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Liberalism and the Construction of the Democratic Subject in Postcommunism: The Case of Poland

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Janine P. Holc
Janine P. Holc*
Affiliation:
Political Science Department of Loyola College in Maryland
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Abstract

In the summer of 1994, political parties in Poland debated yet again the content and form of Poland’s first new constitution since the end of Communist Party rule. These arguments continued a process that had begun in 1989 and would continue until the ratification of a final document in May 1997. During the 1994 debate, each party offered its own version of a constitution, which was closely tied to its particular vision of the ideal new Polish republic. One of these groups was NSZZ Solidarity, the trade union successor to the social movement that had dominated opposition politics in the 1980s. In Solidarity’s version of the constitution, the state’s legitimacy was based on a community of Poles unified by a shared Catholic tradition. Political commentators who supported Solidarity’s constitution described it as follows: “Under the NSZZ Solidarity and presidential drafts [of the constitution] the Republic is the commonweal of the citizens.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 56 , Issue 3 , Fall 1997 , pp. 401 - 427
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1997

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References

Research for this article was supported by the National Council for Soviet and East European Research and the National Endowment for the Humanities. I would like to thank Laury Oaks, Lisa Bernd, Pawel Kazanecki, Inez Pietrzak, Brian Porter, Michael Burton, and three anonymous reviewers for Slavic Review for their excellent suggestions.

1. Barbara, Kasinska, Michal, Kasinski, and Andrzej, Woznicki, “The Constitution of the Republic of Poland: A Comparison of Drafts Prepared by NSZZ Solidarity, the Presidency, Democratic Left Alliance, and Freedom Union,” Tygodnik Malopolska, 4 August 1994, 3 Google Scholar, cited in Foreign Broadcast Information Service, “Solidarity’s Draft Constitution, Others Compared,” Daily Report East Europe, 20 September 1994, 13, emphasis added. The “other parties” referred to are the Social Democrats and Unia Wolności.

2. Of these approaches the most prominent are Linz, Juan J. and Alfred, Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe(Baltimore, 1996)Google Scholar; Samuel, Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century(Norman, Okla., 1992)Google Scholar; Arend, Lijphart, “Constitutional Choices for New Democracies,” Journal of Democracy 2 (Winter 1991): 72–79 Google Scholar; Giuseppe di, Palma, To Craft Democracies (Berkeley, 1990)Google Scholar; and Luiz Carlos Bresser, Pereira, Jose Maria, Maravall, and Adam, Przeworski, Economic Reforms in New Democracies (Cambridge, Mass., 1993)Google Scholar. For a review essay, see Don Chull, Shin, “On the Third Wave of Democratizations,” World Politics 47 (October 1994): 135–70Google Scholar. For recent applications, see the special issue of Comparative Politics 29, no. 3 (April 1997) on democratic transitions.

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4. Schmitter and Karl, “Conceptual Travels.” For example, Valerie Bunce situates herself as a critic of transitologists because of their assumption that “democracy” is the inevitable outcome of postcommunist transitions. She shares with them, however, a focus on the processes of the “transition” and institutional change as the object of analysis concerning state-subject relations. Bunce, , “Should Transitologists Be Grounded?” Slavic Review 54, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 111–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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6. See, for example, Linz and Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation, xii, and Lisa, Anderson, “Introduction,” Comparative Politics 29, no. 3 (April 1997): 253–56Google Scholar, special issue on transitions to democracy.

7. I use a male-gendered pronoun here because the subject assumed by the arguments at hand is constructed as male. As Wendy Brown has succinctly put it, “While men are regarded as autarkic … women are regarded as always already attached to men and obligated to children.” The ideal subject in liberalism is never female. Brown, , States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, 1995), 148 Google Scholar.

8. Linz and Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation, 27, emphasis added. These authors spend a considerable number of pages discussing citizenship, yet they never escape the logic in which fragmented or “overly” pluralized citizens undermine the democratic state. They also take quite seriously public opinion fluctuations regarding the acceptance of various aspects of political and economic reform in the countries they study, but again load the dice in favor of the state when they seek somewhat ad hoc explanations for these ostensibly temporary incongruities in support. In short, the citizens are the problem.

