Pologne, histoire d’une ambition
Pierre Buhler, a former French ambassador to Poland (2012-2016), takes us on a journey of discovery of a Poland that has emerged from its abuse by History to become a country “on the front line of a Europe that is heading East” whilst facing “its most existential challenge since the end of the Cold War” (our translation throughout).
“Nobody embodies […] more accurately than the Polish the fight of a nation for its freedom, crushed by tyrannical and oppressive regimes, during its long disappearance as a State between 1795 and 1918, then falling victim once again to a tragic fate between 1939 and 1945, before being subjected to Soviet occupation for nearly half a century. Today a prosperous and sovereign country, fully integrated in the European and transatlantic scene, with the strength of its 38 million inhabitants behind it, Russia’s increasing tendency towards aggression has made Poland the pivotal state of a central Europe that was for many years treated by the West as nothing more than a periphery”, the author states in the introduction to this book, which is structured along the three ley lines overarching Polish history: the main theme of Roman Catholicism; the rampart against the East; “freedom above all things”, and the “intractability of a proud, brave nation that fights back against all occupation”.
“The weakness of the natural barriers, belonging to Western Christianity and pressure from Germany: the foundations for the future of the Polish nation were apparent from its first decades of existence”, Buhler argues, with reference to the reigns of Miezko I and of his son, Boleslas the Valiant, in the 10th century, when Poland began its expansion to the east, following the chaotic succession of the Grand Prince of the Kievan Rus, Vladimir I. In 1025, when being crowned king of Poland, Boleslas, who committed incursions into Western Galicia and Moravia, “was at the head of one of the most widespread kingdoms of Europe, which came to being in barely half a century and which will, he hopes, retain some fragmentation by dint of this change”. Yet this monarchy was soon halted in its tracks: “the creation by King Kasimir I, in the 11th century, of an order of Knights rewarded with land in return for military duties does, admittedly, share similarities with practices observed elsewhere, but over the course of several successions, in view of the division of the kingdom into hereditary duchies, this elite derived greater benefit than what the kingdoms remained intact. And so it was that in 1228, Duke Ladislas III of Greater Poland, a member of the Piast dynasty with ambitions to re-establish the Royal role by also taking the title of princeps – primacy over the other duchies – of Lesser Poland in Kraków, was forced to concede a charter to the dignitaries of the duchy, meeting as an assembly, whereby he undertook, in exchange for their acquiescence to his accession to the title, to respect their rights and to make no decisions without their agreement. This act, known to history as the ‘Privilege of Cienia’, created the foundation for a system of monarchy with limited powers, far removed from the Western model, whereby the title of nobility granted by the sovereign is based on a relationship of vassalage”. “The King, who traditionally exercised power, consulting the dignitaries of the kingdom, the Church or the cities, ended up, at the turn of the 16th century, stripped of all legislative powers” with the formation, in 1493, of a bicameral parliament made up of a legislative assembly (diet) and the Senate. As well as the nobility, some of whom constituted an extremely wealthy oligarchy, known as “magnates”, the dignitaries of the bishopric, who came from the same group, carried considerable weight: “in the 16th century, the Church owned 10% of the arable land in Greater Poland, 15% in Lesser Poland and 25% in Mazovia, far more than the private Crown lands”. These fortunes swelled on the backs of the peasantry, whose duties of servitude increased to three days of work per week between 1520 and 1550, as the evolution towards serfdom accelerated.
The emergence onto the political landscape of Moscow, which managed in 1480 to throw off the yoke of the Mongol Golden Horde, would change everything. At the end of the 16th century, Poland, which formed the Republic of the Two Nations along with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, was at the peak of its power, but already on its way towards “its disappearance from the political map of Europe”. Undermined by the privileges granted to the nobility and the magnates as well as to the Church and the weakness of the monarchy, which became elective, it was confronted by the uprising of the Ukrainian peasants, subjugated, ill-treated and despised by the Polish nobility and, in the mid-17th century, suffered defeat upon defeat at the hands of the Cossacks of Hetman Khmelnitski allied with the Tatars, then of Czar Alexeï, before being targeted by offensives launched firstly by Russia in 1654 and then, the following year, by Sweden. “In the space of a few years, the Republic of the Two Nations found itself cut off, to the benefit of the czar, from the territorial acquisitions of 1618, the entire left bank of the Dniepr and Kiev. And although the truce concluded with Sweden came with a few modest territorial concessions, Poland was forced to give up its suzerainty over Prussia, which became an enclave within its territory, a source of recurrent tension, and declared itself a Kingdom in 1701”, the author explains, going on to describe the three successive divisions of Poland in 1772, 1793 and 1795 between Russia, Prussia and Austria, leading to its complete disappearance.
