Foreign Policy: Extreme Nationalism Is as Polish as Pierogi

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

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

This conspiratorial view is exemplified in the writings of Rafal Ziemkiewicz, a prominent nationalist author and participant in previous far-right Independence Day marches, who described post-1989 Poland as a “post-colonial state” built not to serve Poles, but to exploit its resources for foreign overlords (Western capital) and their “local collaborators.” In a society with abundant experience of living under state structures serving foreign interests, much psychological fertile ground exists for such conspiratorial beliefs to germinate, and germinate they have in the past three decades, egged on by no less than Poland’s current ruling party. [...]

This camp believes that the only pathway to preventing these hated lefty ideologies from permeating Poland is via a robust defense of the country’s “independence.” Whatever the result of the current face-off over Sunday’s independence march, it represents the opening salvo in an inevitable civil war on Poland’s right between Law and Justice, which wants a controlled nationalism, and those who crave it unleashed in its rawest and crudest form. The battle for who best represents the ideals of God, honor, and Fatherland has just begun.

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