9. Linz and Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation, 28. They write: “Our contention, however, is that there can be no complex modern democracy without voting, no voting without citizenship, and no official membership in the community of citizens without a state to certify membership.“

10. Ibid., 29. The implication here is that the subject is a member of a possibly fractious subculture within a state and thus not yet a democratic citizen; the task, then, is to create democracy by focusing on institution building.

11. Preuss, Ulrich K., “Constitutional Powermaking of the New Polity: Some Deliberations on the Relations between Constituent Power and the Constitution,” in Michael, Rosenfeld, ed., Constitutionalism, Identity, Difference, and Legitimacy (Durham, 1994), 143 Google Scholar.

12. This view of the citizen can appear incontestable and neutral because of the assumption that the “social contract” legitimating the new governments in central and eastern Europe has already been made, through the “revolutions” of 1989 and 1990. After the collapse of the states ruled by the communist parties and the elections that followed, the major question guiding scholarly inquiry shifted to the particular institutional shape of the (ostensibly new) state; both observers and participants in these governments behaved as though state authority had already been “founded.” The prevalence of public opinion polls and their treatment as legitimating tools in central and eastern Europe since 1990 highlight Foucault’s observation that the concept of “public opinion” has been viewed as a “spontaneous re-actualization of the social contract.” Michel, Foucault, Power/Knowledge; Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977(New York, 1980), 161 Google Scholar.

13. As Robert Dahl notes in Polyarchy, “In order for a government to continue over a period of time to be responsive to the preferences of its citizens … all full citizens must have unimpaired opportunities … to formulate their preferences … to signify their preferences to their fellow citizens and the government… and to have their preferences weighed equally in the conduct of the government.” Dahl, Polyarchy (New Haven, 1971), 2. Note that in this definition of democracy, the “full citizen“ already exists, as do the preferences that constitute that citizen’s “interests” that are to be acted upon.

14. See Linz and Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation,

15. Pereira, Maravall, and Przeworski, Economic Reforms in New Democracies, 163, emphasis added.

16. Ibid., 185.

17. Carole, Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, 1988), 225 Google Scholar. It is important to note that liberal citizenship here is not historically, contingently exclusive of women, but structurally so. Thus, the subject position of citizen is always male. For a review of the feminist literature on liberalism’s construction of the subject, see Brown, States of Injury, chap. 6.

18. Carroll, Smith-Rosenberg, “Dis-Covering the Subject of the ‘Great Constitutional Discussion,’ 1786-1789,” Journal of American History 79, no. 3 (December 1992): 843 Google Scholar.

19. Ernesto, Laclau and Chantal, Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London, 1985)Google Scholar.

20. Ibid., 96, emphasis in the original.

21. The idea of misreading comes from my interpretation of the work of Laclau, Slavoj Zizek, and Jacques Lacan. Language and identity can never completely capture meaning; our attempts to signify and categorize reality will always leave behind an “excess of meaning.” When ideologies or discourses do attempt to capture meaning fully, the best they can do is misread or misrecognize their subject. See Ernesto, Laclau, “Reflections on Identity,” in John, Rajchman, ed., The Identity in Question (London, 1995)Google Scholar; Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Phase as Formative of the Function of the I,” in Slavoj, Zizek, ed., Mapping Ideology (London, 1994)Google Scholar; Slavoj, Zizek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham, 1993)Google Scholar.

22. Many works by Foucault and others address this issue, but a particularly clear statement can be found in Michel, Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1 (New York, 1978)Google Scholar.

