The Roots of The Fourth Republic East European Politics and Societies - Robert Brier

East European Politics and
Societies
Volume 23 Number 1
February 2009 63-85
© 2009 Sage Publications
The Roots of the 10.1177/0888325408326790
http://eeps.sagepub.com
hosted at
“Fourth Republic” http://online.sagepub.com
Solidarity’s Cultural Legacy

to Polish Politics
Robert Brier
German Historical Institute, Warsaw, Poland
Most scholars studying Polish politics agree that some of the country’s fiercest political
conflicts evolve around a cultural cleavage that Poland’s Third Republic inherited from
the communist period. The existing literature, however, provides no answer as to why
this cleavage sustained its importance despite the events of 1989. Therefore, the article
seeks to refine some of the theoretical categories used to analyze cultural legacies. In
particular, it argues that cultural systems are transmitted through time primarily
because they sustain their capacity to endow social reality with meaning. Focusing on
right-wing discourse and in particular on the conflict over Poland’s 1997 constitution,
the article then shows that some of the cultural paradigms of the Solidarity period inter-
acted with the character of the Polish transition as a compromise in a way that provided
right-wing politicians with a meaningful framework within which to challenge their
opponents and advance their claims.
Keywords: polish politics; solidarity; polish right-wing discourse; culture and poli-
tics; cultural legacies
ew scholars analyzing politics and society in Poland’s Third Republic1 fail to

F recognize the deeply divisive influence that debates over collective identity, reli-
gion, or history have on the country’s political discourse. According to Paweĺ
Śpiewak, one of the most important argumentative patterns in Polish political dis-
courses of the 1990s was the “moral aggression”: controversies even over rather
“technical” issues developed into fierce conflicts in which the self-acclaimed
“guardians” of “truly” Western democracy, Europeanness, and an open society
opposed the “defenders” of Poland’s “true” historical identity, religious values, and
Author’s Note: This article is dedicated to Anna Schwarz and Michaĺ Buchowski. An earlier version of
this article has been presented at the conference “Danzig - Warschau - Kopenhagen - Athen: Stationen
auf dem Weg ins vereinte Europa,” European University Viadrina, Frankfurt(Oder), Germany, 4-6 June
2004; I would like to thank the conference’s participants for their most helpful remarks and criticism.
Moreover, I gratefully acknowledge the generous financial support of the Konrad-Adenauer-Foundation.
Robert Brier, Niemiecki Instytut Historyczny, Aleje Ujazdowskie 39, 00-540 Warszawa, Poland; e-mail:
brier@dhi.waw.pl.
63
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64 East European Politics and Societies
national sovereignty.2 Poland’s main political cleavages therefore evolve around

“cultural orientations and biographical patterns,” which in turn expose “diverging
moral-symbolic horizons and ways of thinking,”3 so that “culture, understood in the
broadest sense of that term, has become that field, on which the most important
political struggles take place.”4
Moreover, most authors agree that the Third Republic’s peculiar politico-cultural
conflict lines are a legacy from the communist period. Mirosĺawa Grabowska, for
instance, interpreted the religious affiliation or adherence to national traditions of
Poland’s voters and political elites as an indicator of the ongoing significance of a
cleavage that emerged prior to 1989 pitting the formerly communist part of society
against the anti-communist one.5
Whereas the importance of cultural cleavages for the Third Republic is widely
acknowledged, the two main approaches to post-communist politics provide little
theoretical guidance when trying to explain this phenomenon. Indeed, those studies,
which proceeded from the premises of the “new institutionalism,” had even pre-
dicted that symbolic politics would be an ephemeral phenomenon on the post-
communist societies’ way to democracy. Marketization and constitutional engineering,
it was argued, would eventually restructure party competition along economic lines.6
The problem with this line of thought is that ten years after the adoption of
Poland’s constitution and following almost two decades of market reforms, there are
precious little signs that Polish politics are bound to become less symbolic. To the
contrary, Poland’s culture wars rather intensified in the 2000s. Starting around 2003,
Law and Justice (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość [PiS]), Poland’s major right-wing party,
initiated a political campaign based on the assertion that the Third Republic is char-
acterized by fundamental structural deficiencies and needs to be replaced by a
Fourth Republic. This Fourth Republic is supposed to be the product of a moral rev-
olution entailing a rebirth of religious and patriotic values, an uncompromising
decommunization, and the strengthening of collective memory. Moreover, the PiS
characterizes the foundation of this new state as the fulfillment of the 1980s
Solidarity revolution, while portraying their opponents as people who betrayed
Polish identity and the legacy of the democratic opposition.7
A second group of students of post-communist politics does focus on the impact
of historical legacies on transitions to democracy. Thus, they may be more aware of
the historical peculiarities of Central and Eastern Europe. With few exceptions, how-
ever, they have not given socialism’s cultural legacies their due attention.8
Against this background, this article has two tasks. First, it is intended to contribute
to refining the theoretical categories by means of which we study the impact of cultural
legacies on contemporary politics. In particular, I would like to show how the discus-
sion on this topic could profit from the adoption of theoretical categories that inform the
“new cultural history.” Second, in applying these categories, the article aims to help
understand why politics in Poland’s Third Republic evolve around cultural cleavages.
These aims are pursued in the following steps. In the first section, I reconstruct
the main patterns of the discursive formation that Śpiewak called the moral aggression.

