1
Introductory remarks
This book was written in the course of one year but it can be read as a summing up of more than 15 years of my research into the Polish populist radical right. This particular political specimen comes in a variety of shapes and colours in post-communist Poland, while ideologies and traditions of radical national populism define its core identity. Thus both labels â âpopulist radical rightâ and ânational(ist) populismâ â have been employed in the text to the point of interchangeability.
Back in the 1990s, some signs of political radicalization could be seen on the horizon, but it was generally inconceivable that so many protagonists of then marginal political subcultures would soon become members of the countryâs ruling elite. In the 1990s Poland was usually referred to as a country without significant populist radical right movements. It was considered to be a stable, even if young, democracy, and âextremistsâ were perceived as just a little nuisance to the consensus.
By the mid-2000s, the picture changed completely. In 2006, two populist radical right parties (the League of Polish Families and Self-Defence) entered into a coalition government with the right-wing conservative Law and Justice party. A member of a ânational-socialist black metalâ sect, the publisher of brochures under titles such as âNational Socialism. Goals and principlesâ became the official spokesman of one of Polandâs three governing parties. The leader of a skinhead nationalist organization became the minister of education. Another one became a vice-minister of sport. A publisher of a nazi-skinhead fanzine became the chairman of the board of state TV. There were many more similar examples ⊠All of the above mentioned individuals were in their late 20s or early 30s. Their political socialization happened through the extreme-nationalist movement, drawing both from the traditions of the 1930s radical-nationalist right and from contemporary cultural resources such as the racist skinhead culture.
All of a sudden, racist extremist affiliations were not a hindrance to a high-level career, but were tolerated or even seemed positively valued by those who had a direct say in their appointments. The entrance of extremists into state structures was no longer a matter of isolated individual cases, but took on systemic features.
The distance between the political margin and the political mainstream proved dramatically small. In just a few years, groups of the populist radical right, including extreme right elements, went all the way from the fringe to the very centre of politics in one of the European Union member states. Expressions of xenophobia and intolerance, promoted by media outlets such as Radio Maryja, became the quasi-official ideology of the Polish government, to many observersâ dismay and disbelief.
The government that included the populist radical right collapsed after little more than a year and the most extreme members of its coalition were voted out of the parliament after an unprecedented mobilization of (especially young) voters. The 2009 European Parliament election results in Poland confirmed the roll-back of radical nationalism and the main radical right group was reduced to just 1 per cent of the vote. Nevertheless, some nationalist populist ideas (and activists) have remained firmly established in Polish politics and they are set to stay as important players in the years to come.
The main aim of this book is to outline and analyse the journey of the populist radical right in Poland from political obscurity to the heart of mainstream politics (and back).
The book aims to make sense of the rapid growth of organized radical nationalism on the political level by showing its origins, its internal dynamics and the historical, political, social and cultural context that has made it possible. In particular, the specific cultural resources of Polish nationalist populism are discussed here because they are deemed to be among the principal reasons for the relative success of the Polish radical nationalists and their particular brand of identity politics.
Surprisingly, there is not a single volume on the contemporary Polish populist radical right (or nationalist populism, or extreme right) in English today. In fact, very little has been published on the subject by Polish academics either. This book therefore tries to fill an important gap in existing English-language literature concerning a large European country that has traditionally attracted significant international interest for its history and politics.
Let me stress that I do not intend to present the totality of the Polish political life in this modest book. That would be impossible. I have not tried to exhaust the subject of the Polish nationalist and populist right either. I have rather tried to propose a way of looking at the subject, prioritizing its cultural and ideological aspects at the expense of conventional âpolitical sociologyâ understood, for example, as an analysis of voting patterns. In the case of Poland the latter tool is highly problematic. The reason is partly to be found in the extreme fluctuations in electoral support (in a typical example, the social democratic SLD won 41 per cent of the vote in 2001 and just 11 per cent at the next election in 2005). Rados
aw Markowski notes
The electoral volatility is connected to the notoriously unstable political landscape of party labels, splits, changing leaders, etc. All this makes any durable âpolitical sociologyâ analysis of particular parties a near-impossible task, simply because the actors change constantly. As a result, some analyses included here may read like contemporary history, rather than political science, but I hope this does not devalue the overall analysis itself.
In contrast, the cultural threads described in this book belong to the âlong durĂ©eâ features of Polish identity. It can be expected that nationalist populism, which feeds on them, will remain part and parcel of the countryâs political life in the years to come. In this sense, this book is probably going to retain much of its relevance in the foreseeable future.