23. Michel de, Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, 1984), xii-xiiiGoogle Scholar.

24. Pocock, J. G. A. Virtue, Commerce and History(Cambridge, Mass., 1985), 6 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I employ a view of discourse that draws on theories of politics that examine the relationship between language and relations among people in communities, the latter defined both socially and historically. In addition to Pocock, who finds that historical interpretation results in “paradigmatic structures” of argument that are themselves authoritative, I have drawn on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of “language games,“ which are not just verbal expressions but a coherent set of meaning-producing practices necessarily shared. Wittgenstein talks about how we come to apprehend shared meaning at all; Laclau and Mouffe, as well as Zizek to some extent, talk about what happens to this shared (or perhaps not shared) meaning once it enters the realm of the political. See Wittgenstein, , Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1961; reprint, London, 1974)Google Scholar, which he ends with, “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.“

25. Given the size of the literature, this list can only be partial. Examples include, for gender, Denise Riley, I Am That Name: Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History (Minneapolis, 1988); for sexual identity, Judith, Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York, 1990)Google Scholar; for ethnicity, Rajeswari Sunder, Rajan, Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture and Postcolonialism (New York, 1993)Google Scholar; for nationalism, Babha, Homi K., ed., Nation and Narration(London, 1990)Google Scholar, and Partha, Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments(Princeton, 1993)Google Scholar; and for technology, Donna, Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York, 1991)Google Scholar.

26. The methodological emphasis on discourse and how subjectivity is produced by it draws on a variety of sources in addition to those already cited. Historiographical work focuses on public narrations and renarrations of historical experiences, pointing to the importance of discursive traditions but somewhat overstating the stability and unity of such narratives. See Hayden, White, Tropics of Discourse (Baltimore, 1978)Google Scholar; Keith Michael, Baker, Inventing the French Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1990)Google Scholar; Toews, John E., “Intellectual History after the Linguistic Turn: The Autonomy of Meaning and the Irreducibility of Experience,” American Historical Review 92 (October 1987): 879–907CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Antony, Easthope, “Romancing the Stone: History-Writing and Rhetoric,” Social History 18 (May 1993), 235–49Google Scholar. Recent studies on discourse in central and eastern Europe have relied on Pierre Bourdieu’s conceptualization of language as the cultural production and circulation of symbols, rather than the re-narration of history. See, for example, Katherine, Verdery, National Ideology under Socialism: Identity and Cultural Politics in Ceausescu’s Romania(Berkeley, 1991)Google Scholar, and Jan, Kubik, The Power of Symbols against the Symbols of Power: The Rise of Solidarity and the Fall of State Socialism in Poland (University Park, Pa., 1994)Google Scholar. Neither historiography nor cultural studies succeeds in illustrating the manner in which discursive structures fail to capture all meaning and therefore inevitably misread the subject, even while ensnaring it in a grid of categories.

27. Mazowiecki used the term odkreślamy gruba Unia in his speech, meaning “we mark off the past with a thick line.” The concept was shortened to gruba kreska and the speech soon became known as the “gruba kreska” (rather than the “gruba linia“) speech. Mazowiecki, “Przemówienie Tadeusza Mazowieckiego w Sejmie,” Gazeta Wyborcza, 26-28 August 1989.

28. Mazowiecki, “Przemówienie.“

29. “Przemówienie Tadeusza Mazowieckiego w Sejmie,” Gazeta Wyborcza, 14 September 1989.

30. Interview with Lech Walesa in Gazeta Wyborcza, 15 May 1990.

31. Leszek, Balcerowicz, 800 Dni: Szok kontrolowany (Warsaw, 1992)Google Scholar.

32. The Kongres Liberalno-Demokratyczny (KLD) ceased to exist as a formal political party when it joined with Unia Demokratyczna to form Unia Wolnosci in 1994. The argument presented here treats the period prior to the creation of Unia Wolności, when the KLD was a separate organization.

33. See Peter, Gowan, “Neo-Liberal Theory and Practice for Eastern Europe,” New Left Review 213 (September-October 1995): 3–60 Google Scholar.

34. It is telling that one of the most comprehensive and influential writers on liberalism in Poland, Jerzy Szacki, spends several pages of his book debating just how “collectivist” Solidarity really was. See Szacki, , Liberalizm po komunizmie (Warsaw, 1994), 147–53Google Scholar.

