From Dzielski to Tusk – political realism of Polish liberals

Poland is dominated by nostalgies following PRL taking on fresh populist forms. And this is dominated even among the youngest ones who learned about the Polish People's Republic only from their post-communist or post-solidarized parents, for various reasons bitter with the experience of transformation. In the face of this advantage of anti-liberalism, we will build liberal Poland, avoiding the word "liberalism", sometimes bidding even against our opponents for "redistributive populism", otherwise we would be killed. Just like we were killed in 1993.

Mirosław Dzielski was remembered as a model “political realism”. Already in the text “Who are Liberals” of 1979, he emphasized that the key features of liberal thought are “realism”, “consensualty”, “avoidance of war”. However, the stone of "realpolitics" cast by him in the well of opposition environments of late PRL was a different text from 1979, "How to hold power in the Polish People's Republic. fresh Year's Wishes for Lieutenant Jerzy Borewicz". Let us remind you that Borewicz was the hero of the series "07 come forward", the first tv militiaman to wear Pewex clothes.

Szielski there formulated an highly serious (although consciously provocative form) offer addressed to the communist elite of power (although opposition environments reacted much louder). He offered to leave political power to the Communists in exchange for abandoning any of the ideological dogmas. The precedence of Dzielski – even in relation to the restoration of democracy in Poland – was to convince communists to introduce elements of the marketplace economy, especially to grow the area of legal private property. In fact, Mirosław Dzielski had small enthusiasm towards democracy. As in 2014, in the same provocative text as the lyrics of Szielski himself wrote about his erstwhile master Rafał Matyja, "the strong accent of the liberal thought of Szielski was the belief that private property and free enterprise are a better foundation of individual freedom than democracy."

It is comic that at the turn of 1979 and 1980 the proposal of Szielski could appear to be “collaborant” or “too real-political” in the eyes of almost the full opposition at the time. After all, it was formulated in a time of full dominance of the USSR in Central and east Europe. In fact, it was at the time a crazy fantasy, taken seriously only by another individual fantasy artists specified as Stefan Kisielewski.

I remember another anecdote concerning the political realism of Mirosław Dzielski's environment. At the beginning of May 1988, to meet representatives of various more or little extremist student communities of the Jagiellonian University, who then decided on a solidarity strike with Huta workers. Lenina (who had just been pacified by the ZOMO and the service) besides appeared the head of the Dzielski Youth School (this is after more than 3 decades inactive an crucial and sympathetic figure in the Polish public sphere, so I will skip his name). erstwhile this young “devil” is the only 1 voting against the strike, arguing that “the organization property of the Jagiellonian University must not be risked”, he is almost defenetrated by his more extremist peers. Of course, the solidarity strike with Huta at the Jagiellonian University will begin and the university will last this risk.

At the same time, Mirosław Dzielski himself, shortly after writing his appeal to Lieutenant Borewicz, will become a loyal associate and advisor to the first "Solidarity" and later a associate in the solidarity underground of the 1980s. He will so participate in actions more associated with heroism than with mundane political realism, which in the past of Poland (a country usually not existing, and in the times of its existence being a field of rapidly changing ideological hegemony and youth) was besides very frequently an alibi for average opportunisticism.

Where did Dzielski and his “heroic realism” come from?

However, this combination of heroism and political realism is not entirely impossible in Poland. At least 3 traditions of political realism in the heroic version were behind the “reasonable and romantic” Mirosław Dzielski (which is interesting, all associated with liberalism or liberal conservatism, with longing not only for political freedom, but besides for economical modernisation and modern normative or organization order).

The first is the Warsaw positivism, the second is the Krakow historical school, and the 3rd is the environment of Jerzy Giedroycia. An crucial associate in this second environment was Adolf Maria Bocheński, whose lyrics and very short life bear all the features of “heroic political reality”.

Warsaw's positivism is among others the "generation of Warsaw School of Economics", a university founded in 1862 by Alexander Wielopolski. Students educated as authoritative and economical staff of the Kingdom of Poland, who, in the first or second year of survey at this elite school, abandoned the cabins and books to go to the January uprising and to endure their own. After the collapse of the uprising, in the times of comparative normalization of the last decades of the 19th century, they will become ruthless critics of the insurrectional tradition, which they themselves have learned from the worst side – powerless exaltation.

