NYT pisze o Polsce (1)
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Piotr Malecki for The New York Times
WISLICA, Poland — This modest village in central Poland, standing in the
shadow of the Basilica of the Birth of Blessed Virgin Mary, finds itself
reaching back to its deepest roots soon after Poland, and much of
Central Europe, won the prizes of membership in NATO and the European Union.
In Wislica, many people fear that old traditions are disappearing.
Many of the village’s 600 residents have concluded with dismay that the
tradition represented by their revered 14th-century basilica, which is
closely connected to the unifying kings of Poland’s past, is disappearing.
They have given their support to a nationalist Roman Catholic government
that in the few months since coming to power has been defending what
people here call Christian values and acting with an aggressiveness and
a pugnacity that alarms more secular and liberal-minded people in Poland
and elsewhere in Europe.
One villager, Wieslaw Cygan, who teaches in a technical college, is one
of the 48 people here who voted for the League for Polish Families, a
political party once deemed to occupy the Polish right-wing fringe that
is now part of the governing coalition.
“I would like to see a new political party,” Mr. Cygan said in an
interview in his tidy home, sparsely decorated with the kind of
religious and landscape paintings in fashion across much of Central and
Eastern Europe. “I call it a People’s Democratic Christian Conservative
Party that would be Catholic and patriotic,” he said.
The labels that Mr. Cygan attaches to his dream party suggest the
struggle for identity that is going on in deeply Catholic and rural
Poland and in some ways rippling across other formerly Communist
countries in Europe. Now that they are firmly embedded in the European
Union and the Western alliance, they seem to feel an urge to reassert
older, more traditional parts of themselves.
Indeed, nearly 17 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and two years
after Poland and other former Soviet bloc states joined the European
Union, it is a surprising time in Europe. On the very heels of what
could certainly be deemed a historic achievement, the defeat of
Communist dictatorship and the merging of Eastern and Western Europe
into a 25-member club of peaceful, secure and solidly democratic
countries, Europe is in a strange and sour mood.
In the West, ever since the rejection by France and the Netherlands of a
proposed constitution that was supposed to put enlarged Europe into its
next phase of integration, there seems to be no energy and no political
will directed toward what used to be enthusiastically called the
European project.
Instead, the European Union is experiencing what the Center for European
Reform in London has called an unprecedented malaise, signaled by a
retreat into a narrow defense of national interests.
Meanwhile, members of the former Eastern bloc, though objectively in
better shape economically and politically than at any other time in
their histories, appear to feel lost, bereft of the purpose that
inspired them when their only goal was to topple the Communists and,
with that accomplished, to join the Western clubs open only to fully
democratic countries.
The paradox is that neither the old members of the Union nor the new
ones seem to be celebrating what really is a historic achievement,
uniting a continent that for centuries was rent by war. Instead, in
several countries — Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia in
particular — the politics of lofty ideals and general high-mindedness
has been replaced by a politics of bickering, accusations of corruption
and ever changing coalitions.
“That was a very romantic time in Eastern Europe,” Krisztian Szabados,
director of Political Capital, a political analysis organization in
Budapest, said of the immediate post-Communist period. “But the romantic
time is over. Now politics is more professional, and professionalism
means corruption and the dirty side of politics.”
In Poland, a lesser zeal for Europe has coincided with an increased
commitment to tradition, as interpreted by coalition leaders in Warsaw
and their supporters in places like Wislica.
Here, the answer for the problems of Poland is symbolized by the solid,
venerable and wholesome basilica, which anchors the village of just a
few streets of modest houses and an expanse beyond of small farms. The
church has long given life to the town.
Workers have restored the ruins of a ninth-century Romanesque church
that was a predecessor to the Gothic basilica. A small museum depicts
Wislica’s history as one of Poland’s medieval settlements, a crossroads
visited by early kings.
But the government itself is not so solid. The coalition in Warsaw has
had a rocky tenure since it came to power last fall. Some moderates fled
the government as the Law and Justice Party eventually linked up with
populist and far-right parties to stay afloat.
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stepped down. To fill the post, President Lech Kaczynski appointed his
twin brother, Jaroslaw, the leader of the Law and Justice Party, which
the brothers created several years ago. The move gives the Kaczynskis a
dominance in Poland unseen since the days of Communist rule.
Piotr Malecki for The New York Times
President Kaczynski is well remembered in more liberal Europe for having
banned a gay pride parade in Warsaw when he was mayor there two years
ago. But more recently he reacted so vociferously to a parody of him in
a leftist German newspaper — demanding that the German government
investigate the newspaper and apologize for the article — that some
German commentators argued that it had been a mistake to have allowed
Poland into the European Union.
“The new Polish leadership stands for a negative trend in European
politics,” Süddeutsche Zeitung editorialized after Mr. Kaczynski’s
comments about the parody. “Nationalism and chauvinism are on the rise.”
At home, Mr. Kaczynski has put loyalists into key government commissions
supervising radio and television, and he has declined to speak out
against what many people here have described as the growing power of a
conservative Catholic nationalist radio station, Radio Maryja, which
some people say is broadcasting a message of coded anti-Semitism.
And then there was the coalition with two populist parties that gave
their leaders the Ministries of Education and Agriculture and made them
deputy prime ministers to boot.
For some people inside and outside the country, the conservatism and
pugnacity being shown in Poland signal an abrupt step backward in the
direction of an aggrieved Slavic nationalism that was supposed to have
disappeared with European Union membership.