Brier / The Roots of the “Fourth Republic” 65
To focus this discussion, my analysis concentrates on a specific event in the history

of the Third Republic: the 1996-1997 constitutional debate. I chose the
constitutional debate as a case study because it allows to study the role of cultural
legacies in relation to an event that was politically of far-reaching significance.
Moreover, the 1997 constitution has an important place in the PiS’s campaign for a
Fourth Republic. My discussion is also restricted to right-wing discourse. In a second
section, I will briefly discuss existing approaches to Poland’s cultural legacies in
order to refine them. A third section applies these theoretical categories to show why
the cultural frames of the 1980s maintained their symbolic power, thus becoming a
cultural legacy. The last section discusses the significance of this legacy for the 2000s.
Central Cultural Patterns of Polish Politics:

The Case of the Constitutional Debate
The debate surrounding the drafting process of Poland’s 1997 constitution provides
a very good example to study the main patterns of the discursive formation that
Śpiewak called the moral aggression.9 Poland’s first full-fledged post-communist con-
stitution was drafted under peculiar circumstances. The parliament, where the new
constitution was drafted, was dominated by two post-communist parties: the
Democratic Left Alliance (Sojusz Lewicy Demokratycznej [SLD]), the main commu-
nist successor party, and the peasant-based Polish People’s Party (Polskie Stronnictwo
Ludowe [PSL]). The right-wing and conservative successor parties of the Solidarity
movement, in contrast, were confined to the role of an extra-parliamentary opposition.
While together these parties received about one third of the ballot during the 1993 elec-
tions, these votes were spread over a large number of small and splinter parties that
were hopelessly divided among one another. As a result, none of the parties made it
past a newly introduced electoral threshold. It was not until the summer of 1996, when
the work of the parliament’s Constitutional Commission slowly approached its finish,
that these parties joined forces founding the Electoral Action Solidarity (Akcja
Wyborcza Solidarność [AWS]).10 Immediately after its foundation, the AWS initiated
a fierce campaign against the work of the Constitutional Commission that displayed
many of the features that Śpiewak described as a moral aggression.
In early 1997, Marian Krzaklewski, the chairman of the AWS, was invited to par-
ticipate in parliamentary consultations concerning a possible constitutional compro-
mise between the parties in parliament and the AWS. Krzaklewski made it clear,
though, that such a compromise seemed highly unlikely because the draft constitu-
tion embodied, according to him, “a violation of the convictions of a large part of
society.”11 Solidarity Senator Piotr Andrzejewski depicted the constitution’s adop-
tion in the Constitutional Commission as the result of “an extra constitutional settle-
ment of a political accord.”12 Alicja Grześkowiak, another Solidarity Senator, said in
the National Assembly’s constitutional debate: “The draft, which is debated in the
National Assembly conveys the impression, that it was written for the interests of