35. The primary text that I rely on for this section is the official publication of the Kongres Liberalno-Demokratyczny, Przegląd Polityczny. The evidence for this section of the paper will also draw on the writings of prominent members of the Liberals or those sympathetic to the KLD, such as Donald Tusk, Jan Krzystof Bielecki, Janusz Lewandowski, and Ewa Graczyk.

36. “Deklaracja programowa,” Przegląd Polityczny 1 (June 1991), inside cover. The exact words are, “Uznajemy wolnośc za wartosc nadrzędna i pierwsza zasadę iadu spolecznego.“

37. Ibid.

38. Ibid. This view of private property characterized many Liberal texts, both scholarly and “popular.” See, for example, Justyna, Miklaszewska, “Neoliberalówie w polskiej rzeczywistości,” Tygodnik Powszechny 24 (12 June 1994): 15 Google Scholar.

39. “Deklaracja programowa.“

40. Ibid.

41. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 105.

42. See “Ubywa zwolenników prywatyzacji,” Rzeczpospolita, 2 October 1992, 2.

43. Leszek, Balcerowicz, “Szanse Niezadowolonych,” Wprost, 27 July 1993, 23 Google Scholar.

44. Ibid.

45. Examples of policies pursued by the church that reflect this vision of the community include the institutionalization of Catholic teaching in public schools and the issue of the “Konkordat,” a legal agreement on par with the constitution, codifying relations between the Vatican and the state and guaranteeing specific prerogatives for the church in public life. As of this writing, it has not yet been finalized.

46. Pawel, Kaczorowski, “Ethos Demokracji,” Znak 443 (April 1992): 89 Google Scholar.

47. Matgorzata, Fuszara, “Legal Regulation of Abortion in Poland,” Signs 17 (August 1991): 124 Google Scholar. Thousands demonstrated both for and against abortion rights in 1989.

48. “Biskupi o aborcji, antykoncepcji i fundamentach demokracji,” Gazeta Wyborcza, 31 December 1991-1 January 1992, 2. The bishops also condemned contraception on these grounds.

49. See, for example, “Zamieszane wokol aborcji,” Rzeczpospolita, 21 December 1992; “Niezadowolenie z ustawy aborcyjnej,” Rzeczpospolita, 9-10 January 1993.

50. Scholars have written about the fetus as person in the context of the United States, but almost all of this work links fetal personhood to ways the fetus is culturally, politically, and technologically represented and focuses on practices specific to the United States rather than to the discursive structures described here. For example, Rosalind Pollack Petchesky writes about the way that sonograms and pro-life films create images of the autonomous, free-floating fetus that merely extend to gestation the Hobbesian view of human beings as disconnected, solitary “individuals.” Petchesky, “Fetal Images: The Power of Visual Culture in the Politics of Reproduction,“ Feminist Studies 13, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 270. See also Barbara Katz, Rothman, The Tentative Pregnancy: Prenatal Diagnosis and the Future of Motherhood (New York, 1987)Google Scholar, and Lauren, Berlant, “America, ‘Fat,’ the Fetus,” boundary 2 21 (Fall 1994): 145-95Google Scholar, which offers an extensive bibliography on the issue. The Polish experience illustrates the effect of (nontechnological, nonfilmic) cultural practices organized by discourses in not only transferring present-time rights back to an embryo, fetus, or unborn person, but also projecting the fetus through future time out into the public space of citizenship. Relevant here is the psychoanalytic impulse to designate “a fragmented bodyimage to a form of its totality,” discussed in Lacan, “The Mirror Phase as Formative of the Function of the I,” 96.

51. “Lekarze zakazuje aborcji,” Gazeta Wyborcza, 16 December 1991, 1.

