ETERNAL VIGILANCE
Where the west ends
Centuries of history have taught Poland to be wary of Russia. Its authoritarian turn may slowly change that—and destroy its relationships with everyone else
CHRISTIAN DAVIES
Existential threats: the leader of Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party, Jarosław Kaczyński, speaks to supporters during the 2019 election count
© CARSTEN KOALL/GETTY IMAGES)
In the spring of 2018, I travelled from Warsaw to the town of Montrose, on the east coast of Scotland, to meet a fringe Polish politician who has dedicated his life to overturning Europe’s post-1989 political settlement.
A native of the southeastern Polish city of Lublin, he was the deputy leader of an overtly pro-Russian marginal political party calling for a radical re-orientation in Polish foreign policy. Describing itself as “the first non-American political party in Poland,” it was anti-capitalist, anti-Nato and anti-EU, and had ties both to the global extreme farright and to foreign pro-Russian actors, including the Donbass rebels in eastern Ukraine and proxies for the Assad regime in Syria. This politician (who in this piece I need to keep anonymous) had moved to Scotland after his party’s leader was detained by Polish security services on suspicion of espionage on behalf of Russia and China. A specialist in political entryism, he started a new life in Aberdeen and— intriguingly—reinvented himself as a passionate advocate of Scottish independence.
As we sat over soup in a quiet corner of Montrose’s George Hotel, the politician outlined a radical vision for Poland’s future, one that involved renouncing its “civilisational
choice” to join western political and security institutions after 1989 and instead returning to Russia’s warm embrace. For all you may have heard about the country’s authoritarian turn under the nationalist Law and Justice Party (PiS), this position remains a near-heretical stance. The standard Polish view is that the nation’s western vocation was ordained over a thousand years ago, when the first Polish king, Mieszko I, adopted Roman Catholicism in the year 966.
The conviction that Poland’s destiny lies in the west is rooted in centuries of historical experience. Having developed into mainland Europe’s largest state following royal and political unions between the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the 14th and 16th centuries, the so-called Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had been dismantled over the course of the 18th century by neighbouring authoritarian powers: the so-called “Holy Alliance” of Austria, Prussia and Russia. While all three powers suppressed Polish national aspirations to varying degrees, it is harshly autocratic Tsarist Russia, which crushed two Polish uprisings with overwhelming force, that features in the Polish imagination as principal villain and tormentor.
In the 19th century, advocates of Polish restoration juxtaposed the democratic virtues of the freedom-loving, western-oriented Poles with the despotic barbarism of their Russian occupiers. This was not just a question of sympathy for an oppressed nation. If the extinction of Polish statehood had been a pre-condition for the Holy Alliance’s authoritarian hegemony over the continent, the thinking went, then Poland’s restoration must surely be a precondition for Europe’s liberation.
It was for this reason that the Polish Cause attracted passionate supporters ranging from Edmund Burke to—counterintuitively for modern Poles—Karl Marx, who argued in a speech in London in 1867 entitled “Poland’s European Mission” that “there is but one alternative for Europe”: “Either Asiatic Barbarism, under Muscovite direction, will burst around [Europe’s] head like an avalanche, or else it must re-establish Poland, thus putting twenty million heroes between itself and Asia and gaining a breathing spell for the accomplishment of its social regeneration.”