Neoliberalism Redux: Poland’s Recombinant Populism and its Alternatives

Abstract

This article considers the re-emergence of populism in Poland. With an all but absent left, the anti-neoliberal position in Poland emerged from the right. The article explores the processes associated with this and critically evaluates the populist turn asking if this is a rejection of neoliberalism or whether recombinant populism is increasingly compatible with contemporary neoliberalism. Despite widespread dissatisfaction with post-communist transition, first through Shock Therapy, second through Europeanization, and more recently through the so-called global financial crisis, former dissidents have been co-opted into the reproduction of neoliberalism. In the absence of a more forceful left response in Poland, the population has proclaimed its outrage with the hardships of post-communism by discovering a captivating message from the populists. The emergence of populist social forces has become one of the mechanisms for the disenfranchised to make sense of the pressures of neoliberalization. Populism, nationalism and neoliberalism can happily co-exist.

Keywords

Poland recombinant populism neoliberalism Gramsci political economy post-communist transition

Introduction

The resurgence of populism as a socio-political force in Poland (and throughout Europe, West as well as East) in recent years has since been exacerbated by the economic crisis that has grasped Europe. This poses a number of significant questions for critical scholarship. In particular, how is the rise of populism related to neoliberal formulations of post-communist transition? Though not unlike a variety of other recent experiences across Europe in the aftermath of the North Atlantic crisis,¹ the populist turn provokes concerns as to why such a response has emerged from the right rather than the left.² Is this an expression of social antagonism, the result of crises of under-consumption, or a simple conservative reaction to the worst excesses of the transition, now writ ever larger in the current post-crisis mood of austerity? It is worth recalling that such issues are not necessarily novel for much of Eastern Central Europe (ECE). Large swathes of the former Soviet bloc have experienced a general socio-economic and political crisis since the collapse of Soviet hegemony in the early 1990s, as those states geographically most proximate to the European Union (EU) have edged ever closer to membership of the ‘club’ leaving others marginalized on the European periphery. However, widespread inequalities, hidden unemployment and underemployment remain endemic (Bandelj and Mahugta, 2010). The intended rapid neoliberal transition to liberal democracy and market capitalism and concomitant membership of Western institutions has instead tested the resolve of both state and society for over a generation. Bearing in mind such concerns, explanations of the resurgence of populism could include a number of factors, as obviously very complex local dynamics are also unfolding in the socio-political responses elicited by post-communist transition. However, the primary focus of this article is to contextualize this recombinant populism particularly in its international context: the particular and differentiated development of capitalism in ECE associated with the ongoing construction of neoliberal hegemony. In short then, the article posits that, much as with the restructuring of property relations in transition, we are witnessing a form of recombinant populism. This idea emulates Stark’s notion of recombinant property applied to the restructuring of post-communist property relations (Stark, 1996). I utilize the idea of recombination to illustrate how agents understand the (re-)emergence of populism as a response to the ongoing social ambiguity of transition, enabling them to redefine and recombine existing and novel political and social resources that are built both on and with the ruins of existing populist discourse in ECE.

As the article interrogates the social impact of neoliberalization and the potential countervailing hegemonic forces inculcated through neoliberalism I turn to recent critical scholarship in international relations and international political economy (IR/IPE) that draws on the work of Antonio Gramsci to understand this populism in the context of structural change, the social relations of production and the changing social forces engendered in post-communist transition that maintain neoliberal hegemony. This requires an emphasis on the role of various mediating structures, most notably the post-communist state and global capitalism since populism has re-emerged in Poland primarily since the international and regionally mediated crisis of the post-communist world, and the accompanying re-alignment within the global capitalist economy.

The article considers the recent re-emergence of populism despite the absence of a coherent left alternative. The anti-neoliberal alternative has come from the nationalist right with the pro-welfare position dominated by politically regressive conservative social forces who aim to arrest welfare cuts and end the austerity associated with Poland’s seemingly permanent miring in transition (Lubecki, 2004). The article explores such changes and attempts to critically evaluate the populist turn reflecting on whether or not this is a clear rejection of neoliberalism. Populism is understood in terms of the relationship to specific conjunctural projects for the reorientation of capitalist reproduction in ECE, and how recombinant populism is increasingly compatible with the latest variegation of neoliberalism. The argument unfolds in four stages. First, drawing on a Gramscian critical political economy, the next section elaborates the context for consideration of the populist response to neoliberalization through the inter-related injurious impacts of post-communist transition and EU enlargement. The deleterious lack of economic progress has invoked widespread dissatisfaction with the political process as those who suffered most to overthrow Communist hegemony have reaped so little in return. Section two then reflects on the rupture with the past in Poland considering what happened to propagate the dissolution of the Solidarność successor parties. In exploring what has happened to these political forces since 1989 the article suggests that left and right have been (willingly) co-opted into the reproduction of neoliberalism. This leads to a discussion in part three of the article about the emergence of populist social forces, predominantly ultra-Catholic, nationalist radicals, who have opposed on moral grounds the seemingly permanent miring of the post-Solidarność parties and the reformed communist party in corruption allegations. Section four then reflects on the potential for a progressive politics of a renewed left to emerge as opposition to the current crisis in ECE intensifies.

Contextualising Populism: Post-Communist Transition and Neoliberalism

One of the most powerful responses to the adversities of transition has been the (re-)emergence of populism in Poland. As a hegemonic project transition can be understood as being instigated by coalitions of social forces, of classes, or fractions of capital that attempt to establish a particular type of social order. This can be inclusive of most social forces or a more fragile hegemony, which renders excluded groups available for mobilization into counter hegemonic movements. The contradictions in the neoliberal project offer space for alternative political initiatives within national formations so that a range of counter-hegemonic possibilities remains open. The resurgence of populism as a socio-political force in Poland (and throughout Europe) in recent years is one such response, exacerbated by the recent economic crisis. My starting point for thinking about populism is as a discourse that ‘pits a virtuous, homogeneous national people against a set of self-serving “powers-that-be”, who consider society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, “the pure people” versus “the corrupt elite”’ (Mudde, 2004: 541), conspiring in a time of (perceived or real) crisis and change, not only to deprive the people of what is rightfully theirs in terms of their economic and social standing, but to suppress their values, their voice and their very identity. This is obviously a widely encompassing term for a multiplicity of responses though it nonetheless captures some sense of the political mobilization occurring. Given the current conjuncture it is worth heeding de la Torre’s claim that ‘modernizing elites’ have argued that populism’s rhetoric and style of mobilization pose dangers to democratic institutions. They have constructed ‘popular subjects as the “Other” – the negation of the “modern and rational” political subjects that they aim to forge’ (De la Torre, 1997: 13). The limits of the possible within any state-society complex become contiguous with capitalist rationality, and an ahistorical reified market economy and capitalist state.