52. Agata Nowakowska, commentary on “Lekarze zakazuje aborcji,” Gazeta Wyborcza, 16 December 1991, 1.

53. A typical poll asked respondents whether they agreed with such statements as, “Abortion should be banned by law when the life of the mother is threatened,“ “when the health of the mother is threatened,” “when the pregnancy is the result of a rape,” “when the mother is in a difficult material situation.” “Ustawa antyaborcyjna,“ Gazeta Wyborcza, 15 May 1991, 1, 3.

54. Fuszara, “Legal Regulation of Abortion in Poland,” 126.

55. “Pro Femina via Letowska,” Gazeta Wyborcza, 31 December 1991-1 January 1992, 2.

56. Fuszara, “Legal Regulation of Abortion in Poland,” 128. Fuszara argues that the proposed ban on abortion in 1989 actually caused this new conceptualization of women’s rights to be voiced for the first time since 1939.

57. For the details, see Wanda, Nowicka, “Two Steps Back: Poland’s New Abortion haw,” Journal of Women’s History 5 (Winter 1994): 151–55Google Scholar.

58. As the public prosecutor’s quote above indicates, supporters of legal abortion in 1989 constructed women as potential victims of illegal, and therefore lifethreatening, abortions. Thus, “women” as a category was allowed, but only as people who were dead or dying. See Fuszara, “Legal Regulation of Abortion in Poland,” 126.

59. The history of Poland as a unified, nationalist tradition had been an important narrative in the opposition to Communist Party rule and, just as the colorful shops stabilized Liberal discourse on the cultural level, the status of nationalist history as authentic reality that enables Poles to maintain a collective identity in the face of occupation, war, and censorship was constantly reinforced by cultural production, particularly poetry and theater. For a critically informed analysis, see Lisa, Bernd, “The Dramatic (Imagi)Nation: Representations of Nationalism and Identity in Polish Drama,“ (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin—Madison, 1997)Google Scholar.

60. The language of “fatherland” is loaded with an immense variety of historical and cultural meanings. One extreme nationalist grouping in Poland called itself “Fatherland“ and explicitly painted the economic hardships of the postcommunist period as a Liberal-Jewish conspiracy. This view is held by a small minority in Poland, but the coded references linking the categories “economic self-interest,” “treason,” and “Jew” are equivalencies that make “cultural sense” in the nationalist context in Poland. In 1995 a more moderate right-wing party adopted the name.

61. Walęsa surely had a variety of motivations for this choice, including distancing himself from what by that time was an unpopular set of Liberal and Unia politicians. What is important here is not Walęsa’s intentions, but the effects of his practices.

62. This excerpt is taken from the exposé of the Olszewski government to parliament, as published in the press. Jan, Olszewski, “Początek końca komunizmu,” Gazeta Wyborcza, 23 December 1991, 5 Google Scholar. Note the appropriation of the Liberals’ conception of “Europe.“

63. Benedict Anderson points out the manner in which the Russian and other empires naturalized their rule by “stretching the short, tight, skin of the nation over the gigantic body of the empire.” Anderson, , Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983), 82 Google Scholar. If we take seriously the idea that all subjects have access to an ensemble of identities, it seems that Anderson’s taut skin applies to nations as well as empires.

64. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 95-96.

65. See Renata, Salecl, “The Crisis of Identity and the Struggle for New Hegemony in the Former Yugoslavia,” in Ernest, Laclau, ed., The Making of Political Identities (London, 1994), 211 Google Scholar.

66. Several Liberals passed muster for Suchocka’s cabinet, but the portfolio for labor went to a member of Unia Demokratyczna and for industry to a Christiannationalist.

67. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 152.

68. Prasenjit, Duara, “Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China,” in Geoff, Eley and Ronald Grigor, Suny, eds., Becoming National (New York, 1996), 164 Google Scholar.

69. Slavoj, Zizek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 156 Google Scholar. Zizek goes on to note that “we can acquire a sense of the dignity of another’s fantasy only by assuming a kind of distance toward our own, by experiencing the ultimate contingency of fantasy as such” (157). Although Zizek does not align himself (or Lacan) with theorists who emphasize the fluidity of identity, I find certain aspects of his approach quite compatible.