The second tradition is Krakow's historical school, the Stanisans, known for its large interpretations of national history, as well as from the pamphlet caricatures of the Polish insurrection and martyrdom tradition contained in "Tece Stańczyka". Most of them besides had a card of the January uprising – fights, wounds, prisoners, and sometimes messengers.

Finally Adolf Maria Bocheński, the man in whom Jerzy Giedroyc saw the most prominent political thinker of their generation. Liberal conservative and prematurely mature political realist, who in the saddest letter written after the outbreak of the Second planet War and the fall of the Second Polish Republic will write: "This war should not survive". And in fact, as Anders' soldier, he will die in July 1944 in demining the area of Ancona, respective days before the outbreak of the Warsaw Uprising – the most tragic triumph of the insurrectional tradition over political realism in Poland.

Sources of Liberalism III of Poland

At the same time as Mirosław Dzielski – in the 1970s and 1980s – another political realist, prof. Bronisław Łagowski, teaches in Krakow. However, he is simply a associate of the PZPR and a realist without a heroic wing (if you do not number a series of excellent texts published by him in the pages of the "Wszystko Tygodnik" under various aliases). This somewhat conservative, although unlike Mirosław Szielski, a completely secular liberal, will formulate a ruthless attack in his texts on the instinctive, oppositional, solidarityal tradition. Especially on her intelligent wing. Many of us then received his celebrated phrase about people and full environments, which “exalt themselves with their own exaltation.” In these words we recognized an excellent image of many intelligent circles of Warsaw and Krakow at the turn of the Polish People's Republic and the 3rd Republic.

However, the Polish version of the liberal-conservative revolution of the 1980s and 1990s will be born between Łagowski and Szielski. Its symbol is the names of 2 another prominent Krakus. The first is prof. Richard Legutko. Especially as an author published in the 1980s, on emigration and second circulation, a perfect book Capitalism Disputes a related dispute between libertarians and neoconservatives within the modern American right. The second of the cult characters of this environment was the late prof. Miłowit Kuniński, a young Marxist who later became a sensational, “understanding” critic of Marxism, and popularizer of the thoughts of Friedrich August von Hayek.

Mirosław Dzielski is the most balanced of all these superb Krakus, thoughtful and romanticist at the same time. However, it is between him and Łagowski that the full Polish conservative liberalism and liberal conservatism is formed.

At the same time on the Coast – a bit influenced by Dzielski, composed of people who had the chance to perceive to it live besides – the environment of Gdańsk liberals is developing, who will make a Liberal-Democratic legislature after the political breakthrough, already in free Poland. The most crucial names of this environment are Donald Tusk, Jan Krzysztof Bielecki and Janusz Lewandowski (the second most then inclined to compose theoretical and programming texts). Interestingly, at that time, Szielski is besides an authority in Gdańsk for the more right-wing environment of the Youth Movement of Poland, from which in the future both the right wing of the Democratic Union and ZChN will emerge. Father Maciej Zięba remains in the Church under the clear influence of Mirosław Dzielski. present it is “scanned”, wiped out from collective memory, but it is an authority for many environments and brings to Poland both the books of the most typical American neoconservatives and their authors.

On the threshold of the 3rd Polish Republic, the right is bound to the economical liberalism of Dzielski. possibly due to the fact that Szielski is simply a liberal who recognizes Christianity as 1 of the key "non-liberal foundations of liberalism" (that I will usage a expression popularized in Poland by Ryszard Legutka, mentioned in this text). The "post-solidarity" and "post-communist" centres will besides practice capitalism after 1989, but not necessarily admitting inspiration to Mirosław Dzielski.