Contrast this with Latin American populism that is more closely associated with import-substitution industrialization, a clientelistic, party based relationship between a charismatic political leader and the people. All invoked in a particular discursive construction: the people versus an elite (see for example De la Torre, 1997). Yet with the emergence of neoliberalism throughout much of Latin America in the 1980s and 1990s a re-ascendant populism was retooled in a positive vein as neo-populism with the admixture of neoliberal reform and democratization (Weyland, 1998). Neo-populist presidents such as Peru’s Fujimori and Argentina’s Menem stabilized crisis situations, created macroeconomic stability, and maintained high levels of popular support. A more negative interpretation might assert that neo-populism is the reproduction of traditional power relationships between political economic elites and the wider population, between state and society despite the transformative neoliberal development strategy. It might be fruitful to reconcile a rhetoric of the people and their power with a reality in which the majority were excluded from meaningful democratic participation (Motta, 2011). Instead we behold the reproduction of old politics and elite manipulation of class vulnerabilities with new formulations of neoliberal economics (Panizza, 2000). What is most noticeable about the current populist surge in Poland and elsewhere in ECE is that this is a recombinant populism, built both on and with the traditional populist social relations, thus highlighting the limitations of generic ahistorical concepts such as populism for explaining political processes.

Explanations of the resurgence of populism could therefore include multiple factors. In the case of Poland any explanation requires an interrogation of the role of various mediating structures, most notably the post-communist state and the global capitalist system. Resistance to the rise of neoliberalism in Poland has often been centred on a set of anti-political, populist gestures associated with the emergence of a new right and the steady disappearance of the left since 1989. However, the situation is not quite so clear cut as this might imply, as the utility of populism is precisely in its embrace of a range of diverse and often contradictory political beliefs, an eclectically recombinant form of hybrid populisms, composed of ethno-national or religious symbols with more classically leftist orientation. For example, Piccone’s work on France (1993) was an early harbinger of a ‘universalizing New Class seeking to impose an abstract liberal agenda on everyone, and populists wanting to live their lives in their communities, with their partiular cultures, institutions, religions, etc.’ (Piccone, 1993: 21). However, it is Kalb’s more recent reflections on these issues that concentrates on the dialectic between the ‘abstract liberalism of the new class of social engineers’ and the ‘globalizing agenda of the capitalist competition state … losing the legitimacy it once had’ (Kalb, 2005: 179). As Colás warns, populism is:

at once a derivative and self-sustaining category; a social movement and an expression of state authority; a revolutionary and conservative form of politics; at times marginal, on other occasions a determining historical phenomenon, the term “populism” can mean different things to different people in different contexts. (Colás, 2004: 242)

Populism has re-emerged in Poland primarily since the regionally mediated crisis of the post-communist world, and the accompanying re-alignment within the global capitalist economy. Obviously complex local dynamics are unfolding in the socio-political responses elicited; however, the aim of the article remains focused on the contexts of the populist re-ascendancy, associated with the differentiated development of capitalism in the region under ongoing neoliberalization (see Rupert, 2000). The article considers whether this signals a clear and decisive rejection of neoliberalism despite the absence of a coherent left alternative (Lubecki, 2004).

The neoliberal orientation of Poland’s reforms commenced ostensibly in the late 1980s and early 1990s with the installation of a particularly virulent form of economic reform, associated with Leszek Balcerowicz, Finance Minister and Deputy Prime Minister in the first non-communist government after 1989. Though Balcerowicz and associates were working on a plan for transforming the sclerotic Polish economy as early as the 1970s (Balcerowicz, 1995; also see Shields, 2012: 67-72). This particular brand of neoliberalism, Shock Therapy, endorsed by external agents like Jeffrey Sachs and the IMF and World Bank, introduced rapid liberalization with substantial social costs. Recent critical IPE approaches to post-communist transition and EU integration provide a useful starting point for reflecting on the populist response to neoliberalism as both a reaction to the worst exigencies of the first wave of transition as well as a second wave of reforms associated with the EU (Bohle, 2006; Bohle et al., 2007; Cafruny and Ryner, 2003).

As the EU exported its model of market regulation to ECE, reauthoring the relations between capital, state, and labour, the EU became ‘the conduit through which the neoliberal social and economic model is … institutionalised in Europe’ (Wahl, 2004: 38). The impact on labour has, patently obviously, been substantial, primarily because labour has borne the brunt of the neoliberal assault and labour’s capacity for mobilization has been considerably diluted at national and enterprise levels (Hardy, 2009). In contradistinction to the more mainstream constructivist IR literature (Epstein, 2006; Vachudova, 2005), a critical IPE approach emphasizes how accounts of the social transformations occurring in ECE account not only for the form of these changes taking place, but also their social purpose. Through conditionality, in particular the dissemination of ideas and policy transfer of the EU’s objectives to ECE, the policy range available to the accession countries has been considerably limited (Jacoby, 2001). Instead, the highly asymmetrical influence of the benefits of EU membership has crowded out alternative pathways. The dominance of the EU in ECE exports and inward investment, as well as the EU’s role as actor in the construction of post-communist politics, illustrates the central role played by the EU in the region since the mid-1990s (UNCTAD, 2005: 23–40). The EU has locked in neoliberal reforms (on ECE, see Holman, 2004: 225; in general, see Jayasuriya, 2004), depoliticising economy and society by weakening or removing historically accumulated forms of socialization. Existing forms of non-market coordination and state regulation are abandoned (Gough, 2002: 63).