those, who rule today, and in anticipation of the results of future elections. The draft
was worked out in a parliament in which political forces of a leftist, and especially
communist [peerelowski], orientation dominate. And the draft has just such a char-
acter. It reflects only one ideological orientation.”13 The AWS politicians thus por-
trayed the draft constitution as the work of a minority that tried to strengthen its
position of power by forcing its ideology on a social majority or even society itself.
The AWS also identified itself with this alleged societal majority. An important
point in this respect was that in 1994 the Solidarity trade union had seized the oppor-
tunity to write its own constitution. According to the relevant law, a group of at least
500,000 citizens had the right to submit a so-called citizens’ draft that the
Constitutional Commission was obliged to consider in its work on the new constitu-
tion. An editorial in Solidarity’s weekly Tygodnik Solidarność characterized
Solidarity’s citizens’ draft in the following way:
This constitution, worked out by the most famous specialists of constitutional law, pre-
sents a vision of Poland—the vision of a state friendly to its citizens. The communists
which have taken power in Poland today, will try to promote their own constitution,
present in it their vision of the Republic. We present our vision, written in OUR CON-
STITUTION.14
In line with this “we–they” schema, the Constitutional Commission of the

National Assembly was referred to as the “parliamentary commission,” whereas the
authors of the Solidarity draft were called the “Social Constitutional Commission.”
In this context, the term citizens’ draft too acquired a new meaning; it was not any-
more a draft merely of a particular group of citizens but of the citizens. “Their” draft,
on the other hand, was dubbed “Kwaśniewski’s draft” or the “parliamentary draft.”15
Thus casting the constitutional debate as a conflict between “us” and “them,” it
became increasingly important to the AWS how the constitution defined the collec-
tive “we” invoked by the AWS. In an early version, the official draft’s preamble had
defined the constitution’s authors as “all Polish citizens.”16 Furthermore, the official
draft differentiated these citizens into “those, who believe in God as the source of
truth, justice, good, and beauty as well as those who do not share that faith and derive
the values they adhere to from other sources.” In contrast, the Solidarity draft’s pre-
amble opened with “We, the Polish nation.” The preamble then defined this Polish
nation as “remembering our more than a thousand years of history bound up with the
heritage of Christian faith and culture” and it invoked “the Nation’s struggle with
both aggressors during World War II” as well as “the patriotic resistance against for-
eign domination between 1944-1989.” Finally, the Solidarity draft was proclaimed
and adopted “in the Name of God.”17
The definition of Polish national identity, enshrined in the Solidarity constitution,
also defined the limits for a compromise the AWS was willing to accept.
Krzaklewski said in this sense:

A national [constitutional] compromise will be possible, if we all acknowledge, that

there are facts in Poland’s history which are not to be interpreted. This fact is, that
Poland always based both its value system as well as later its constitutional legislation
on Christian values, which were simultaneously positively directed to people of diverse
opinions, convictions, beliefs, and different nationalities. Therefore, if we agree to a
continuity of values, to a continuity of history, I am sure that there is a good chance for
a compromise in other—economic, social, and political—dimensions.18
This quote very well reflects the three central points in the discourse of the AWS.
They first referred to a certain historically defined national identity. Remarkably, this
identity was based on “facts” that “are not to be interpreted.” In a similar vein, Senator
Andrzejewski argued: “We hold, ultimately, that the constitution doesn’t come from
nowhere, from our will, but that it is the continuation of the historic achievement, con-
sciousness, culture, and judicial tradition of the Polish nation.”19 Thus, Andrzejewski
did not even claim authorship of the citizens’ draft but argued that it merely expressed
an objectively existing identity of a cultural community. This identity was, second,
presented as being fundamentally linked with a religious value system. Both the invo-
catio Dei and the supremacy of natural over positive law were postulates that were
voiced along with claims for national identity. And third, the acknowledgement of this
“true” character of Poland’s identity was not interpreted as ruling out pluralism but as
guaranteeing it as well as success in political or economic issues.
In sum, the AWS’s anti-constitutional discourse was organized around a symbolic
frame within which the process of democratization was understood as being inextri-
cably linked with the restitution of a political subject with a clearly defined spiritual
and historical identity. The new constitution, lacking what the AWS considered to be
an appropriate reference to the Polish nation’s “true” identity, did not sufficiently
represent society in the eyes of the right-wing post-Solidarity politicians. Therefore,
the constitution was defined as the work of a minority and its adoption as being a
danger to the project of democratization itself.
Studying Cultural Legacies
How can we explain the ferocity with which right-wing politicians rejected the
1997 constitution? This question is all the more puzzling because from an institu-
tionalist point of view, the adoption of the new constitution was in the AWS’s inter-
est. It significantly reduced the powers of President Aleksander Kwaśniewski, one of
the alliance’s main political opponents.20
Most authors argue that the cultural cleavage that structured the constitutional
debate and Polish politics in general is a legacy from the People’s Republic. For
instance, Jan Kubik and Grzegorz Ekiert maintain that the origins of the Third
Republic’s politics of culture lie in the structure of the social conflict that characterized

