Illiberalism gave back the feeling of choice to the people
Martin Bukovics
You are a well-known Polish philosopher, who’s a university professor in the most left-wing German city, Bremen. With that background why do you do politics in Law & Justice (PiS)?
Because their values are the most in line with my philosophical and political views. My political career began in the ´90s as an independent journalist, in parallel to my academic career, writing well-read articles about the scandals of the Polish Third Republic. At the beginning, I have declared myself a conservative-liberal, but over time - I don’t think I’m alone with that - the liberal part of it faded, as we realized that we had very naive ideas about liberal democracies.
As a journalist, I met a lot of politicians in position. At the time, at the beginning of this century, which began with crises and scandals and which had much criticism of the transition years, there was a saying in Poland that there were two parties that would reform the country: the Civil Platform (PO) and PiS, therefore they were also referred to as POPiS. It was then, that many intellectuals began to politicize with the joint support of the two parties, including philosopher Ryszard Legutko, who is now the leader of the ECR-EP group, or the current deputy prime minister, Jarosław Gowin, who was back then the editor-in-chief of the Catholic newspaper Znak, where I also wrote.
So there were many who took on a stronger role in public life because of their dissatisfaction and criticism of the transition, the Polish elite or the survival of Communists. Then, in 2005, despite preliminary expectations, a coalition of PO and PiS was not formed, but PiS was a minor in a government of a very much unstable coalition until 2007. I met Jarosław Kaczyński after Leszek Miller´s post-communist government between 2001 and 2004, and his intelligence and analytical skills were convincing. This is the personal reason why I took this side and not the other. After all, there is always a personal reason.
You were also a consultant to Jarosław Kaczyński. What is he like?
Very intelligent. Although politics is his passion in the first place, he is perhaps most interested in foreign policy. I knew both brothers, though, Lech, the later president, I only met later at a meeting of intellectuals - by the way, I was one of PiS´ presidential candidates for a while. Lech Kaczyński was much gentler, more inclusive; Jarosław is sharper, more divisive, for him it is harder to find common ground with people.
I really appreciate his patience and perseverance: if anyone, he really is in politics because he has had a vision of Poland since the ´80s that he wants to realize. In this opportunistic, pragmatic modern world this may be strange - especially since the enrichment of himself and his family is not important to him - but it is precisely the thing that has attracted many intellectuals to PiS.
The aforementioned Jarosław Gowin - who was Minister of Justice in Donald Tusk´s government from 2011 to 2013 - asked me after he left PO, do I know what the difference is between the governments of PiS and PO? He replied that Tusk had never been interested in a strategy, he had never asked himself what Poland would look like in twenty and thirty years - just what polls say. Though the point would be the opposite: that we know what we want in the future, to learn the lessons from failures of the transition and the journey we began in 1989.
Most Central European leaders in the Western newspapers are most often only referred to as corrupt. Mostly Orbán, Fico and Babiš; but never Kaczyński. What is the reason behind this?
He is a politician who put money aside. Everyone knows that for many decades he has been living in his parents´ modest, to-be-renovated house in a better part of Warsaw. He is often ridiculed for not fitting into this modern world, as he has no license, has not become rich, what’s more, he doesn’t even have a bank account.
Recently, however, the press has revealed that, if not for himself, he has created a secure financial background for PiS. So he is able to manage financial and economic processes well, but not for his own sake.
There is also a joke about this that the opposition is spreading. It says: why doesn't Kaczyński have a bank account? Because he doesn't need it: every bank is his.
This is a paradox: while state and municipal business leaders, who were most often placed in that position by a particular party, are getting richer, the party leader lives in extremely modest conditions. This makes him extremely immune to attacks.
How would you describe the ideology of Law and Justice? What we at Azonnali are using the most is nationalist (social-)conservative, are we close to the solution?
More or less yes, although we use these adjectives not because they perfectly describe a particular political ideology, but because, quite simply, to us these are available. Incidentally, although PiS is fundamentally conservative — believing in solid and transcendent values such as institutions, God, and the nation — it also has a very strong intention to reform.
The biggest difference between PiS and Donald Tusk is that in Tusk’s speeches, there were never any references to Polish history beyond the mention of communism. The PiS, on the other hand, consciously uses the classic narrative of Polish history, according to which the Polish nation has a tradition of uprising and a desire for freedom: such is the Solidarity Movement, Pope John Paul II, the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, the Polish-Soviet War of 1920, and so on. This national conservatism is manifested when we stand up for the institutions that are under attack today: for the family (some use the term natural family), for the nation, for the church.