Opposition to the disintegration of existing mechanisms of social control and political representation galvanized by neoliberalism configures forms of opposition that draw upon concepts of cultural, ethnic and historical identity to respond to the problems of changing socioeconomic conditions (Radice, 2000; Rupert, 2000; Worth, 2002). To explore this, the remainder of the article focuses on the failures post-Solidarność political forces have incurred in forming a new alternative form of politics and how resistance has instead reverted to a community based populist form of radicalism. This has been based on principles that resonate clearly with many of the same forms of economic and cultural nationalism portrayed above in an anti-consumerist populist culture with a xenophobic sovereignty paranoia that, according to the populists, challenge the consensual hegemony of neoliberalism by returning popular politics back to the nation rediscovering organic communitarian alternatives.

The populist backlash to the neoliberalization of post-communist states exploits a traditional conservative mind-set turning against forms of socio-political order that are not considered a substantial enough contrast to liberal democracy and neoliberalism, as it was this combination that sowed the seeds for what they consider the current malodorous post-communist disorder. They continue to point out the standard populist position: that growing inequalities and societal problems have been enhanced during the post-communist era with a political project that focuses on protecting the national and cultural heritage of the nation-state from the malign influences of an indistinct external threat. Nationalist populist responses in Poland stem from a belief that the hegemonic neoliberal order is not only a serious threat to the sovereignty and identity of the nation, but to the petit bourgeois fear that a dragooning transnational capital poses a menace to national businesses and jobs. Neoliberalism is equated with internationalism, while nationalism is equated with social democratic and other more interventionist approaches, a point I return to later in the article. In addition, in Poland the traditional left-right ideology constitutes both a vehicle and camouflage for other forms of contestation: catholic versus secularist; trader class versus rural migrant and urban proletariat; the petty-bourgeois ‘peasants’, clinging to their independence in the face of power and privilege. That such sentiments may be familiar throughout ECE and similar populist expressions might be complimentary does not resonate widely. In the next section of the article I begin to unpack the dissolution of the communist period resistance and its recalibration as co-opted neoliberals.

From Communist Resistance to Neoliberal Conformism

The broader scope of this article is to engage with the social impact of neoliberalism in Poland and the hegemonic forces inculcated through that. In a more unequivocal sense the article asks how events since the collapse of communism have so frequently come to be to the prejudice of those who endeavoured most to establish Western style freedoms. It is one of the great incongruities of post-communist Poland that a social movement, Solidarność, guided by the principles of worker self-government; self-management and the ‘self-liberation of civil society’ should have implemented a neoliberal reform package like the Sachs-Balcerowicz Plan (Bernard, 1993: 10–13; Cirtautas, 1997).³ The contrast between the two could not be more palpable. Solidarność’s Programme for National Renewal (Sanford, 1990) proposed a system intended to ‘guarantee basic civil freedoms and respect the principles of equality before the law as far as all citizens are concerned … regardless of their convictions, political views and organizational affiliations’ (Solidarność, 1981: 349). In so far as economic reform was addressed, the levels of inequality between members of Polish society that could be tolerated were only those that would improve the conditions of the most disadvantaged. In opposition, Solidarność had maintained a certain credulity towards idealized Western values in distinction to existing socio-political arrangements. As Szacki indicates, this emphasized Western-style political institutions, freedoms and standards of living without consciously promulgating notions of the installation of the market or neoliberalism. Polish demands for Western-style democracy were like skimming cream from the Western economic system (Szacki, 1995: 122).

The year 1989 was a moment in the modernization of a form of state capitalism experiencing the same crisis as states in the west of Europe from the 1970s onwards. Admittedly state ownership of the means of production, planning, etc. were ostensibly state socialist but wage labour, money, production, division of labour, coercion to work, labour time, and separation of the means of production from producer existed in the states of ECE prior to 1989. The reform process was hijacked by neoliberal forces. Apart from the specific neoliberal actors that surrounded Balcerowicz, the Polish intellectual and political elite lacked an explicit programme or vision for reform (Shields, 2003: 226).⁴ Neoliberals excepted, the main actors had little sense of the magnitude of their undertaking. The result, according to Rae, has been the emergence of:

a political system rife with corruption and pathology, weak political parties, and low electoral turnouts … trade unions have been marginalized, resulting in extreme levels of exploitation. A strong and independent civil society, once the ostensible goal of the transformation, has failed to materialise as democratic accountability has declined … conservatism has arisen as the most coherent and consistent alternative mode of political thought in Poland today. (Rae, 2007: 224)

One of the most conspicuous characteristics of post-communist Poland has been the omnipresent contradiction between a militant, uncompromisingly anti-Communist ideology carried over from before 1989 and the principle of compromise which had enabled a smooth, peaceful transfer of political power. In the context of the contemporary period this contradicts the traditional left leanings of the Polish intelligentsia on one hand, and the high value attached to religious values on the other. It is worth stating how widespread social-democratic sympathies presaged the imposition of Soviet domination and the Stalinist turn of 1949, re-emerging after the 1956 liberalization as a belief in ‘market socialism’ and the evolution of the Soviet-type regime to converge with capitalism into a new social organization, combining market, state, and democracy. The left oriented position was common in Solidarność during 1980–81, and the later Round Table talks that culminated in the negotiated end to communist party rule (Kaminski, 1991: 223; Kochanowicz, 1997).