The European Parliament, disturbed by the presence in the Polish
government of the League of Polish Families, which echoes the
Poland-equals-Catholicism nationalism of the 1920’s and 30’s, and noting
a rightward turn in other parts of Central Europe, blasted the
government for what it called “the general rise in racist, xenophobic,
anti-Semitic and homophobic intolerance in Poland.” It also accused the
leaders of the League of Polish Families of “inciting people to hatred
and violence.”
That statement was rebuffed by the Polish leaders and Parliament as
exaggerated and alarmist. Indeed, while some league officials have made
statements highly derogatory of homosexuality, and while the country’s
chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich, was assaulted on a Warsaw street this
spring, many Poles say those are isolated instances of bigotry that are
not representative.
“The general tone of Polish opinion is that this was an
overinterpretation of the situation,” said Andrzej Jonas, editor of the
English-language Warsaw Voice, referring to the European Parliament’s
resolution.
But while they think the European Parliament may exaggerate the degree
of public intolerance and the government’s complacency about it, many
people say something worrisome is taking place.
“It’s true that some of the demons of the past have returned,” said
Zbigniew Lewicki, a professor of American studies at Warsaw University.
“I blame the leadership for it. They keep talking about the last 17
years as a time of dishonesty, a time that has to be accounted for, a
time we should be ashamed of, and when these words come from a
president, people say, ‘Well, maybe they are right.’
“And people also ask, ‘What do I believe in?’ If they can’t believe in
the last 17 years, and they can’t believe in the Communist tradition,
they turn to the prewar tradition. And the only strong prewar tradition
is nationalism, a sense of Polishness.”
Indeed, the new government led by the Law and Justice Party has railed
almost constantly against its predecessors, charging that they were
corrupt domestically and failed to defend Poland’s interests properly
abroad, especially in the negotiations leading to European Union
membership. The new government has evinced a good deal of animosity
toward Poland’s two larger and more secular neighbors, Germany and Russia.
And there are almost daily calls for a parliamentary investigation of
the entire process by which Poland was transformed into a free-market
economy.
A member of the coalition government, Andrzej Lepper, head of the
Self-Defense Party, is emblematic of the complaints. He bitterly opposed
Poland’s joining the Union and argued that Poland’s state assets had
been sold off to private individuals and companies for “peanuts.” He has
criminal charges pending against him connected with anti-European Union,
anti-globalization campaigns in the past.
Other shifts in the mood have resulted in some small but important
changes in matters of everyday life, like a pledge to include questions
about religion, meaning Catholicism, in the test that high school
students must pass to get their diplomas. There is also a proposal to
use government funds to build churches, but that is being contested in
court.
It is the adoption of Catholicism as a sort of unofficial state religion
that may have changed Poland’s atmosphere the most.
“The reality is that we are like other European countries with our low
birthrate, our divorces and abortions and all that,” said Marek
Ostrowski, an editor at the weekly magazine Polityka. “But there is much
more sentiment in favor of a notion of the Polish tradition.”
Mr. Ostrowski said, “Many people are happy that we finally we have a
president who goes to church, and who doesn’t avoid a church connection
with major ceremonies,” in contrast to recent past presidents, who were
thought to represent the secular and international values of Western Europe.
For 17 years, he said, the political mainstream did not pay attention to
the resurgent religious values. “Now that has changed,” he said.
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Po wejsciu do NATO i Unii Europejskiej w Polsce widac nawrot do
tradycyjnych, nacjonalistycznych i religijnych wartosci, co jest
wyrazem szerszego trendu obserwowanego w calej Unii Europejskiej.
Rzady koalicji PiS, LPR i Samoobrony, partii okreslanych jako
eurosceptyczne lub antyeuropejskie, sa wyrazem walki o tozsamosc
toczacej sie w gleboko katolickiej i wiejskiej Polsce.
Teraz, gdy jest ona mocno osadzona w Unii Europejskiej i w NATO, wydaje
sie odczuwac potrzebe potwierdzenia starszych, bardziej tradycyjnych
elementow swojego "ja".
To zaskakujacy czas w Europie. Po tym, co mozna z pewnoscia uwazac za
historyczne osiagniecie - pokonaniu komunistycznej dyktatury i
polaczeniu sie zachodniej i wschodniej Europy w zlozonym z 25 czlonkow
klubie pokojowych, bezpiecznych i demokratycznych panstw, Europa jest w
dziwnym i skwaszonym nastroju.
Na Zachodzie, od momentu odrzucenia we Francji i Holandii proponowanej
konstytucji, która miala przeprowadzic rozszerzona Europe do nastepnej
fazy integracji, nie ma - jak sie wydaje - zadnej energii, ani woli
politycznej skierowanej na to, co entuzjastycznie nazywano europejskim
projektem. Zamiast tego, Unia Europejska przezywa to, co Center for
European Reform w Londynie nazywa bezprecedensowa malaise
(dolegliwoscia), ktorej objawem jest ucieczka w waska obrone narodowych
interesow. Tymczasem, czlonkowie bylego bloku wschodniego, chociaz
obiektywnie sa w lepszej kondycji gospodarczej i politycznej niz w
jakimkolwiek innym okresie swej historii, wydaja sie czuc zagubieni i
unieszczesliwieni brakiem celu, jakim bylo kiedys obalenie komunizmu.
Paradoksem jest, ze ani starzy czlonkowie Unii, ani nowi, nie swietuja
tego, co naprawde jest historycznym sukcesem, czyli zjednoczenia
kontynentu przez stulecia pustoszonego przez wojny.