Abstract
Reviewed by: Michael Fleming, Polish University Abroad, London, UK
In the introduction to this excellent survey of modern Polish history, Porter-Szűcs contends that it is the very ordinariness of Poland that makes the country worth studying. Through a comparative and transnational framework, Poland in the Modern World challenges, on the one hand, orientalist narratives that often depict Poland as backward and, on the other, the myths of nationalists that frame the imagined nation as the historical subject. Beyond Martyrdom in the book’s title reflects a thorough rejection of exceptionalist accounts of modern Polish history and signals an intervention in an on-going debate which has seen the current political opposition Prawo i Sprawiedliwość promote a restricted, nationalist interpretation of Polish history.
Throughout the book Porter-Szűcs rejects the clichés that have characterized some discussions of modern Polish history. The tone of the text is set by positioning Poland in a global context – neither leading nor particularly lagging on various indicators of development, but comfortably middling, or ordinary. Starting the narrative with a brief discussion of the late eighteenth-century partitions, Porter-Szűcs problematizes the mapping of contemporary national labels to the past, and highlights the different forms of social organization that existed prior to the upheavals of nineteenth- and twentieth-century industrialization and urbanization.
Though the discussion of the nineteenth century in this survey is relatively summary, the author explores the impact of the Partitions in the much more thorough exposition of the twentieth century. Porter-Szűcs is the author of a well-received book on nationalism in Poland, and in Poland in the Modern World he offers a sensitive and multifaceted account of the development of nationalism during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The exploration of the exclusive and anti-Semitic nationalism of National Democracy is held in tension with a necessary corrective to the general impression many have of interwar Poland. Porter-Szűcs notes that ‘people with different languages and religions got along pretty well most of the time’ and contests the notion that ‘heterogeneity in and of itself was dangerous’ (130). The book also includes a useful examination of the national communism of the post-war and particularly the post-1956 period, which reached its nadir in the 1968 anti-Semitic campaign.
Porter-Szűcs makes numerous links and comparisons between developments in Poland and those elsewhere. The figure of Matka-Polka (Mother Pole) is shown to be a particular manifestation of a nineteenth-century middle-class model of femininity, for instance. Incarceration rates during the Stalinist period were 250 per 100,000 citizens, compared with 106 per 100,000 in the US. Strikingly, the author notes that today the US figure is 753, and in Poland it is 218 (209). Porter-Szűcs points out that ‘just as today’s US prison population is drawn from specific demographic categories, so was Stalinist incarceration focused on particular groups’ (210). By using these statistics the author demonstrates that ‘the prism of oppression is probably not the most useful starting point’ (214). Rather, if we wish to understand the Stalinist period, or other periods for that matter, we need to be empirically rigorous rather than beholden to various stylized facts. We also need to be critical about sources: those facing arrest were those most likely to write about it.
One issue which has attracted a great deal of attention over the last few years is the collapse of communism. The role of debt, the population’s enhanced material expectations, generational change and the significance of Karol Wojtyła’s ascendency to the Papacy are explored here. The problems of Poland’s command economy are contextualized with a useful and well-written juxtaposition of communist and capitalist economic rationales. Though the rigours and discipline of the factory floor operated on both sides of the Iron Curtain, key differences between a producer-centric and consumer-centric system are explored, and the profound implications for social and economic organization highlighted.
The end of the Polish People’s Republic and the introduction of Leszek Balcerowicz’s ‘shock therapy’ to discipline the ‘labor force with lower wages in order to maximize productivity and efficiency’ (330) had a profound effect, reducing real wages by ‘24 percent between 1990 and 1991’ (333). From other studies, we know that a new geography of suicide was created in the 1990s as many towns’ principal or only employer closed down. The on-going debate on the benefits and costs of ‘shock therapy’ is mentioned. Poland’s later ascension to the EU (in 2004) is briefly mentioned (337). Further consideration of the significance of Poland’s EU (and NATO) membership would have been welcome.
Porter-Szűcs’s book is an invaluable addition to the growing collection of English-language surveys of modern Polish history. Informative and accessible, the book will be particularly useful to students and teachers of the history of Poland.