In government from 2005 to 2007, we also advocated for a free market economy, and our Minister of Finance was explicitly liberal. This has changed since then, the party is now much more social. But this is a general trend, I think: twenty years ago, left- and center-left parties were relatively critical of the free market, but liberals in culture, and conservatives were pro-market, for example demanding low tax rates.
This has changed today, interestingly starting from Central and Eastern Europe which is exploitated through low wages: the right has linked value-based conservatism with social policy. The PiS government, which has been in power since 2015, is the first Polish government to have a truly national and effective social policy, as the goal is for our own people to live well in a welfare state. This is also the reason why the electoral base of PiS is made up of villagers, small town people, former Solidarity activists and generally people living in poorer living conditions than before the transition.
Is PiS an illiberal party, or is this adjective an exaggeration?
What we mean by illiberalism? It is said in the European Parliament that this is a restriction on the freedom of the individual, a terror of democratic majority - I think that is a mistake. But if we say that there is a different definition of the concept of freedom, let´s say in the republican tradition, as opposed to the concept of freedom in postmodern liberalism, then truly, PiS is not really a liberal party.
But we do not oppose the rule of law or individual freedoms at all, on the contrary, we claim that liberal democracies of the periphery have robbed themselves of these freedoms from people who feel helpless against transnational elites - all in connection with the theory of neocolonialism. Angela Merkel has often said about her policy that there is no alternative to it. To tell people that there is only one direction, well, is to rob people of their freedom.
The illiberalism of Fidesz and PiS just gave back this kind of sense of freedom to the people: that there is always a choice.
That is why I think that when the Polish government is attacked by the Procedure Article 7 in the European Parliament, Poles may rightly think that they are actually being attacked and not allowed to govern Poland by the will of the Polish people. In other words, it is in this sense that today's prevalent liberalism is actually illiberal.
In their recent book, Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes argue that the reason for the good public response to Central European illiberal tendencies is that they have had enough of copying the West, as it became clear during the economic crisis that it would not lead to success.
The theory is true, but not very original. The two authors handle resources very loosely, and many authors are silenced, including, for example, me and my 2003 book on this, in which I described the phenomenon introduced by the authors, imitation of modernization. With the end of communism, they said, let’s not experiment, we know which way to go: - in my book I have presented the paradoxes, the derailments of what the West has shown, and the consequent change of the Solidarity movement. My book helps to understand why the lower circle of Polish society supports PiS, which pursues the original objectives of Solidarity, instead of liberalism imported from the West.
Rather, the current edition of Holmes and Krastev’s book points out that in Central and Eastern European societies, the perception of the West has changed fundamentally, not just in intellectual circles: it is no longer a role model, people see its deficits. I am regularly asked by taxi drivers in Warsaw why politicians in Brussels have gone crazy like this. Not even the Western European Polish diaspora wants a Poland similar to the West.
Prior to the Second World War, Warsaw earned the nickname Paris of the North: now we wouldn´t be much flattered. Just let us not become like them in Paris or Brussels!
This is a huge change in mentality: it is also the reason why more and more people are moving back home from Western Europe. They moved out before because they never thought they would ever be able to live well here – now it is possible. This is also the reason for this current anti-Western uprising in the Visegrad countries: the European Parliament, the European Council, the European Commission thought wrongly, sometimes quite ridiculously, that they were our teachers. Guy Verhofstadt and Frans Timmermans can't even deal with their own populists flirting with Flemish nationalism in Belgium and in the Netherlands, so do they really want to give us lessons?!
Anyway, does it still makes sense for dividing west and east?
This is no longer present today, thanks to the financial-economic crisis, a north vs. south division grew stronger. We do not necessarily think of Portugal, Spain or Italy when we talk about the West, a word that had the most meaning during the Cold War: the four or five most economically developed, richest European countries. With significant differences of course, only to think about the French-German relations.
Central Europe, especially the Visegrad countries, can be distinguished from the West by the fact that it has no colonial past and tradition - so it is difficult to explain to anyone in Warsaw why we should accept migrants from Mali or Congo, as they feel no cultural connection, nor moral obligation to accept that. The other is that in the 20th century, these countries suffered not from a conservative authoritarian regime like Spain or Portugal, but from a far-left dictatorship. Paris traditionally looks south, we look east, Hungary a little towards the Balkans - Poland has therefore never really been directly exposed to the migration crisis, only later, indirectly, through Brussels, on the issue of EU quotas.
