ideas of democracy into practice. Amusingly, in a volume that rejects the Communist era as dictatorial and foreign-inspired, the approach is one of praxis, or putting thought into action, an approach that was adopted by Marxists to show the practical significance of abstract ideas. There is nothing wrong, of course, in using a good idea from any source, and the term antedates Marxism by over two thousand years. These two volumes on Polish democratic thought provide a quick history of the country emphasizing its consistent democratic aspirations.

Despite its seemingly obvious meaning, “democracy” is a complicated term that needs careful definition. The English political scholar Bernard Crick has defined democracy as (1) “a principle or doctrine of government,” (2) “a set of institutional arrangements or constitutional devices,” and (3) “a type of behavior” that includes both respect for oneself and respect for others. He notes that all three characteristics “do not always go together.” When they conflict, it may be due to the conflict between two views: that democracy is liberty to do what you want, and that democracy requires limitations on unchecked behavior.³ As these two volumes on Polish democratic thought demonstrate, Poles have generally been attached to the principle of democratic government in Crick’s first definition. However, the set of institutional arrangements in his second definition has not always been suitable to make this principle work. Furthermore, and hardest to document, the type of behavior in Crick’s third definition has often interfered with the process of orderly government. Adherence to ideological or other principles and strong personal antipathies have often made it difficult to reach the compromises that are needed to hold a society together. In the 1920s, Józef Piłsudski identified a lingering Polish predilection to oppose government initiatives as the product of the partition era, and this attitude scarcely disappeared under German occupation during the Second World War or in forty-five years of Communist rule. Indeed, its origins may be found before the partitions, in early modern times, when nobles resisted authority, trying to protect their freedoms. The Polish suspicion of government has resulted in periods when weak governments failed to prepare for and react to domestic and international crises. This trait was glaringly obvious in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and led up to the partitions. The Second Republic (1918 to 1939) and Third Republic (1989 to the present) have shared this problem, although bold initiatives have also been launched. At present, post-Communist governments have adopted political, economic, and diplomatic measures that appear likely, barring major crises, to ensure a bright future.

However important these issues seem to Poles and their sympathizers, they have little resonance with the outside world. American textbooks paid little attention to east-central Europe fifty years ago, as the noted historian region.”⁴

Norman Davies’s Europe: A History provides a rare exception. Written by a Polonist with several significant books to his credit, this account integrates the history of the entire European continent.⁵ In most general accounts of European history and Western civilization, “Europe” ends in Berlin and Vienna. An exception may be made for Russia, thanks to its great power status in the modern world. For the typical west European or North American, the image of Europe resembles Saul Steinberg’s famous New Yorker magazine cover depicting a Manhattanite’s view of America—the urban peaks of lower New York, the Hudson River, a few farms in New Jersey, Chicago in the distance, some mountains, San Francisco, and the Pacific Ocean. Similarly, a Westerner’s map of Europe would show London, Paris, and maybe Florence; Berlin would be discernible in the distance; then there would be empty fields until St. Petersburg or Moscow loomed up on the edge of the abyss. Vibrant cities such as Warsaw, Prague, Budapest, and their countries, would not appear on the map at all. Mass tourism in the twenty-first century may erase the distinction between East and West, but it will take time.

The general textbook account of Polish history differs in degree only, since democracy is a relative latecomer as a primary value in European history. The main emphasis in Western civilization from the High Middle Ages until the French Revolution was on efficiency and power, and most textbooks praise European kings for centralizing power in their own hands. The feudal nobles who shared power with royalty or even dominated it are portrayed as obstacles to progress. An otherwise fine recent textbook typifies the approach, mentioning medieval Poland only through Nicolaus Copernicus. Early-modern Poland is discussed primarily to show the deficiencies of the Polish constitution and the partitions, although Jan III Sobieski’s 1683 victory at Vienna is also highlighted.⁶ This version scarcely varies from a classic statement by the great French historian Roland Mousnier thirty years earlier. Mousnier saw European kings as “embodying the national ideal.” Royal absolutism was socially progressive because, in “the antagonism of two classes, the bourgeoisie and the nobility,” royalty sided with the former.⁷ For him, as for many other historians, medieval parliaments and medieval privileges constructed bastions of class-based (or estate-based) social injustice, victimizing the lower orders and halting the construction of a state that would provide justice.

The deficiencies of the Polish constitution, along with its virtues, excite one historian’s comment that early-modern Poland’s democratic practice was merely “the onset of political artero-sclerosis” and that “the [modern] nations of Eastern Europe had no tradition of democracy in the Western sense.” As a result, “if one regards Soviet Communism as a disease, then it seems that Eastern Europe may have had a pre-disposition to the infection.” This historian finds the roots of permanent backwardness in Charlemagne’s failure to push the borders of his empire farther east in the ninth century.⁸ Other historians suggest different periods of history, such as western Europe’s sixteenth-century commercial and industrial revolutions, which left east-central Europe behind.