In the more recent past, political turbulence and party instability has occurred on the centre-left of the political spectrum. This is surprising since many commentators have cited the Polish communist successor party, the Democratic Left Alliance (Sojusz Lewicy Demokratycznej: SLD), as a model of how to transform a former regime party into modern, electorally successful social democrats (Grzymala-Busse, 2002). The former-communists, refabricated as social democrats, returned to power in 1993 less concerned with articulating an alternative to neoliberal hegemony than reproducing mainstream neoliberalism based on the familiar macroeconomic policies of the Balcerowicz era. By the 2001 election the renewed SLD fell just short of an overall majority in the Sejm, the lower chamber of the Polish parliament. During what was an electorally unstable period the emergence of populist social forces began to crystallize in reaction to the Rywingate affair. In 2002 a prominent film producer, Lew Rywin, was alleged to have offered Adam Michnik (editor of Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland’s first and largest post-communist daily newspaper) an appropriate inducement to make changes to a draft media ownership law that would have severely curtailed print media access to radio and television firms. Rywin alleged he was acting for a ‘group holding power’. From the New Year, televised hearings of the Polish Parliament’s Rywin commission, opened up the interconnections between politics, business and corruption under the SLD government to public examination.⁵

The problems for the SLD were exacerbated when the sleaze accusations failed to stop. Accusation piled upon accusation as SLD MPs were accused of accepting bribes relating to a new gaming law. This was connected to allegations concerning organized crime and money laundering, and corruption in the health service and local government. These claims were corroborated in a series of criminal trials (McMenamin and Timonen, 2002; Watson, 2006). The Sejm established a second investigative commission in May 2004 into the circumstances surrounding use of the security services to arrest the president of PKN Orlen, Poland’s largest energy company, in order to block a deal to supply it with Russian oil. The investigation spread to include the role of then Prime Minister Leszek Miller, wider government misuse of the security services, PKN Orlen’s revised contracts, and matters of economic supervision and energy security in the Finance Ministry. In January 2005 a third commission examined alleged irregularities in the 1999 privatization of the state insurance giant PZU.

In an early foretaste of the response to the current crisis, the negative social impact of these scandals was further aggravated by the introduction of economic austerity measures at the end of 2003 to prevent the budget deficit from spiralling out of control. As a later OECD Economic Survey announced, government action was induced to reduce spending, ease business conditions, reform labour law, and invest in infrastructure (OECD, 2006). SLD was experiencing the worst of its chronic unpopularity levels. Having won an election in 2001 with 42% of the vote, by 2004 it was trailing in a limp third with 12% (CBOS, 2004). The austerity package, named the Hausner Plan after its architect, the then Finance Minster Jerzy Hausner, included a series of bills devised to shrink pension payments and defence spending, diminish civil service numbers and increase women’s retirement age from 60 to 65. The drastic cuts would shrink the budget by zl54b from 2004. It is perhaps little surprise that the populists were able to exploit this situation for political gain. The SLD-led government had continued to consolidate the sunset industries accelerating privatization of the mining sector. In a period of growing unemployment the Hausner Plan’s reform of the welfare system was not most appropriately coordinated with the need for extra state funding for EU membership. As neoliberal reforms continued to undermine social protection and living standards the Hausner Plan promised a disproportionate impact on those least able to defend themselves. The dreams of Western ‘cream’ had long dissipated alongside the necessity for neoliberal therapy and EU membership, and the emphasis on EU membership despite the costs empowered those occluded from the political process, represented by the parties: PiS (Law and Justice), LPR (League of Polish Families) and SO (Self Defence of the Republic of Poland).

Attempts at organising an alternative right wing electoral coalition on the lines of Solidarność Electoral Action were abandoned in favour of consolidation around the two remaining dominant parliamentary parties: PO (Civic Platform) and PiS, both on the right of the political spectrum. However, as illustration of the discursive strength of the emerging and widely variegated populism, even neoliberal PO attempted to realign the party along more socially conservative lines and a stronger national-patriotic discourse encapsulated in a change of tone in the party’s approach to European issues, particularly its opposition to the new voting provisions contained in the EU constitutional treaty. This would have replaced the 2001 Nice Treaty settlement that had aimed to revise internal EU institutional structures to facilitate eastwards enlargement. Popular Polish sentiment at the time indicated these negotiations could have been more favourably completed. As Szczerbiak’s (2002: 29–30) expansive analysis indicates,

Poles have become increasingly cynical about the EU over the last few years … We should not be too surprised about this state of affairs. Support was bound to fall once it became apparent that conforming to EU norms would involve negative economic and social consequences as well as benefits … [A] stereotype develops of the kind of person and socio-occupational groups that are likely to benefit from it, with certain segments of the population clearly defined as, and perceiving themselves to be, ‘winners’ and ‘losers’. This would reinforce the idea of EU accession as an elite-driven process from which only a narrow, wealthy section of the population will benefit, or which simply does not affect most people’s day-to-day lives.

The utility of the winners and losers trope is one that resonates with the World Bank’s use of the same adumbration (World Bank, 2002; see also Kalb, 2009; Shields, 2008), reinforcing claims that contemporary right wing populism is fuelled by the emergence of the so-called modernization losers rather than by a state-led attempt to reconcile neoliberalization. Certainly in Poland a new societal group believes neoliberal economic reforms have (objectively or subjectively) affected their ability to benefit from the post-communist period.

The contortions the right was prepared to indulge in including PO’s shift from a manifestly narrow economic neoliberalism benefited PO when it emerged as the most popular party in opinion polls at the beginning of 2004 and subsequently won the largest share of the vote in the June 2004 European Parliament election. In 2005 PO suggested introducing a 15% flat tax rate for income, business and VAT. Two years later in the October 2007 general election, with PiS and the populists defeated at the ballot box, PO even offered to improve state sector wages. PO leader Donald Tusk, now Prime Minister, even supported the idea of national champions in strategic sectors to compete with transnational capital (Cullmann and Hirschhausen, 2008: 338). Reinforcing Weyland’s argument concerning Latin American neo-populism, it should be clear that the dividing line between neoliberalism and populism has not grown any wider in recent decades in Poland. As the next section of the article will discuss, the populist turn in Poland has inadvertently strengthened neoliberalism. Though whether that neoliberalization has strengthened populist leadership is another matter. Instead, to mis-quote Weyland, the recombinant populist turn of the 2000s in Poland is a marriage of inconvenience (pace Weyland, 1999) as it does not fit into the easy categories of nationalism or populism. Instead as the next section of the article contends, the emergent populist symmetry across multiple states and regions, with the emergence of a form of global neoliberal populism in recent years attests to a bastardized mix of neoliberal social and economic policies cosseted in populist rhetoric alongside authoritarian overtones: on neoliberalism and the state in general, see Bonefeld (2010); on recent European examples see Bruff (forthcoming) and Macartney (forthcoming); and in addition to the Latin American examples noted above, on Asia, see Jayasuriya and Hewison (2006).

