World Order after Leninism

Vladimir Tismaneanu, Marc Morje Howard, Rudra Sil, Vladimir Tismaneanu, Marc Morje Howard, Rudra Sil

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780295802435
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia dell'Europa orientale

World Order after Leninism examines the origins and evolution of world communism and explores how its legacies have shaped the post-Cold War world order. The lessons of Leninism continue to exert a strong influence in contemporary foreign affairs--most visibly in Poland and other post-communist states of the former Soviet Union, but also in China and other newly industrialized states balancing authoritarian impulses against the pressures of globalization, free markets, and democratic possibilities. World Order after Leninism began as a conversation among former students of Ken Jowitt, professor of political science at the University of California at Berkeley from 1970-2002 and whose monumental career transformed the fields of political science, Russian studies, and post-communist studies. Using divergent case studies, the essays in this volume document the ways in which Jowitt's exceptionally original work on Leninism's evolution and consolidation remains highly relevant in analyzing contemporary post-communist and post-authoritarian political transformations.

IIIdentity and Social Transformation in Eastern Europe and Russia

4

INSTITUTIONS AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF INDIVIDUALISM

The Case of Western Poland after World War II

TOMEK GRABOWSKI

Will Poland succeed in the European Union (EU)? Will the EU benefit from Poland’s membership? And, more fundamentally, what kind of a social, political, and cultural animal is Poland? Is it a Western country? Or is it closer, say, to Turkey, and, by admitting Poland, has Europe let a large chunk of Asia in?

Today, in the aftermath of the EU’s historical enlargement, the wildest and most extreme opinions about the newcomer can be heard. Officially, European bureaucrats maintain that there is no problem. To be admitted, they say, the newcomers had to fulfill certain uniform criteria including, for instance, making sufficient progress in synchronizing their laws with those of the EU. Since Poland had done that, it means that it was ready; there is nothing more to say.

Beneath this veneer of official optimism, however, there is a good deal of uncertainty and even fear. And I do not mean just for the average European “man in the street”; I also mean for the continent’s elites. Jokes float around about Poland’s medieval Catholicism and her old-fashioned nationalism. There is talk about the Polish peasant, unwashed and primitive, and about Polish workers, ready to swamp the labor market of neighboring countries. The Economist has outlined the nightmare scenario: Poland will be a thorn in Europe’s back, because it will combine the worst features of the old members; it will be poor and backward, like Greece; it will demand huge subsidies for its farmers, like France; it will be skeptical about integration and scandalously pro-American, like Britain; and it will be corrupt, like Italy.¹

The reality is more complicated. Poland is a hopeful newcomer. It has a potential for being a productive and dynamic member of the European community. But the secret about Poland is that culturally, it is one of the most heterogeneous countries ever admitted to the EU. The country sits on a cultural fault line. On the one hand, it is one of the few postcommunist countries where an authentic, recognizably liberal culture shows strong signs of life. On the other hand, there is ample evidence pointing to the exceptionally strong, authoritarian, and backward-looking undercurrents in Polish society, which brew under the surface of its ostensibly liberal democratic institutions. To put it somewhat crudely, you have in one and the same country parts that are a bit like Ukraine, and parts that are quite like Belgium. The two Polands are in conflict; its outcome hangs in the balance.

The fault line is to a significant degree (although not exclusively) geographical. It divides the country along the north-south axis. If you want to see modern, dynamic, and tolerant Poland, go west—to Wrocław, Opole, or Gdansk. If you want to see illiberal and authoritarian Poland, go east—to places such as Lublin, Rzeszów, Białystok, or even, perhaps, Warsaw.

The aim of this essay is to shed some light on the origins of this divide. In particular, I want to explain why western Poland achieved a breakthrough to cultural individualism and eastern Poland did not. With that goal in mind, I focus especially on the role of institutions as midwives of individualism, both in general, and in the Polish case. My central argument is that organized Catholicism played a key role in bringing individualism to western Poland, but that it was a highly anomalous, local version of Catholicism.

THE CENTRALITY OF INDIVIDUALISM

When we talk of a country’s “readiness for Europe,” we usually make assumptions about culture. Some of the fears I just mentioned boil down to the question of culture—to the feeling that Poland may be culturally too different, too alien for Western Europe. We need to be specific here. The central fact about Western Europe is that it is a liberal democratic space; the sociopolitical “essence” of Europe is liberal democracy. Hence, to assess Poland’s chances of success in the EU, in ways which go beyond wishful thinking and prejudices, we should start by asking, What kind of a culture supports liberal democracy?

Let’s begin impressionistically—with Alexis de Tocqueville. Writing in the 1830s, Tocqueville was trying to understand why liberal democracy was successful in the United States but not in France. His main claim was that

the reign of freedom cannot be established without that of mores, nor mores founded without beliefs. . . . In the United States the dogma of the sovereignty of the people is not an isolated doctrine . . . on the contrary, one can view it as the last link in a chain of opinions that envelops the Anglo-American world as a whole.

What is this “chain of opinions”? asked Tocqueville. And he observed that according to a near-universal consensus among the Americans,

Providence has given to each individual, whoever he may be, the degree of reason necessary for him to be able to direct himself in things that interest him exclusively. Such is the great maxim on which civil and political society in the United States rests. The father of a family applies it to his children, the master to his servants, the township to those under its administration, the province to the townships, the state to the provinces, the Union to the states.

Even America’s dominant religion, says Tocqueville, manifests the same attitude: Protestantism “submits the truths of the other world to individual reason . . . and it grants that each man freely take the way that will lead him to Heaven.”² Here, according to Tocqueville, lies the key to America’s success with democracy.