A handful of enthusiasts saw feudal nobles as more than selfish reactionaries who stood in the way of progress. For example, Robert H. Lord must have drawn on his training as a Polish historian to argue that medieval parliaments laid the foundations for the modern state and modern democracy. He claims, “We may be grateful to them [medieval parliaments] for having through centuries, implanted and maintained . . . certain precious ideas about constitutional liberty, the rights of peoples as against monarchs, no taxation without representation, government carried on through and with the consent of the governed, the representative system.” He further points out that modern “friends of liberty could find traditions, precedents, principles, and inspiration in the records of their own parliaments in the Middle Ages.”⁹

While royal absolutism triumphed in France, Austria, Russia, and, eventually, the German states, the libertarian tradition of limiting royal power by creating legal safeguards triumphed in Poland, England, the Netherlands, and Venice, states described in seventeenth-and eighteenth-century political terminology as commonwealths, republics, or free states even though they were ruled by kings, dukes, and doges. Like England, Poland created civil rights to prevent arbitrary arrest and protect due process, as well as political safeguards against absolutism, such as powerful parliaments and limitations on royal appointments. To be sure, such privileges protected only the nobility, but the Polish-Lithuanian nobility made almost 10 percent of the population in the eighteenth century. What is more important, a libertarian principle was established that could gradually be extended to cover other social groups.

Historians often see the roots of Polish democratic thought in the network of legal privileges that established the rights of the nobility to influence or even decide issues of taxation, patronage appointments, and legislation.¹⁰ These began with the 1374 privilege granted in Košice (now in Slovakia) by King Louis the Hungarian, who succeeded Kazimierz III Wielki (Casimir the Great) but who rarely came to Poland. This privilege established a low taxation rate in perpetuity for Polish nobles. Succeeding monarchs proffered new privileges, generally as concessions to win support for wars. In the Nieszawa Statute of 1454, Kazimierz IV Jagiellończyk promised to consult provincial assemblies (sejmiki) before summoning a general military levy ( pospolite ruszenie) or issuing legislation. In 1505, Aleksander granted the privilege of nihil novi (“nothing new”), a pledge to refrain from issuing legislative decrees without approval of the parliament (Sejm). The Polish parliament came to consist of three “estates”: the Senate, composed of Roman Catholic bishops and royally appointed provincial governors; a lower chamber (also called the Sejm) composed of deputies selected by provincial assemblies; and the king himself. Laws were passed by consensus. Some historians have suggested that the kings’ motivation in granting these privileges was to ally themselves with the lesser nobility as a counterweight to the rich, powerful aristocratic stratum known as magnates, whose power often overshadowed that of royalty.¹¹

After the Jagiellonian dynasty died out in 1572, the principle was established that all nobles could participate personally in royal elections by gathering in a mass assembly, usually on a field in Wola, a village near Warsaw that is now well within the city limits. The king had to swear to uphold the constitutional Henrician Articles (named after the first elected king, Henri Valois of France) and specific items negotiated at the time of election (pacta conventa). Furthermore, nobility held together in solidarity based on legal equality, as the proverb proclaimed: “The noble on his estate is equal to the king’s lieutenant.”¹² Although vast differences in wealth existed within the nobility, the principle of equality prevented the emergence of a separate legal group such as the English lords or the hierarchy of barons, earls, dukes, and marquesses within the western European nobility. Each of Napoleon’s soldiers may have carried a marshal’s baton in his knapsack, but poor Polish nobles, many of whom went barefoot and hung their swords on tree branches while plowing their own fields, could win promotion to high military and political rank. In theory, they could even become king. In fact, promotion from the depths to the heights rarely, if ever, occurred, but significant social mobility over several generations was not unusual.

In this fashion, Poles created a system of shared power in which the kings made the important decisions subject to restraint by the nobility. The results were admirable during Poland’s golden age, from about 1450 to 1648. At a time when royal autocracy grew throughout most of Europe, Poland was, for the most part, an oasis of tranquility. There were few rebellions and no civil wars. The religious wars that raged throughout the Germanies and France skipped Poland, as did the persecutions and executions that secured regions such as Italy for Catholicism and countries such as England for Protestantism.¹³ Indeed, the religious situation was closely linked to the drive for political checks and balances as the 25 to 30 percent of nobles who adopted Protestantism in the sixteenth century sought to protect their newfound religion while Roman Catholic nobles, who might have been willing to persecute Protestants, held back for fear of undermining their noble privileges. The Warsaw Confederation (a confederation was a union of nobles in time of crisis) convoked during the 1573 Interregnum proclaimed the legal equality of Catholicism and Protestantism.

Other groups were treated relatively well. The Jewish community grew rapidly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as Jews immigrated from the Germanies and Bohemia to take advantage of new opportunities and better conditions in Poland-Lithuania at a time when they were barred from England, France, Spain, Russia, and many of the German and Italian states.¹⁴ A Muslim Tatar community flourished in Lithuania as well. Accounts differ about the degree of persecution of witches, but Poland-Lithuania seems to have been relatively free of deadly witch hunts.