Resisting Neoliberalism: Poland’s Recombinant Populists

The populists remain committed to occupy the terrain of dissensus deserted by traditional parties (Mouffe, 2005: 64–69). The populist response to the perceived iniquities of post-communist life has been to foster an ambiguous, personality-driven and paternalistic coalition of forces that on the one hand reject the technocratic forms of governance associated with neoliberal Shock Therapy, but on the other hand continue to accept the disciplines of the market. This is a form of anti-politics, and I use the term deliberately given its resonance with the earlier period of dissident anti-politics, that rejected the technocratic policies of the international financial organizations and EU, and instead developed the anti-politics of the Kazczynski-led coalition government. The populist coalition that came to power in 2005 in Poland on a wave of ultra-catholic nationalist rhetoric is apparently predicated on suspicions of foreign influence and of the breakdown of family and religion in the face of neoliberalism. For Gramsci, as Boggs notes, the ‘development of capitalism in Italy was impeded and distorted by its necessary compromise with feudal survivals – the monarchy, Church, landholding aristocracy, southern traditionalism’ (1984: 173). On being elected the Kaczynski twins’ (President Lech and Prime Minister Jaroslaw) government pursued high-profile attacks on gay rights, favoured the reintroduction of the death penalty, and demanded a complete ban on abortion. The government headed by the twins gathered around itself disparate sets of ideological positions and political demands, and stressed their equivalence in terms of a shared antagonism to both the Solidarność successor parties and the former communists, SLD.⁶

The populist response in Poland has been to construct a variety of conspiracy theories around the usual social pathologies, ranging from a global liberal-left Jewish pact aimed at taking over the world, to fears that the EU and monetary union represent another attempt by Germany to reinstate Poland’s peripheral position in the European political economy. This stems not only from a fear for national identity and culture, but also from the divisive sense that particular domestic social forces, the former Party nomenklatura, have benefitted from the transition and translated their previous power as state managers into power as the new post-communist bourgeoisie. This is supplemented with a swirling concoction of xenophobic fears that historical enemies are trying to force Poland to accept a secondary role in the EU and the perception that the transition has exchanged Moscow’s hegemony for that of Brussels.

When the reformed communist SLD gained power, the nationalist, anti-Communist right became increasingly vocal in using popular sentiments against supposedly unjust economic policies, combining that with rhetoric targeted against the ruling coalition. Yet the populists did not attack capitalism as such, but rather what they perceived as a parasitic form that capitalism took due to the alleged manipulation of the former communists, who were interested solely in enriching themselves, and due to the operations of foreign capital. Prior to the 2005 elections this populism had been addressed within a discourse of the ‘stolen revolution’ (Stan, 2006), but clearly reflects traditional Polish sentiments from the interwar period of an ‘us’ and a ‘them’ that negotiates similar symbolic terrains of nationalism and xenophobia – which PiS successfully exploited.

The election in 2005 of the ultra-conservative PiS signalled the collapse of former left parties as the obvious party of choice for the malcontent losers of transition. SLD, in government since 2001, had its image irretrievably tarnished by the succession of corruption scandals and achieved a mere 11% of the vote. Instead, an increasingly estranged constituency of the population turned to the populist SO, the LPR known for its high profile attacks on gay rights, favouring the reintroduction of the death penalty, and demanding a complete ban on abortion, and the Polish Peasants’ Party (Polskie Stronnictwo Ludowe, PSL). Their geographical locale is so-called Polska B, the under-developed north and east of Poland that has suffered the most deleterious effects of Shock Therapy. SO leader and Deputy Prime Minister Andrzej Lepper opposed transition, EU enlargement and NATO membership, and as Krok-Paszkowska asserts, understood provincial Poland like no other politician (Krok-Paszkowska, 2003: 126).

However, does the emergence of parties like Lepper’s Samoobrona (SO) indicate a flourishing alternative hegemonic project countering extant neoliberalism? Or is the alternative populist sentiment actually having the reverse impact to that its supporters claim and instead contributing to a deeper neoliberalization? Rather than countering hegemonic protectionism the Polish populists are illustrating the incompatibility of Poland’s capitalism with the continental market economy. Put differently, we are witnessing a struggle over a particular formulation of the hegemonic project, rather than an alternative hegemony that distinctly contests a particular order on ideological grounds. For Gramsci, hegemony is class leadership and dominance over other classes. As Gramsci notes,

the supremacy of a social group manifests itself in two ways, as ‘domination’ and as ‘intellectual and moral leadership’. A social group dominates antagonistic groups, which it tends to ‘liquidate’, or to subjugate perhaps even by armed force; it leads kindred and allied groups. A social group can, and indeed must, already exercise ‘leadership’ [hegemony] before winning governmental power (this indeed is one of the principal conditions for the winning of such power); it subsequently becomes dominant when it exercises power, but even if it holds it firmly in its grasp, it must continue to ‘lead’ as well. (Gramsci, 1971: 254)

Can the PiS-SO-LPR coalition be realistically considered as configuring a negotiated alliance of consensually subaltern classes? In this case, a form of ‘peasant’ resistance (PiS-SO-LPR) was dominated by a ‘disordered rabble, a tumultuous horde’ with a ‘diffuse mentality’ with little indication they could ‘acquire an organic conception of class struggle’ (Gramsci, 1977: 86–87). Instead, the attraction of populism has been an increase in fringe political groups that are more explicitly counter-hegemonic, being grounded more rigorously in nationalist principles (Prizel, 1998: 38). For Harvey, such a nationalist discourse is used for the promotion of neoliberal policies by the state within the terms of taking competitive advantage in the global economy:

the neoliberal state needs nationalism of a certain sort to survive. Forced to operate as a competitive agent in the world market and seeking to establish the best possible business climate, it mobilizes nationalism in its effort to succeed. Competition produces ephemeral winners and losers in the global struggle for position, and this in itself can be a source of national pride or of national soul-searching. (Harvey, 2005: 85)

Such a rise in relatively extremist views serves to galvanize and polarize debates on the construction of economic imperatives by policymakers. Other noticeable populist concerns have stemmed from the farming crisis and subsequent rural marches and protests (Paszkiewicz, 2004). For most of the other post-communist period governments Poland’s antediluvian agricultural sector has remained in need of serious restructuring. A quarter of the population still occupies antiquated small-holdings that deliver only 6 percent of GDP (GUS, 2011: 67–74). Without the historical forced collectivization in other former Soviet states, Polish agriculture remains under constant pressure to compete with cheaper foreign imports because of its small size, fragmented scale and absence of an industrial scale agribusiness. One fuel protest, aimed at taxation on fuel, gained the support of neoliberals, and provided another ambiguous forum for rural protesters to underline concerns such as cheap food imports, low government subsidies, and the interference of the urban elite in the cultural traditions of Poland.

