VIEWS FROM THE CAPITALS

Autumn 2008

by Ben Koschalka

“Polska, biało-czerwoni” – “white and red” – chanted Polish football fans, out on the streets during the country’s brief sortie at the European championships over the summer. Faces were daubed in the national colours of red and white and the country basked in a moment of short-lived unity. Then the old rifts opened up again, with the familiar sound of arguments presented as straightforward dichotomies: right versus wrong, modernity against tradition, social liberal versus conservative. Maybe the true national colours of Poland should be black and white, not red and white, to reflect the way that politicians, the media and other public figures state their case. There are no subtle shades of grey in Polish debates.

The polarised nature of argument in Poland can be illustrated by one particular story that became a bitter political tug-of-war earlier this year. It concerned a 14-year-old schoolgirl known as Agata who sought an abortion after apparently being raped. Depending on which version of events you subscribe to, either she was supported in her wish for an abortion by her mother and pro-choice liberal activists, or her mother coerced Agata into terminating an unwanted pregnancy in the face of fierce opposition by pro-life groups and the Catholic Church. In any event, it created a hard-fought political battle.

The numerous confrontations in Poland – political, ideological and economic - make it very difficult to reach any agreement on matters of policy. The key players in government and the media see every subject, every event and every scandal as the latest embodiment of the fight between “their” version of Poland and the alternative. Some ideological splits involve former allies who, since beginning their disputes in the early 1990s, now stare at each other across a chasm. Adam Michnik, a leading light in Poland’s liberal elite, spoke last year of a war between two Polands. He said, “A Poland of suspicion, fear and revenge is fighting a Poland of hope, courage and dialogue.”

Such talk is nothing new. Back in 1995, former President Aleksander Kwaśniewski identified one side of Poland which epitomised modernity and embraced economic change and the West. He said this Poland was “enlightened, educated, enterprising, already today attracting the real interest of Europe and the world”. But it faced an opposite side, “a country of poverty, of humiliating unemployment, of functional illiteracy, of a backward civilisation.”

Some would say this alarming vision of Poland is still familiar in 2008. Social liberals felt their country was sliding into the dark side while the Kaczyński twins were in power and Roman Giertych was the extremist minister for education. Things may have improved for now, but the cracks remain. One on-going economic divide is the so-called Poland A and Poland B of haves and have-nots. The income disparities and lack of cohesion between these groups is seen as a particular weakness in Polish democracy. Joanna Staręga Piasek, director of the Warsaw Institute for the Development of Social Services, and Irena Wóycicka of the Research Institute for the Market Economy talk about two sets of people, “One resourceful and the other not managing, and between them no communication, common values or feelings of affiliation.”

The problem is that these lists of Polish divisions go on and on. There are Poles keeping pace with the world and those languishing behind; there are internationalists and nationalists, the university-educated and school-leavers, the east versus the west. The urban-rural divide is another category where Poland consistently shows huge differences in political and ideological opinion. The country’s media figures and its political leaders – the Kaczyńskis and Michniks and others – take every opportunity to score points off each other when defending “their” Poland and attacking their opponents. It would be better for Poland – and the rest of Europe – if they could start to see the tones of grey between their black-and-white arguments.