Following the interlude of its absorption by the Napoleonic Empire, insurrection broke out in January 1863 at the behest of a provisional national government, which was “far better prepared than the Rebellion of 1830, but with more limited resources”. “On the basis of the guerilla model, the troops, who would never number more than 20,000 to 30,000 men, would meet a Russian army of 340,000, would take 16 months to put down the insurrection. Once again, however, its leaders failed to train the peasantry, which took advantage of the situation, in Belarus and Ukraine, to attack the residences of their Polish masters, encouraged in this endeavour by land privileges granted by the czarist administration in the wake of the abolition of serfdom”, writes Buhler, who goes on to explain that “this latest failure, the cost of which was between 10,000 and 20,000 victims on the Polish side, of the deportation of 40,000 insurgents to the salt mines of Siberia and tens of thousands of exiles – around 10,000, many of whom once again ended up in France – is writ large in Polish martyrology. It seems to exclude the hope of an independent Poland, a sentiment that vindicates the liquidation, in 1867, of the ‘Kingdom of Poland’, the crown of which was given to Czar Alexander I by the Congress of Vienna. The Kingdom became ‘Vistula Land’, the administration and university became Russianised, Orthodox Christianity became the national religion and some 3500 estates belonging to the Polish nobility were confiscated”.
It would not be until the end of the First World War that Poland would be resurrected after 123 years of total occupation, the author stresses, going on to reiterate that the poet Adam Mickiewicz compared “Poland’s fate to the martyrdom of Christ” and gave this “’Christ of the nations’ the function of redeeming the sins of the other nations and granting them freedom through its suffering”. Between 1922 and 1939, Poland covered some of the Belarusian and Ukrainian territories and “4.5 million Ukrainians and 1 million Belarusians” came under Polish administration. “Of the 27 million inhabitants of Poland within the borders of the Treaty of Riga [of March 1921], more than eight million, or nearly one third, are members of minorities, also including some 2 million Jews and 1 million Germans”.
Following the Second World War, Poland – which “had suffered a demographic blood-letting of historical proportions: some 6 million dead, around 3 million of them Jewish victims of the Holocaust, or more than one sixth of the population, more than any other country affected by the conflict”, was to be dispossessed by Russia of its Ukrainian, Belarusian and Lithuanian territories, but was given instead territories taken from Germany, in the West (Silesia and Pomerania) and North (Masuria).
“Under the rule of a dull, obsequious but effective apparatchik, Boleslav Bierut, the country was Sovietised to an outrageous degree. The press, intelligentsia and cultural spheres were called brutally to heel. The economic apparatus, now under state control, was subjected to enforced productivism, worsened by increased needs for armament in 1950 onwards as a result of the Korean War. Agriculture was also affected by the early days of collectivisation. The authorities attacked the Church, which had until then been spared. The only force capable of supporting sustainable resistance, it faced increasing numbers of attacks through measures to secularise public life, atheist propaganda campaigns, but also arrests of priests, confiscation of heritage and of charitable institutions as well as limitations on its various privileges”, the author narrates, adding that “the crisis came to its paroxysm with the arrest of the Primate of Poland, Stefan Wyszyński, in 1953, the closure of one third of all places of worship and of the [Catholic weekly newspaper] Tygodnik Powszechny”.