From Political Realism to “Marrano-liberalism” by Tusk

However, returning to the Liberal-Democratic Congress, this is the environment that will come to test “liberalism after communism” in Polish applicable policy. They will besides be forced into political realism in a collision with the anti-liberal social and ideological scenery of the 3rd Republic of Poland. The young populist left and young populist right present like to criticize the transformation and III of the Polish Republic as areas of "total neoliberal hegemony". Nothing more wrong. In fact, the full Polish systemic transformation took place (and continues) in a scenery determined by the statistic nostalgia and their political, media, ideological representations. This clearly forced caution and political realism in liberals. Ultimately, it led to the formation of a circumstantial "marrano-liberalism" (paraphrase behind Agata Bielik-Robson), the Late Civic Platform. Convincing that in profoundly anti-liberal Poland liberal priorities (both in the area of the economy and culture or social thought) can only be realised in hiding, without referring to the "compromised and compromising" word "liberalism" in Poland.

On the battlefield of the fight for liberalism in Poland, the Liberal-Democratic legislature environment will besides pass its January uprising. Beginning in an atmosphere of triumphal exaltation, with a very bitter defeat. In the early 1990s, Gdańsk liberals have their minute of triumph, they co-create the government (premier Jan Krzysztof Bielecki), which politically takes care of Leszek Balcerowicz and the full Polish systemic transformation. This is, of course, a force lent to them by Lech Wałęsa, who won his own presidential run (first with Mazowieckie and later with Tymiński) under the slogan of extremist and populist "transformation correction", but after winning the elections, alternatively of "repel Balcerowicz", Walęsa acknowledges that he must be defended. The political tool of this care is the government of Jan Krzysztof Bielecki.

The defeat of the January Uprising of Polish Liberals turns out to be the 1993 election campaign, to which Donald Tusk's environment last competes under his own liberal banner.

Around 1990, Donald Tusk converted younger than himself Grzegorz Schetina from an insurrectional consciousness (which marked the full generation born in the 1960s and ripened in the social and political hell of the 1980s) to political realism, acceptance for transformation and fascination with the liberal West and its institutions. Schetyna together with another "repentants" (Halicki, Siemoniak...) built KL-D structures for Tusk and co-organized subsequent campaigning of this party, including the 1993 parliamentary campaign. Let me quote him extensively from the "History of the Generation" interview that I had the honour to carry out with him. Schetine says about KL-D's defeat:

After a fewer years of transformation and change, people wanted to relax from reforms. They needed support, empathy, solidarity in hard times. But we inactive had quite a few energy inside us, and we thought others could be lit. Under the Coca-Cola mill in Gdynia we made a very optimistic place presenting successes of Hanna Suchock's government and the full Polish transformation. We organized parades in American style. Even camels passed through Wrocław. We had white and red sunshine with large pictures of candidates. Throughout the full time there were parades, orchestras, we wanted to have a joyful run to show the success of Poland. Our run mascot was a bald eagle in a KL-D T-shirt. Patriotic eagle-liberal.

But Kaczyński, Olszewski, KPN... they all started attacking us for privatization. And erstwhile you went to the country or to the smaller towns, you could see that you were very grasping. PGRs have already fallen in PRL, not due to KL-D. But it felt like our optimistic run was hitting the void. I remember riding between Wrocław and Warsaw we stopped close Sierod, with a guy who sold hot sausages with buns and mustard by the road. We convinced him that as a tiny businessman he must vote for KL-D. He promised us that. Then, at election night, erstwhile the votes were counted, we stopped at school close that barbecue to see what kind of support we got there. Convinced that there will be a good result, due to the fact that we have a contact here, we have built large relations with the entrepreneur who sold sausage. From the full circuit were 2 votes for KL-D. Kuba Sienkiewicz had the song: “It’s over, there’s nothing, we’re free, we can go“. And we sang it to each another walking through the deserted Warsaw after election night.

Isn't this 1993 painting an eternal memento for liberalism in Poland? Anyway, he remained specified a memento for Donald Tusk's environment.

When I was preparing an interview with Grzegorz Schetina at the turn of 2017 and 2018 (this was happening in the apogee of the regulation of the Law and Justice, erstwhile it seemed that the antiliberalism of the right, to which the youth of the organization were happy to join then, nothing would halt it), I discovered how profoundly the trauma of the losing elections of 1993, that "starting defeat of Polish liberalism" was formed by Donald Tusk himself (he was then in Brussels, but his spirit was inactive floating over Polish waters) and his full environment. She taught them hard, sometimes bitter realism.

