Polish Constitutionalism under Populist Rule: A Revolution without a Revolution

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Not all revolutions succeed: some fail on their way to a better future, and some are doomed from the beginning. Perhaps, with a hint of Žižekean melancholic sobriety, it should be argued that failure is inherent in the very notion of the revolution: as its repressed undertone, hovering possibility and the final calculus of gains and losses. Failed revolutions are much more common than the handbook history seems to suggest. Apart from the great epochal failures whose despairingly disappointing consequences are measured against the background of their initial promises – as in the case of the October revolution – there are revolutions of smaller scope and ambition. Some of them do not even take the name of the revolution, and this name may be nothing but a subsequent academic label. These pose the greatest problems in identification: without reflexive self-imposition of a category, a revolution would be typically experienced passively, without a clear goal or a coherent agenda. Only an après coup identification could reveal the properly revolutionary momentum which was concealed under chaos and provisionality that was not properly linked to the symbolic level.

Such a revolution produces unpredictable side-effects and distortions of its objectives which even originally were muddled. Even though it does not have to necessarily be a failure in itself – it might bring about some beneficial socio-political changes – it remains problematic due to its alienating and obfuscating character. Measures which are undertaken are often haphazard – tactical rather than strategic and deprived of a clearcut social support. Moreover, ‘a revolution without a revolution’ opens up a problematic ideological battlefield dominated initially by a strong need to define what actually happened. Only after marking the goalposts and building the first footholds for a future hegemony does the revolution begin to be represented symbolically, even if at the price of deep ideological deformations that sometimes consist of denying that a revolution took a place at all.