The constitutional and legal principles established in Poland were gradually extended to the vast Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which became linked to Poland by the marriage of “King” Jadwiga of Poland and Grand Duke Jagiełło (Jogaila) and the associated Union of Krewo (Kriavas) in 1385–86. The dynastic union was made a permanent federal union with a common ruler and parliament by the Union of Lublin (1569), and Lithuanian nobles enjoyed the same legal and democratic rights as their Polish counterparts, although Poland and Lithuania continued to maintain separate officials, treasuries, armies, and law codes. The term “Lithuanian” denoted a place of residence and a political allegiance rather than ethnicity. Lithuanian nobles might be ethnically Lithuanian, Polish, or Ruthenian (Belarusian or Ukrainian), and they might follow Roman Catholicism, Eastern Rite Catholicism (Greek/Ukrainian or Armenian Catholic), Orthodoxy, or even Islam. Despite this diversity, extending noble privileges to these groups helped assimilate and denationalize them, particularly during the peaceful Catholic Reformation, when Zygmunt III Waza (Sigismund Vasa) reserved his political and economic patronage for Roman Catholic nobles. Most Protestant and many Orthodox nobles became Roman Catholic, and their peasants saw them as Poles well into the twentieth century.

Although the institutions of szlachta democracy (noble democracy) were highly prized as it emerged from legal privileges, the term “democracy” itself had pejorative connotations in Renaissance European thought. Defined as rule by the demos, or lower classes, over the rest of society, democracy seemed to classical philosophers and their Renaissance pupils to be no better than the rule of the rich and powerful over the poor. Instead, Renaissance philosophers endorsed a mixed constitution that included royal, aristocratic, and democratic elements, and the mixed Polish-Lithuanian constitution reflected these views. The rights of all three groups were protected by legal safeguards through the three elements of the parliament: the king himself; the highest levels of the nobility through the Senate; and the mass of the nobles through the lower chamber.¹⁵

Looking back on the achievements of the Polish (and Polish-Lithuanian) nobles, we see a distinct system of political democracy and civil liberties that emerged at a time when autocracy was growing in Europe. The system of shared power was, as it turned out, prone to gridlock and eventually undermined the existence of the state, but collapse was not inevitable and might have been averted had wiser policies been followed later. Regardless of the values and shortcomings of noble democracy at the time, it provided a model and an inspiration for future generations. As the current volume on Polish democratic thought shows, democratic ideals came to be typically Polish; democracy was never a foreign import that threatened the moral basis and unity of the Polish nation as it was for European opponents such as French monarchists (from the Vendée to Vichy) and Russian Slavophiles.

Sadly, the problems inherent in noble democracy reached crisis proportion as the unfortunate excesses of democratic practice undermined the strength of the Polish-Lithuanian state.¹⁶ Republicans, determined to minimize the role of the monarchy, clashed with Poland’s Vasa kings, who tried to maintain and occasionally extend royal prerogatives. Wildly exaggerated fears of royal absolutism on the one hand, and, perhaps, a lack of sympathy with Polish traditions on the other, led to the outbreak of noble rebellions that became increasingly serious as the seventeenth century wore on. Furthermore, the failure to find a satisfactory resolution of the Ruthenian (Ukrainian) problem led to a massive revolt in 1648 by Cossacks, Orthodox nobles, and peasants, supported by the Orthodox clergy. After years of damaging warfare, Poland-Lithuania lost its territories east of the Dnieper River. In addition, Swedish, Russian, and Transylvanian armies overran most of Poland-Lithuania in 1654–55. They all were expelled by 1660, but the state was irretrievably damaged.

As if the weaknesses had not been made obvious by events, a comprehensive set of golden liberties became a sacred principle of noble democracy by the 1660s. The liberum veto, the idea of consensus government taken to an impractical extreme, allowed a single negative vote in parliament to block enactment of a bill under discussion and also canceled everything that had previously been approved unanimously. Deputies cast this veto with increasing frequency in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, making the Sejm irrelevant. Other dangerous practices included the elected kingship and lifetime tenure for ministers, which undermined royal power. As a result, central authority collapsed to such a degree that it was sometimes impossible to collect taxes and maintain an army. The government that was restored in 1717 functioned at a low level. To use only one index, the army numbered about twenty thousand men, while Poland-Lithuania’s neighbors fielded anything from one hundred thousand to four hundred thousand men each. The disastrous political system of the late seventeenth century was made worse by a severe economic decline caused by decades of warfare and structural factors.

Luckily, a healthy reform trad...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Preface
• Guide to Pronunciation
• 1. An Introduction to Polish Democratic Thought
• 2. New Political Directions: A Transition toward Popular Participation in Politics, 1863–90
• 3. The Rise of Political Parties, 1890–1914
• 4. Polish Democratic Thought during the First World War
• 5. The Rise and Fall of Parliamentary Democracy in Interwar Polandy
• 6. Polish Democratic Thought at Home, 1939–45
• 7. Democratic Thought and Action among the Polish Political Émigrés, 1939–89
• 8. Polish Democratic Thought and the Fight for Sovereignty, 1945–69
• 9. Polish Democratic Thought, 1968–89: The Long March to Capitalism
• 10. Rebuilding Democracy in Poland, 1989–2004
• Selected Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index