What was the basic rule of this realism? We do not usage the word "liberalism", and we surely do not abuse it. Not in the organization name, not in our public statements. The left-wing and right-wing populace have made it a puppet, they wipe their mouths with it, this fight we lost. Poland is dominated by nostalgies following PRL taking on fresh populist forms. And this is dominated even among the youngest ones who learned about the Polish People's Republic only from their post-communist or post-solidarized parents, for various reasons bitter with the experience of transformation. In the face of this advantage of anti-liberalism, we will build liberal Poland, avoiding the word "liberalism", sometimes bidding even against our opponents for "redistributive populism", otherwise we would be killed. Just like we were killed in 1993.

Thus Tusk and his environment became "liberal marans", storing liberal longing, fighting for liberal freedoms, but "without liberal ostentatisation".

“If you have a vision, go to the doctor” – this well-known late Tusk mot takes a large deal from that lesson, from the 1993 election trauma.

Can specified “marrano-liberalism” be effective? Of course, yes – Tusk and his coalitions have already ruled Poland for a small longer than the next anti-liberal Kaczyński coalitions – only that its effectiveness or defeat depends on criteria another than krasomology or "cleanness of liberal language".

What are the criteria? Force criterion. Performance criterion. The criterion of providing Poles – even at the image level, but of course besides at the real level – with a sense of safety and stability. So yet this political realism wins against liberalism in the mix first tested by Mirosław Dzielski in the end of the Polish People's Republic.

Will the marans of Polish liberalism survive?

Is the price of winning Polish liberalism a hard lesson in political realism? The price is the unprecedented defeat of liberalism in Poland at the level of ideas (which “have consequences”).

My generation has mostly betrayed liberalism. We started with freedom (also economic, besides moral) in order to yet choose in its crucial part the "blackest anti-liberal reaction". For apparent reasons – falling into all the traps of the cultural wars of the 1990s, having incessant trauma of anti-communism of the 1980sMany of us have completely lost the memory of liberalism as a synonym of our erstwhile closest freedom, not just political freedom.

However, my (coming to the grave) generation besides has a strong liberal wing. For example, the older generation of the Civic Platform are people who remember the Polish People's Republic, and so do not submit to the nostalgias for a "big plate" (today programmed by the Warsaw and Kraków hipsters) or for the "great constructions of socialism" (today it is called the CPK, the keel under construction of ferries or the "rnzennie Polish electrical car" – the monster of Dr. Frankenstein composed of German and Chinese parts, and above all incapable to live).

Younger than my generation grew up in an anti-liberal spirit. The Liberté environment is 1 of the fewer exceptions. The young right and the young left combined the rebellion against the “generation of liberal transformation” that “guards our way” and “takes our seats besides long”. This purely biological generation revolt took an ideological form, turned against the transformation itself and liberalism itself.

Today's perfect scenery of the young generation resembles the memory of Czesław Miłosz Family Europe). erstwhile Miłosz was – in the early 1930s – a student in Vilnius, his full generation was divided into communists and fascists. any were fascinated by Stalinist Russia, others by Mussolini Italy, and the most extremist looked with hope even at Adolf Hitler. At the time, the “left” and “rights” were able to fight and even beat, but erstwhile they sat at vodka or beer, they were joined by a common ridiculer of “demoliberism” who, according to their full generation, “was already doomed”, remained the “dead kingdom of the grandfathers”.

When I see an anti-liberal alliance of young “compartments” and young alt-rights, that memory of Miłosz comes back to me. Antiliberal youth from the 1930s only converted the experience of war to "demoliberalism", as well as the experience of real fascism and real communism. In any case, the experience of "real anti-liberalism" converted those who survived it. I would not like to witness a akin test to the false claim that "everything is better than this liberalism, all fanatic is better than a "libka", but erstwhile I finish writing this text, the alt-right populist Donald Trump returns to the White House, and the anti-liberal left besides enjoys the "fall of the liberal mainstream".

In the context of the "new 1930s" in Poland, Europe, realistic "marrano-liberalism" throughout the West may not be enough. It is essential to revive liberal language, make and save liberal environments that will be able to fight, last the coming storms, hold (perhaps for long "dark centuries") the hope of the Fukuyamian global kingdom of freedom within the limits of institutions and laws.