Post by JustJohn or JJ on Aug 11, 2016 3:23:33 GMT -7
'We Don’t Need to Be Alone’: A Political Shift Has Poland Assessing Its Values
AUG. 10, 2016
Market Square in Wroclaw, Poland, one of the country’s largest old market sites. Credit Maciek Nabrdalik
WROCLAW, Poland — Mayor Rafal Dutkiewicz of Wroclaw has presided over city hall in the magnificent old center since 2002. As he watches Poland’s politics take a rightward and nationalistic turn — a phenomenon playing out to varying degrees across much of Europe — Mr. Dutkiewicz, an early supporter of Solidarity, cites history ancient and modern to argue that Europe is good for Poland.
“It makes everybody bigger,” he said in an interview. “We don’t need to be alone — we are Europe.”
In Poland, the biggest former Communist nation in the European Union and NATO, the question is whether the liberty and European identity that meant so much to those who toppled Communism carry the same value today. The question applies especially for young people with no memory of divided Europe and Soviet bloc oppression.
The debate is playing out in various ways across the country. It has a special resonance in Wroclaw, a city of 630,000 that brims with tourists, Polish and foreign, and is home to more than 130,000 students. This year, it is a European capital of culture, a title bestowed by Brussels on one or two cities each year that brings publicity, hundreds of millions of euros in subsidies and scores of special events.
Rafal Dutkiewicz, the mayor of Wroclaw and a supporter of the European Union. “It makes everybody bigger,” he said. “We don’t need to be alone — we are Europe.” Credit Maciek Nabrdalik
Two stand out for the mayor. One is an exhibit honoring the city’s former archbishop, Boleslaw Kominek, who in 1966 wrote a then-utopian vision of a federal Europe that would bring peace and prosperity and bury the bloodshed of the past.
The second is the United Nations’ designation of a local medieval script, the Book of Henrykow, as world heritage.
Building history is important in Central Europe, the scene of so many shifts of fate and governance through the centuries. So the mayor likens the United Nations honor to an Oscar nomination for the manuscript, which he said was written mostly in Latin by a German monk who also penned the first sentence written in Polish: a remark from a Czech peasant to his Polish wife.
That early multiculturalism is the essence of a city like Wroclaw, until 1945 perhaps better known by its German name, Breslau. It was one of the largest cities to undergo population exchange after World War II, with Germans expelled and Poles brought in.
Krzysztof Mieszkowski, the director of Wroclaw’s prominent avant-garde theater, is quite clear about where he sees Poland going and who is taking it there.
Spectators in Wroclaw during the Crystal Cup horse race in June. Credit Maciek Nabrdalik
He believes that Jaroslaw Kaczynski, head of the governing Law and Justice party, which won both presidential and parliamentary elections last year, “likes authoritarian rule and is in love with dictatorship.”
Mr. Mieszkowski, who is also an opposition lawmaker in Parliament, added, “He has always been dreaming about this.”
Critics inside and outside Poland say Mr. Kaczynski, who holds no elected office, and his camp have moved decisively to undo the constitutional court, curb the news media, make abortion harder to obtain, and fan a new chauvinism that could cause social conflict and hurt one of Europe’s few vibrant economies.
Already, Mr. Mieszkowski said, Poland “has lost the thing that is most important for democracy, which is thinking about civil society.”
Like Prime Minister Viktor Orban in post-Communist Hungary, Mr. Kaczynski is depicted as a dictator by his foes. In the view of his many supporters, his government helps poorer Poles with welfare subsidies and is rediscovering vital national values when the notion of a united Europe seems more distant and less appealing.
Alexander Gleichgewicht, the president of the Wroclaw branch of the Union of Jewish Religious Communities in Poland. Credit Maciek Nabrdalik
Like governments across Central and Eastern Europe, Poland’s has been opposed to resettling substantial numbers of refugees from Syria and other poor and war-torn nations, another point of stress in its relations with Brussels.
In some cases, toeing the new line in Warsaw has involved a sharp shift in standpoint. Mateusz Morawiecki, deputy prime minister and head of economic development, led the Polish operations of the Spanish bank Santander for eight years.
Now, he is sounding the alarm about globalization, suggesting that Poland’s growth is stagnating and that Poles are captives of uncontrollable foreign forces that have condemned them to worse wages and conditions than in Western Europe.
“We have been in this model for 27 years,” Mr. Morawiecki told the Rzeczpospolita newspaper, dating these developments back to 1989, when the Solidarity movement triumphed over Communism. “And that is why we have reached the trap of medium development, the trap of low profit margin and the trap of dependent development,” he added. “We are, to an enormous extent, dependent on foreigners.”
Similarly, Ryszard Legutko, a deputy in the European Parliament for the Law and Justice party, said the European Union had lost political appeal and was passing unfair judgment on Poland because its government dared to defy European institutions.
Sunset at Ostrow Tumski, or Cathedral Island, the oldest part of Wroclaw. Credit Maciek Nabrdalik
“Nowadays, when people say Europe, they do not mean Sophocles, or Descartes, or Bach, or Roman law,” Mr. Legutko said in a telephone interview. “What they mean is a very particular set of institutions,” a self-perpetuating alphabet soup of bodies “more experienced in social engineering” than groundbreaking thoughts.
In Wroclaw, Mayor Dutkiewicz proudly showed photos with famous visitors, including Vaclav Havel, the former dissident and Czech president, and Fritz Stern, the prominent German-American historian who fled Breslau and the Nazis with his Jewish family in 1938. He settled in New York, where he died in May.
When he turned 90 in February, Mr. Stern sounded strong warnings about democracy, Donald J. Trump and Europe’s slide rightward.
“I grew up with the death of a democracy,” Mr. Stern told German television, “and now I see democracy only in danger.”
“Democracy,” he added, “must be defended.”
Certainly, Mr. Dutkiewicz concurred, but first it “needs to be built, as well.”
Across town, Mr. Mieszkowski, the theater director, was more strident. “Polish democrats fell asleep,” he said. “They forget that democracy is something that needs to be cultivated.”
Although Mr. Mieszkowski’s theater and its sellout performances show that Poland is no totalitarian society, he and others compared the present to George Orwell’s novel “1984.” The book has special resonance in Poland because that actual year fell during the Communist suppression of Solidarity, just after two years of martial law.
For Mr. Kaczynski’s camp, the more salient date is 2010. That April, his twin brother, Lech, then president, was killed with 95 others when their plane crashed in Smolensk, Russia, en route to a memorial for the Polish military elites killed in the 1940 Katyn massacre.
Two investigations have found the crash to be an accident. But the Kaczynski camp still sees a conspiracy by a menacing Russia. The resulting narrative of beleaguered Poland fending off foes to the Russian east and European west is “a best seller,” said a Warsaw media analyst, Jacek Wasilewski.
In the heart of old Wroclaw, the head of the city’s small Jewish community, Alexander Gleichgewicht, mulled today’s turmoil and what it signifies for his 97-year-old father; his Norwegian wife, Bente Kahan; and their globe-trotting student children.
Developments include the possibility that Poland will be treated as “a second-class country” where “a radical element feels encouraged by the government,” Mr. Gleichgewicht said. For now, he added, it is simply “a time of ghosts, a time of redefinitions.”