The struggle between competing social forces for hegemony in Poland is evident elsewhere. For example, during Balcerowicz’s governorship of the Polish central bank (NBP), from 2000 to 2006, he was repeatedly at variance with the Kaczynskis over their rejection of the NBP prioritising budgetary discipline before social spending, and over Balcerowicz’s opposition to government plans to add economic growth to the bank’s legal mandate (Stenning et al., 2010: 47).

Concerns voiced during election time raised the spectre that Poland’s economic reforms might be jeopardized under such populist policies. Kaczynski’s nomination as replacement for Balcerowicz, Sławomir Skrzypek, had close personal ties to Kaczynski prior to becoming CEO of PKO BP, Poland’s largest state-owned bank. Indeed the PiS-SO-LPR coalition government eventually nominated fiscal disciplinarian Zyta Gilowska (former vice-chair of the neoliberal party PO) as Finance Minister, who pledged to continue targeting the Maastricht criteria for adoption of the Euro by 2010.⁷ As Cox suggests, the threat of a resurgence of local national populisms actually reinforces neoliberal hegemony (Cox, 1983).

This outbreak of populism is defined by its form rather than its content, dividing and simplifying the social field into two distinct camps, championing the people over what Laclau termed ‘the dominant ideology’, or ‘the dominant bloc’ (Laclau, 1977: 173). The disparate and heterogeneous demands that constitute the movement have been unified and stabilized under the rubric of exorcising the past to defend the future. The Kaczynskis pledged to end corruption and focus on restoring the moral integrity of Poland that had been discarded under communist rule and ignored during the transition. The populist coalition of PiS, SO and LPR promised a moral revolution adopting an anti-EU position that resonates deeply with long held Polish fears over the historical ‘absence’ of the state (though not the nation) from the map of Europe from 1795 to 1918, and the 1920s and 1930s divisions between a national rural people and an urban, cosmopolitan elite (De Lange and Guerra, 2002; Tesser, 2004). This is corralled within a contemporary context of a nationally oriented anti-EU sentiment cast in contradistinction to an international, urban, pro-EU elite who have so conspicuously failed to reconstruct Poland’s economy, rid the nation of the remnants of communism and protect ‘Poles, (peasants, workers, “us”) from those who would threaten them (foreigners, Germans, Jews, capitalists, political elites, “them”)’ (Krok-Paszkowska, 2003: 117). Yet rather than offer a competing hegemonic alternative for subaltern classes in Poland the PiS-SO-LPR coalition proposed a paranoid sociodicy full of rhetoric that rejected the economic problems associated with Shock Therapy and neoliberalism (Ost, 2005: 187). Smolar’s claim is justified that ‘their identity, in a political, economic, and social sense, has been moulded around the rejection of this model’ (Smolar, 2006). To be blunt, it is as if somehow, capitalism despite its neoliberal variant can ameliorate the problems of unemployment, under-development and historical backwardness as long as it is national, rather than global, as the real enemy is the external other. The nation-state is once more appealed to, brought back in (again) for national fractions of capital to emerge and realize the historical dreams of national development, economic protectionism and territorial sovereignty rather than to be left to the interests of global (and foreign) capital. Unfortunately for the recombinant populists in Poland, the coalition followed the pattern of previous post-communist governments and became deeply mired in corruption charges.⁸

Poland’s recombinant populism is, therefore, integral to a wider set of neoliberal advances in the decades since the collapse of communism. Populism has become one of the mechanisms for disenfranchised populations to make sense of the pressures of neoliberalism. As Kalb contends, ‘those that do not speak out loudly or vote openly for the radical Right, are often soto voce blaming liberal state-classes just as well for their complicity with the conspiracies against “the people”’ (Kalb, 2009: 210); a familiar refrain in the narrative detailed above. Yet while populism emerges renewed and recombined in recently Europeanized states this is a populism that combines a subtle appeal to neoliberal market reforms in amongst the populist and illiberal politics that seek to replace existing class based representative institutions and practices. In the final substantive part of this article I turn to progressive forms of class based response to neoliberalization and populism.

Resisting Neoliberalism: Whither Progressive Alternatives from the Left?

Since 1989 the Polish economy has enjoyed the reputation of being a pacesetter for post-communist reforms. Indeed, not only did the economy thrive, but the scholarly consensus considered the Polish political system, characterized by electoral competition between the ‘left’ derived from the former ruling communist party, and the progeny of the ‘right’, the former democratic opposition, as a model of stability and efficiency in governing as well as in a peaceful alternation in power. Yet the revitalization of populism accompanied by a widespread apathy and alienation from the formal democratic process indicate that the story is not so clear-cut. Perhaps Poland should be more realistically located among the politically troubled ECE states. One vulnerability in the existing political culture is that a coherent left alternative, rather than one marginalized, remains a necessity. For many in ECE, the North Atlantic crisis and its Eurozone corollary is the first recession experienced since the collapse of the Soviet Union and a ‘sustained period of economic growth in the early part of the 21st century during which individuals became increasingly financialized’ (Smith and Swain, 2010: 2). Expectations would normally be that widespread dissatisfaction with the neoliberal response to the current crisis would have strengthened the intervention of the left. Instead the opposite seems a more plausible option to entertain, with neoliberal hegemony reinforced. While an emancipatory project appears more credible in Latin America, it is also enacted ostensibly as a form of left economic nationalism and populism (Munck, 2004). However, the intellectual and political climate in Poland, as noted in the preceding sections, has impressed against the emergence of a compelling alternative left wing discourse. Poland has moved towards an unholy mix of populism and neoliberalism accordant with Weyland’s neopopulism as the left has become paralysed with inaction.