the 1980s. Owing to the geopolitical situation and the communist regime’s almost
complete political and economic control, the conflict of the late 1970s and 1980s was
primarily one over legitimacy and authority. “The fundamental distinction was drawn
between those who controlled political and economic resources and attempted to legi-
timize their authority, and those who had little power but struggled to make ‘their’ dis-
course visible, audible, and, eventually, hegemonic.” The social conflict of the 1980s
was thus primarily one between competing visions of social and political order. The
emergence of the Solidarity movement intensified this struggle as the movement was
based on a strongly bipolar vision dividing society into “us” (society, the nation, etc.)
and “them” (the system). This distinction finally was framed primarily through the use
of Catholic and national symbols, thus constructing the we–they schema as a cultural
or ethnic distinction.21
Geneviève Zubrzycki makes similar observations about the origins of Poland’s
“culture wars.” Poles, Zubrzycki argues, understand their country’s transition to
democracy “in terms of the recovery of a sovereign state and of national indepen-
dence.” This “nationalist project, which aims at fusing the national and political
units, requires the specification of what Polishness is.”22 With the emergence of the
Third Republic, however, a hitherto hegemonic definition of national identity
became problematic. The resistance to communist rule had reinvigorated the cultural
imagery of the Polish nation as an ethnic community characterized primarily by its
fidelity to the Roman Catholic Church. “In the 1980s, Catholicism and the Roman
Catholic Church were portrayed by the opposition as the basis for a moral commu-
nity fighting an ‘evil’ totalitarian regime imposed from outside and from above.”
“[T]he discourse and symbolism of [Solidarity’s] anti-state protest” was, as a result,
“undeniably and powerfully garbed in religious robes, puzzling many Western
observers.”23 With the advent of a legitimate state though “the Catholic Church lost
the ability to credibly portray itself as the nation’s keeper.”24 Thus, the democratic
transition reopened the discursive field in which Polish national identity was defined
and led to a conflict in which the proponents of the old ethno-religious understand-
ing of Polish nationhood stood against adherents of a more civic definition. In this
context, the constitutional debate provided a symbolic battleground on which these
two competing views of collective identity clashed.
Both accounts provide an important starting point for the succeeding discussion.
The origins of the cultural cleavage of the 1990s and 2000s undeniably lie in the
social conflict of the 1980s. However, both leave two important sets of questions
unresolved. The first concerns the communist period. In both accounts, it is not quite
clear why the frame of an ethno-religious community commanded such symbolic
power prior to 1989. For instance, Zubrzycki writes that “the structure of domina-
tion in Communist Poland presented a privileged niche for the church as the sole
institution that retained relative autonomy which in turn facilitated the creation of a
coherent myth surrounding the ecclesiastical institution.”25 While the Church’s
autonomy was doubtlessly important, this fact alone cannot explain why Catholic