Buhler goes on to discuss the election, on 16 October 1978, of Karol Wojtyla to the head of the Roman Catholic Church, a move “hailed a miracle [in Poland]”, followed by the arrival on the scene two years later of a “37-year-old electrician, a jovial man with a moustache and outspoken devotion”, Lech Walesa. “Supported by a power balance that was suddenly reversed, the strikers secured from the defeated authority the signature, on 31 August 1980, of the Gdansk agreements, in which it accepted the freedom of the unions, an achievement of major political significance. This attack on the monopoly of the Party the ‘representation’ of the working class constituted a severe head injury to the dogma of Marxism and Leninism”, the author writes. Although everything is still not yet resolved – “the saga of Solidarność would be interrupted by martial law” – “none of the nations subjugated by the Soviet Union has risen up with such perseverance against the fate imposed upon it by the vicissitudes of history and fought as fiercely for its emancipation”, Buhler observes.
Having shaken off its Soviet shackles, Poland began its journey towards NATO, which it joined in March 1999, and the European Union, of which it became a member in 2004. “Thanks to a significant injection of European funds, in the order of 10 billion euros a year over the decade following its accession, or between 2% and 3% of GDP, agriculture and infrastructures have experienced a phase of accelerated modernisation. Unemployment has fallen below 10% and an annual growth rate of nearly 4% over this same period is in contrast with the European average of 1%, if that. In return, GDP per head of population, which was only around 25% of the European average in 2004, has risen to 39% 10 years later”, the author points out, stressing that correcting for purchasing power parity, these ratios stand at 51% and 67% respectively. This highly positive development would not, however, prevent the Conservative Nationalists of the PiS from coming to power. Since, unlike the Hungarian populist Viktor Orbán, they do not have a sufficient majority to modify the Constitution, they will develop a stranglehold over the apparatus of the judiciary, the media and the universities,, leading the European Commission to take retaliatory measures with European funding and to launch numerous infringement proceedings.
Yet “the conjunction between eight years of domination and politics by the PiS [2015-2023] and its open support for the Church, the animated reactions of civil society and a cognitive posture of the opposition, have revealed the full scale of another phenomenon, that of the secularisation of Polish society, despite its impregnation by Catholicism at the end of communism. This secularisation, which was gradual over the first decades, has accelerated on PiS’ watch and is growing more swiftly than in any other country in the world”. Relying on a series of data: - the proportion of Poles who describe themselves as Catholics dropped 16 points between 2011 and 2021, or five million adults; - from nearly 70% in 1992, the proportion of regular worshippers fell to 43% in 2021 while that of young people aged between 18 and 24 fell from 69% to 23%. “Another indicator of the disaffection of the younger generation can also be seen in the drop in vocations, illustrated by the case of the seminar of Kraków, where numbers have fallen, in the space of 10 years, from 300 to 30, 11 of whom are from Africa”, the author adds.
Additionally, the encouraging economic results made by Poland must not disguise its fragility: - the weight of its dependency on imported technologies and foreign capital (one third of the productive economy); - insufficient investment in R&D, 1.5% of GDP compared to an EU average of 2.25%; - the combination of demographic ageing and lower fertility rates, leading to a potential “intermediary revenue trap”.
Finally, Buhler notes that the “sentiment of a certain moral superiority, the key position achieved in supplying Ukraine with weapons following its invasion by Russia in 2022, welcoming massive numbers of Ukrainian refugees and a new centrality in the political geography of the EU have unarguably given Poland a new stature in Europe”. And yet the Polish, who currently hold the Presidency of the Council of the EU, are “well aware of the capacity for blockage within the European Union of the country’s most sensitive to the siren song of Moscow, such as Hungary or Slovakia, and are looking for other formats, with countries sharing the same analysis, to offset the ‘existential threat to Europe’ of Russia’s strategic objective of overturning the international order and re-establishing the spheres of influence of the past”, the author writes. He goes on to add that “it was with this in mind that in November 2024, Warsaw took a step closer to the cooperation body between Nordic and Baltic countries (NB8) and countries of Western Europe that are most sensitive to the Russian threat, such as France and the United Kingdom. This commitment makes it the undeniable authority to influence various planks of foreign and security policy, such as relations with Moscow or the prospect of enlargement. Also in the debate on decision-making mechanisms in this field, specifically qualified-majority voting, to which countries of the ‘frontline’ and of Northern Europe have declared their opposition. (Olivier Jehin)
Pierre Buhler. Pologne, histoire d’une ambition – Comprendre le moment polonais (available in French only). Tallandier. ISBN: 979-1-0210-6107-1. 267 pages. €19,90