To what extent can we still talk about solidarity between European member states today, after Germany, despite Poland's opposition, is still clinging to Nord Stream 2 with the Russians?
The essence of solidarity is to do it voluntarily. This is the case in some questions between member states: the donations following the Notre-Dame fire have been such a case. But it was also the case on the part of Poland when, between 1994 and 1996, during the first Chechen-Russian war, it received hundreds of thousands of Chechen refugees without any protest. But when Angela Merkel announced in 2015 that they could no longer control the border, so they would accept everyone, so let everyone be in solidarity with them, that’s everything but European policy. Just as the construction of Nord Stream 2 with Vladimir Putin, despite sanctions against Russia, is being declared a European project by German foreign minister Heiko Maas, although the European Commission and Parliament have repeatedly criticized it.
But why do you think the Germans are doing that?
Good question. Angela Merkel always argues that Nord Stream 2 is a purely economic project, although everyone is aware that it is about geopolitics. It does mean that Germans think differently about geopolitics than we do.
Once I organized a conversation about this with the Greens´ foundation: everyone there was very critical, and then talked about why Nord Stream 2 is so important to Russia. Then I asked them, “good, Russian motivations are obvious, but dear German colleagues, what are the German motivations? ” To this, the Greens answered that they did not think there was any strategy on the German side behind it, it was just an economic project. Who would believe this? Anyway, my impression is that many who fear Russian politics, not just politicians but also economic actors, do not dare to criticize the Germans and to ask the simple question: what does Germany want?
So which is a bigger threat to the EU or even only to Central Europe: Germans or Russians?
EU policy is shaped by Germany, with competition from France. Some of Emmanuel Macron's ideas for a core Europe are even more dangerous to us than those of the Germans - this is due to the fact that France no longer has significant knowledge of the Central European region and has a kind of nostalgia for the beginning of the EU. Germany, on the other hand, has always been more cautious, a supporter of a larger EU – if only because there are plenty of German companies operating in the region and it is in their interest to remain so – as they do not want to placed on a periphery of Europe.
But what is most dangerous for Europe is the policy of its leadership to achieve an ever closer union, the dream of a centralized European empire that can successfully compete with China and the US, and would blur national differences as well. This is dangerous because Europe cannot be an empire; even if there will be one, it will be just an empire in Europe. Napoleon and Hitler made the same mistake.
At the same time, ambiguity, hypocrisy and fear of others are truly dangerous. Several smaller member states also differ from the EU mainstream on certain issues, but they do not articulate it because they are under pressure not to. This is what we see on every sitting: they are afraid that they will be a minority. The best example of this is the issue of tackling climate change, which is the main topic since the migration crisis - where in the latter Germany’s current opinion has finally come very close to the V4’s stance, which was certainly articulated as a minority opinion to Merkel’s words in 2015.
Someone working at the European Commission told me that the French and the Germans do not really dare to criticize the current climate targets publicly, so what if someone from Central Europe did it for them, as the Polish economy is still carbon-based – it would fit the government to protect it. Because of this double standard, I would say that real populism does not come from the so-called strongmen of Central and Eastern European politics, but from those who dare not contradict the majority on popular and emotionally overheated issues.
Previously, PiS itself sat in EPP in the European Parliament, so presumably there is some connection to this large center-right group. People’s Party politicians are often accused of actually seeing things in a much more nuanced and perhaps better way than they say - is that really the case?
In the People’s Party, the conservative wing has weakened since the 2019 EP elections, as the majority in the current European Parliament also needs the votes of the center-left S&D Group and the liberal Renew Europe. That is why we also see some frustration among the members of the EPP. In private conversations, they regularly point out that they are also Catholics or just as critical of migration than we are, so we ECR members should cooperate more with them to prevent far-left dominance - yet, when decisions are made, there is nothing of that. Therefore, I treat these private conversations as confessions of love.
In theory, there´s already a report on Donald Tusk´s desk from the three wisemen, examining the compatibility of Fidesz and Christian-democratic values. If they are kicked out, or if they go by themselves, as they are already telling, would you accept them in ECR?
Of course, this would be one of the first steps (there are others, of course more important ones) in European politics, to begin to recover from its crisis. Today's political structure not at all reflects the dominant ideologies in Europe, so one of my dreams is that a large conservative faction will finally be formed - which will also mean the disintegration of EPP.
I would be glad to see Fidesz to finally leave EPP. Well, by bringing others with itself as well!
The interview was originally published on January 7th 2020. We would like to thank azonnali.hu for the permission.