Much of the recombinant populist dynamic resonates deeply in Poland where contemporary change cannot be more fully understood without exploring the historical development of issues like the importance of national state formation, class development and relations, the struggles for independence and democracy, and the formation of labour movements. The reformulation of state and society is not a new question for Poland since the experience of imperial domination and the nationalist response to this continue to inform contemporary politics and have been actively utilized in the selective redrawing of the past by various social forces and political interests. As Aletta Norval (2000: 226) remarks: ‘National identity is the form, par excellence, of identification that is characterized by the drawing of rigid, if complex, boundaries to distinguish the collective self, and its other’; not too difficult a claim to substantiate through Poland’s recombinant populism. Norval continues,

The political frontiers associated with the construction of national identities tend, more often than not, to be paratactical in nature, dividing ‘us’ from ‘them’, the ‘self’ from the ‘other’, through the drawing of relatively clear-cut frontiers … Far from being given only through ‘positive’ characteristics, identities coagulate, or are given their unity, in and through that which distinguishes them from others. (2000: 226)

It is worth accentuating that the nation, in Poland, has been predominantly explained in ethnic terms, primarily because sovereign statehood was deprived for most of modern Polish history. Nation and state have historically been understood as distinct if not antagonistic.

This section of the article adds a more contemporaneous slant to the preceding analysis. It does so by addressing the emphasis in the article so far on the right’s populist mobilization by considering potential left wing opposition that has emerged in the wake of the current financial crisis. This set of reflections is animated by the question of the possibilities for the emergence of a modern Prince, in the Gramscian sense, whereby ‘an organism, a complex element of society in which a collective will, which has already been recognized and has to some extent asserted itself in action, begins to take concrete form’ (Gramsci, 1971: 129) as a counter to neoliberal hegemony rejuvenated through the latest crisis in ECE.

Recent Gramscian theorizing has been plagued by accusations of insufficient attention being paid to resistance and counter-hegemony, focusing instead on elite-driven hegemonic practices, analysing dominant social forces and the construction of an enlightenment project (Worth, 2002: 303). In a similar vein a number of scholars have represented Gramscian concerns with resistance as paying lip service to counter-hegemonic moves and being overwhelmed by the power of global capital despite the avowed commitment to an emancipatory agenda (Colás, 2002: 16; Drainville, 2004: 29). Resistance is too often seen as a response to (and legitimation of) domination rather than ‘theorized as dialectically defining the conditions which make hegemonic practices historically “necessary” in the first place … the reciprocal configuration of each other’ (Persaud, 2001: 49). The possibilities for progressive alternatives are real: remember how seemingly implacable political regimes collapsed around ECE in 1989 (see Dale, 2011). However, the downfall of the political structures of the old regime did not mean that there was great enthusiasm for a Western-style market economy. The longer time has gone on the less people have liked it and the crisis offers a punctuation point in the neoliberal mode of transition and integration into the global economy. The hubris of the EU and international financial institutions in considering transition a success is at least debatable, and the idea that graduation to EU membership means the completion of the transition process should be more forcefully probed.

It might be no great shock that workers were disoriented in the early phase of transition in the 1990s after the emergent transnationalization and mobility of capitalism in tandem with more flexible forms of production transformed working conditions globally as well as in ECE. Solidarność, the key social force in the struggle against the ancien regime, ended up arguing for workers to accept market reforms, offering itself up to its own marginalization. Over time this has become an even less effective strategy given the devastating results of neoliberalization. Attitudes to the common sense of neoliberalism have changed over time in Poland. While the picture remains mixed there are rising expressions of dissatisfaction. In terms of formal labour disputes one of the longest running actions in Poland occurred at the Budryk mine in Silesia between the union August 1980 and the Jastrzebska Coal Company. It is worth emphasising that this dispute did not feature either of the two largest and mainstream unions: Solidarność or OPZZ. The dispute has recurred since 2003 and the most recent eruption lasted 46 days. The dispute escalated from a contractual disagreement into a hunger strike by several miners and a protest in Warsaw by the miners’ wives. The year 2010 witnessed demonstrations by public sector unions against a proposed wage freeze, rail unions protesting against privatization and the lack of investment, and despite the Budryk case being solved ongoing protests are expected in the mining sector as well as retailing (EIRO, 2008, 2010). In 2007, nurses set up a tent village in Lazienki Park, outside the Prime Minster’s office, and received widespread support from miners, steelworkers and others who shared the nurses’ concerns about the creeping neoliberalization through increasing private provision in Poland’s health care system (Stenning and Hardy, 2005: 507). By the start of last year the Nurses and Midwives Union had occupied a space in the Sejm, the Polish parliament, in protest at the introduction of flexible contracts for nurses. The then health minister, Ewa Kopacz, asserted that a ban on flexible working was unconstitutional, attempting to reinforce the juridical component of neoliberalization (PAP, 2011).