What is Tocqueville saying? He is saying, in effect, that liberal democracy requires more than a certain set of institutions or a certain level of economic development. It requires more than free elections, a free press, or an independent judiciary. In order for liberal democracy to be sustainable, a society needs a culture whose members believe in their own capacity to discern what is best for them; in other words, who trust their own reason and judgment. This is the “chain of opinions” that he talks about.

Why is such a culture important? For one thing, only people with moral and intellectual self-confidence make competent citizens. A citizen is someone willing and able to bring his own voice to debates about issues of general importance. This means, among other things, that he does not instinctively defer, on such issues, to the opinions of others, be it his friends, parents, workmates, bosses, or priests. Only citizens can fill the formal institutions of democracy with substance. They are noisy and inquisitive. They demand equal treatment; they scrutinize the behavior of their leaders, whom they treat as their equals, and they expect that the leaders live up to certain standards. Without citizens’ engagement, governments cease to be both responsible and responsive. Thus democracy needs a culture of citizenship. And a culture of citizenship, in turn, needs individualism.

The question of individualism—its meaning, origins, and sustainability—is one of the abiding concerns of Ken Jowitt’s work. “An effective liberal capitalist democracy,” he observed at the beginning of the 1990s, “rests on the foundation that is not marketization or privatization; it is individuation. The individual is the basis of liberal capitalist democracy. The question [in any society attempting democratization] is whether you can in fact create a culture in which the individual is the primary actor, as citizen, as entrepreneur, and as a source of moral conscience.”³

Individualism, is, of course, a contested concept. Some view it as an ideology. In this vein, Steven Lukes distinguishes four elementary ideas “variously expressed and combined” in the term “individualism”: (1) the supreme dignity of the individual human being; (2) autonomy; (3) privacy; and (4) self-development. Others view individualism as a peculiar social condition or tendency toward a withdrawal from public life into private life; as such, it is almost synonymous with “egoism” or social anomie. To Marxists, “bourgeois individualism” conjures up the image of political institutions and ideological justifications associated with the liberal state. To Michel Foucault and his disciples, individualism or “modern subjectivity” is a set of practices centered on personal self-perfection and self-fashioning. The only consensus that holds (and it is a significant one) is that individualism is, for better or worse (depending on one’s partisan proclivities), a distinct marker of Western liberal capitalist societies—or that, at least, it has developed to the highest degree in the West.

Following Jowitt, who builds on the classical tradition of Emile Durkheim, by “individualism” I will understand a cultural order based on the moral primacy of individuals over groups. In individualist cultures, the individual—not the group—is viewed as the primary actor—as citizen, as entrepreneur, and as a source of moral conscience. A modal member of such a cultural order has an autonomous sense of self-worth that is not reducible to his group memberships and social statuses. Instead, self-worth may come from a number of alternative sources, such as personal achievement (the memory of past struggles and victories) or religion (which declares that each individual, with his unique qualities, is the subject of God’s love irrespective of his social station). This autonomous self-worth is, chiefly, what in turn gives a modal member of an individualist order ethical self-confidence: a belief in his capacity for forming a judgment.

The contrast between the individualistic culture and the other major type of cultural order, corporate culture, is substantial. In corporate cultures, the group, not the individual, is the primary unit of action, responsibility, and conscience in society. Whereas individualist cultures encourage their members to question received opinions and to exercise their own judgment, corporate cultures emphasize the individual’s inherent weakness, together with his moral and intellectual insufficiency vis-à-vis the group. The members of such cultures are expected to treat key moral precepts of the community as sacred dogmas. The sum total of their group memberships and social statuses normally provides them with the only basis of self-worth that they have. Ninety percent of world cultures, past and present, have been organized on the corporate principle. (This does not mean that “pure” individualist or corporate societies exist anywhere. Each real society is to some degree a mixture of both elements.) Individualism is, historically speaking, an aberration.⁴

Poland has a potential for being a productive and dynamic member of the European democratic community primarily for one reason: it is blessed with the presence of a genuinely individualist current in its culture. But this cultural current is, for a large part, regionally based. The main engine behind the Westernization of Poland—its main asset and a calling card when it comes to claims to European modernity—is roughly the western half of the country.

The east-west divide in today’s Poland can be observed on multiple levels, from political and economic patterns to social attitudes to forms of religiosity to voting behavior:

•In the June 2003 referendum on EU membership, regional residence was the single most powerful predictor of the vote. In the western and northern provinces, the rate of support for the EU was on average almost twenty percentage points higher than in the eastern provinces.⁵ Central Poland was an intermediate case. This is an extraordinary result. For one thing, it is the inhabitants of the western borderlands that should be more afraid of German power, of “the Germans coming and buying our land, our factories, and destroying out culture.” Instead, it is the easterners (many of whom have never met a German industrialist) who are much more anti-European and xenophobic.

•In the 2005 parliamentary and presidential elections, the votes split along regional lines. The west and northwest voted for the pro-European, liberal, Civic Platform, and for its presidential candidate, Donald Tusk. The victorious presidential contender, Lech Kaczyński, together with his nationalist Eurosceptical Law and Justice party, won in the east and the southeast.

•According to research on attitudes, the Poles in western Poland are significantly more individualistic than the Poles in the east. This applies to religious attitudes in particular. An extensive research into Polish Catholic religiosity conducted in the 1990s has revealed the existence, as the authors put it, of “two Polands.” In the east and southeast, “Catholicism manifests itself in a greater participation in the Church’s organized life and in greater deference to the Church’s teachings. The north and the west are the areas where self-dec...