Antisemitism is crucial to the Polish populist radical right, but Germanophobia and Russophobia have been very important to several brands too. Moreover, their authoritarianism is important to note, including its ties to traditionalist Roman Catholicism. The latter aspect is strongly interlinked with the contemporary Polish radical right, which employs the discourse of moral absolutism. Homophobia in particular has played an increasingly important role in right-wing populist propaganda. At the same time, we must realize that the Polish extreme right is largely about antisemitism, much more than anything else. It is simply a central element of the nationalist political tradition. The number of Jews in Poland today is minimal, but the anti-Jewish prejudice serves as a code for a general hostility to diversity and to Polish (liberal) democracy. In Poland, and in much of East Central Europe, it is a paradigmatic form of intolerance. For this reason, this book is in large measure also a book about antisemitism, as expressed in Polish political discourse, even though it is not its exclusive focus.
My goal is to provide at least a partial answer to the question, how was it possible for the extreme right and national populism to make such rapid advances into the Polish political mainstream? In particular, what were the symbolic resources it used and the cultural frames that informed its outlook? What are the ideologies of the Polish extreme right and national populism? I have treated âideologyâ in the broadest possible sense here: as Stuart Hall put it,
The terminology employed in the following text includes a number of essentially contested terms. I do not claim to have âdiscoveredâ the only and true meaning of each of the controversial terms such as âextreme rightâ, ânationalismâ, âfascismâ, âpopulismâ, etc. They are, and will remain, controversial and some measure of arbitrariness in their usage is unavoidable. Various political groups described in this book can be characterized by one or more of the above labels. It does not mean they are all the same. Instead of lumping them altogether, I will try to describe their relevant similarities as well as some key differences.
As Jerzy Tomaszewski writes, âIt is a feature of the Polish political scene that hardly any people with serious ambitions declare themselves to be nationalistsâ.3 In contrast, we employ the term ânationalismâ in a more value-neutral way throughout the book, even though it could be argued that the traditional Polish distinction between âpatriotismâ and ânationalismâ is not without its merits. Nevertheless, we reject an essentialist understanding of the nation â which is still generally speaking hegemonic in Poland and across much of East Central Europe â in favour of a constructionist perspective on the nation as an âimagined communityâ.4 Nationalism can thus be defined broadly as a political ideology that is centred on the notion of the nation as its core value. In the classic formulation of Ernest Gellner, âNationalism is primarily a political principle, which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent. Nationalism as a sentiment, or as a movement, can best be defined in terms of this principleâ.5
In historical practice, in Poland (and in the broader EastâCentral European region) the nationalist principle has expressed itself most often in the form of ethno-nationalism, where ethnic bonds of shared ancestry take priority over civic affiliations. The civic nationalism of JĂłzef Pi
sudski was, arguably, an exception to this rule, and â as we will argue in the subsequent chapters â any broader popular awareness of that multi-cultural aspect of the Polish national tradition is largely a thing of the past.
Moreover, the sharp distinction between the supposedly radically dissimilar types of nationalism: âcivicâ (which is said to be prevalent in Western Europe) and âethnicâ (which is attributed to the East), has been criticized and problematized by some contemporary authors. They suggest that nationalism is in fact a mixture of both elements: it âalways includes political/civic and cultural/ethnic aspectsâ.6 Indeed, they can be seen as abstract ideal types which do not exist in actual reality, while the political practice of nationalism is always located in the broad grey zone between the âcivicâ and the âethnicâ poles. The history of Polish nationalism provides more evidence of that.
The âextreme rightâ is, arguably, an even more controversial label, one which even fewer actors would willingly adopt. In our understanding of the extreme right in the Polish context, it would apply to those political groups and ideologies that subscribe to a radically anti-pluralist, homogeneous vision of the national community and reject the basic democratic values. Violence often accompanies extreme-right politics, either directly or implicitly (e.g. through a discursive justification of violent means).
This book prioritizes the (nominally democratic) populist radical right as well as the (openly anti-democratic) extreme right as the focus of our attention (seen against the background of the broader cultural and political phenomenon of national populism). It does not mean, however, that all the groups and parties mentioned here belong to this category. For example, the Law and Justice party has tolerated extreme-right activists as its allies and even in its ranks, but its political pedigree is different. Nevertheless, the analysis would not be complete without discussing the role Law and Justice has played in the story.
Analytically, it is possible to set apart the extreme right from the (populist) radical right, i.e. from those groups which espouse a âstrongâ version of typically right-wing ideas (such as the free market, traditional moral norms, etc.), but their ideas and methods are within the confines of democratic rules. The distinction between the radical and the extreme right is sometimes difficult to maintain, however, especially in describing those polities where mainstream political actors are not necessarily keen to distance themselves from extremist groups and ideas. The new democracies of East Central Europe often fall into that category. There is also some persisting confusion on the leftâright dichotomy in transition-period post-communist societies, where a conservative approach is typically associated with post-communist parties, while anti-communists have argued for a large-scale reconstruction of the way society works. For these reasons, typologies of âleftâ and ârightâ have been notoriously unstable and prone to controversy. Nevertheless, there are political actors who deserve the âextreme rightâ tag without doubt....