However, the response of the left to the hardships of recent years has not been limited to organized labour, as the relations between Polish trade unions remain intrinsically fractious (Hardy and Fitzgerald, 2010). Other social groups have not been slow to stage major events. A number of demonstrations in 2003 against the Iraq war brought 10,000 people onto the streets of Warsaw to protest against Polish involvement in the war. US efforts at locating part of the European missile shield in Poland met resistance (Bartosz, 2008). Indeed a form of anti-globalization movement has coalesced in Poland in recent years fuelled by efforts to configure both a practical and ideological alternative to post-communist transition despite its mixed political focus: against welfare cuts, support for strikes, against the US interventions in the Middle East, objection to the deployment of the US missile shield in ECE, and opposition to discrimination against women and minorities (Dutting and Semeniuk, 2008). In October 2012 tens of thousands of Poles marched through Warsaw protesting in favour of civic freedom in contradistinction to the lack of social dialogue and to the increasing retirement age, as part of a march dubbed by the media ‘Wake up, Poland!’ (Rzeczpospolita, 2012). With the pressures of maintaining the government’s stated aim of joining the euro and a constitutional commitment to keep the deficit at 55% of GDP the future in Poland promises a set of austerity measures similar to those elsewhere in Europe.⁹

While the left has remained relatively supine in parliamentary terms compared to the populist and neoliberal right, potential space has opened up for a reinvigoration of the left with the founding of Krytyka Polityczna (KP). Formed in 2002, KP aims to create a new left wing formation in Poland and reintroduce a left wing discourse into public life. It has an independent publishing house translating the works of foreign left wing intellectuals and providing a space for numerous past and present Polish writers. Representatives of KP frequently contribute to the political debate in the mainstream media, at a level that no other left wing grouping has managed to achieve.¹⁰ There has been little sober attempt to assess KP, except for Rae’s work on KP and its intellectual leader Slawomir Sierakowski. Sierakowski has managed to mobilize a section of the country’s intelligentsia against the prevailing political consensus and attempt to build a centre-left coalition that would form an alternative hegemonic project, set on challenging the neoliberal and populist right’s domination of Polish political life and breaking the false dichotomy between conservative nationalism and neoliberal conservatism (Rae, 2008).

For many, the old left, in particular the SLD, has sustained itself as a form of protest vote with a nostalgic resonance for the old days. Despite the corruption scandals of the last SLD government, at the 2010 presidential election 20% of the SLD vote came from other demographics than the elderly and the other losers in transition.¹¹ A possible way forward for the left is the emerging social grouping who have not kept up with the winners of transition. An educated, young section of society is priced out of the housing market, and dependent on ‘flexible’ working patterns (Smith et al., 2008). However, the forces set against the left remain numerous and powerful, and avoiding recession (so far) has only encouraged the neoliberals: former Finance Minister Leszek Balcerowicz has been on a lecture tour promoting Poland’s exceptional economic performance during the crisis, while PO remain ready to use the crisis as an excuse for further, deeper reforms (for examples see Financial Times, 2010; Gadomski, 2010).

Conclusion

In this article I have emphasized a Gramscian approach to the international context of the recombinant populist revival in Poland: the particular and differentiated development of capitalism in ECE associated with the ongoing hegemony of neoliberalization. The article has both underlined the particular historical trajectory of contemporary capitalist development in the region and analysed the dynamics of the concrete social formations engendered through the process of post-communist transition. For Gramsci, solidarity among subaltern forces remained vital. The constitution of the ‘national’ in structures of hegemony was tied to particular hegemonic ethnic groups. Notions of ‘national identity’ and ‘national culture’ needed to be challenged, as part of a renegotiation of the relations of hegemony. The social dislocation and under-development endemic to Poland and the period of post-communism have been translated into an additional force propelling the region towards economic crisis in order to eliminate an active, resistant and costly labour force. The social relations of neoliberalization have fast become the iron hand of determination though the article illustrates how local outcomes are mediated by various path dependencies that, in the Polish case, incubate a politics of fear and anger to generate a ‘legitimate’ populist response to popular anxiety and social paranoias (Kalb, 2005).

In addition the article underscores the global-regional dimensions of capitalist crisis in ECE in the context of EU integration. No clear anti-neoliberal strategy exists in Poland, instead pragmatic responses by specific social forces have occurred but within the structurally delimited environs of state intervention. By centring the analysis on the revivification of recombinant populism the article shows the specific forms of socio-political response to capitalist crisis in ECE. Responses like those of the populists in Poland invoke an undifferentiated political subject, ‘the people’ (narod) in the context of a global-regional mediated collapse of state legitimacy and social cohesion. Whilst by no means absent in the other half of Europe, such responses are particular in their emergence within social formations that have enjoyed subordinate reintegration into global capitalism. This specific articulation has been accompanied by a set of struggles that engender specific forms of socio-political mobilization that recombine long-standing ‘vertical’ allegiances to kin, trade, ethnicity or creed with budding ‘horizontal’ allegiances of class (Thompson, 1978) that have reinvented long-standing Polish traditions of anti-imperialism, nationality and statehood.

One consequence of the triumph of neoliberalism in Poland, and elsewhere in ECE, is that traditional dividing lines between left and right have become ever more blurred ‘and the wider public power projects are out of the reach [of left and right] and suspected of serving their ongoing dispossession’ (Kalb, 2005: 4). This throws up some interesting problems with many of the more straightforward accepted notions of neoliberalism, especially the notion of neoliberalism as endpoint. The latter approach invites analysis that offers a unidirectional neoliberal progression resolutely forcing the state into the eager embrace of privatization, deregulation and marketization. Caricaturing neoliberalism as ‘open, competitive, and unregulated markets, liberated from all forms of state interference, represent the optimal mechanism for economic development’ perhaps needs to be substituted by a more nuanced and compelling sense of neoliberalization as ongoing process. Actual policy and practice involves ‘disciplinary forms of state intervention in order to impose market rule upon all aspects of social life’ (Brenner and Theodore, 2002: 352). So while neoliberalism may appear to be dying after the ‘crisis’, it remains dominant; the ‘crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear’ (Gramsci, 1971: 276). There remains an urgent need to track the ‘morbid symptoms’ of neoliberalization and make connections between local instances of resistance to crisis and the mobilization of neoliberal co-option. In the absence of a stronger left response, populations throughout Europe seeking to proclaim their outrage at the hardships of repeated crises are discovering a more captivating message from the populists. As the Polish case illustrates, variants of populism and nationalism in Poland are a key facet of, and contribution to, the neoliberal project.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Ian Bruff, Greig Charnock and Huw Macartney, as well as to the editor and three reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. Earlier versions of the article were presented in draft form at the International Research Seminar, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and the Globalisation and European Integration: ‘The Nature of the Beast’ conference, at the University of Warwick. My thanks to participants at both events for their critical engagement. All errors remain my responsibility.

Funding

The research for this paper was part funded by the British Council Partnership Programme in Science (PPS RV008).

Notes

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