myths and narratives helped create such a powerful symbolic framework. Whereas
the Catholic Church had regained its autonomy as early as 1956, it was not until the
1970s that it became an important ideational inspiration for the Polish opposition.
Moreover, there were symbolic sources other than the Church for the expression of
dissent and protest. After all, some of the most important figures in the Polish demo-
cratic opposition such as Adam Michnik and Jacek Kuroń had been Marxists in their
youth.
The second set of questions concerns contemporary Poland. When it comes to
Zubrzycki’s account, it is not clear why the fusion of religious and national symbols
“was bound to be questioned once Poland ‘recovered her independence.’”26 Do the
1990s and 2000s not rather show that among certain segments of Poland’s society
and political elites, the national–Catholic myth still provides a compelling narrative
to construct national identity and legitimize the polity? This observation, however, is
problematic for Ekiert and Kubik. If, as they argue, the mentioned cultural cleavage
emerged as a result of the structure of domination in the People’s Republic, then why
did it survive the downfall of communism in Poland? After all, a peculiarity of cul-
tural legacies is, as Kubik himself wrote, that unlike a polluted environment or an
outdated and inefficient industry, they are not passively “received” from a previous
epoch but “must be transmitted and the cultural scenarios embedded in them must
be enacted by at least some actors.”27
Polish politics then lead us directly to a highly important theoretical question: Why
do some discursive formations command symbolic power in the first place and why do
they retain this power despite structural changes, that is, become cultural legacies? In
answering this question, this article follows Kubik, who proceeds from the semiotic
understanding of culture that has been developed in cultural anthropology and has been
widely applied in the “new cultural history.”28 Culture, that is, is understood as “an his-
torically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited
conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men [sic] communicate,
perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life.”29 Studying
culture therefore means to analyze “the machinery individuals and groups of individ-
uals employ to orient themselves in a world otherwise opaque.”30 It is important to note
that understood as a semiotic system, culture is not a subjective but an emergent phe-
nomenon that is relatively autonomous from the social, political, or psychological
processes it endows with meaning.31 This systematic nature is where culture’s indepen-
dent causal role in social life stems from; culture both enables actors to act meaning-
fully on their environment and restricts the ways in which they can do so.
Whereas this constraining influence of culture is important to recognize, it is sim-
ilarly crucial to understand its relationship to its environment. Three points are impor-
tant in this respect. First, while culture constrains social action, it does not determine
it. Indeed, “every act of symbolic attribution puts a symbol at risk, makes it possible
that the meanings of the symbols will be inflected or transformed by the uncertain
consequences of practice.”32 Whether a set of cultural meanings is transferred in time

as a cultural legacy therefore depends on the actions of specific actors. That is why
we have to understand, as Kubik showed, that cultural legacies are actively transmit-
ted rather than passively received.
Second, in almost any society, there is a group of people—priests, intellectuals,
professors, politicians—who have the power to uphold certain cultural meanings as
hegemonic and to suppress others as illegitimate or irrational. The transfer of cul-
tural legacies has therefore a profound political dimension as well. Indeed, as Pierre
Bourdieu argued, the possibility to either uphold or transform those conceptions
through which social reality is interpreted constitutes the “Archimedean point” for
“truly political action.”
Knowledge of the social world and, more precisely, the categories which make it pos-
sible, are the stakes par excellence of the political struggle, a struggle which is insepa-
rably theoretical and practical, over the power of preserving or transforming the social
world by preserving or transforming the categories of perception of that world.33
The emergence of cultural legacies is thus also constrained by the political and
other institutions that distribute the power to define legitimate and illegitimate forms
of meaning making.
Finally, culture’s role is constrained by a dimension that in my view is missing in
Kubik’s conceptualization of cultural legacies. As noted above, culture as a semiotic
structure with emergent qualities is relatively autonomous from the material world it
endows with meaning. At the same time though the social and material world displays
a degree of recalcitrance to our conceptions of it. As Robert Bates, Rui De Figueiredo,
and Barry Weingast note, cultural interpretations “must interact with events in a way
that ‘makes sense’ of the world” in order to inform and organize social interaction;
they must “somehow gain some external validity.” And that is not only a matter of cul-
tural symbols themselves but also of the way in which they relate to “the process and
context of interaction between all of the actors there.”34 In conclusion, while any one
meaningful interpretation of social reality is “never the only one possible,”35 the
number of possible interpretations of any one chunk of social interaction is finite.
In sum, cultural legacies influence social action by restricting the array of possi-
ble ways in which actors can understand and thus act on their reality. To understand
why a set of conceptions or ideas becomes a cultural legacy, that is, is transmitted
through time, it is necessary to analyze where their symbolic power stemmed from
in the first place and how they sustained this power through time. To assess this ques-
tion it is of pivotal importance to assess how these ideas interact with social reality
in a way that “makes sense of the world.” This point is not addressed sufficiently in
the accounts discussed above. Therefore, the following section discusses how the
cultural imagery of a social structure divided into “us” and “them” emerged and how
it retained its symbolic power because it interacted with certain structures and
processes in a specific way.

Democratization as the Cultural Reconstitution of Society:

Solidarity’s Cultural Legacy to the Third Republic
Religion, Ethos, and Worldview in Solidarity’s Political Culture

Against the background of the theoretical discussions above, this section seeks to
explain why national and religious symbols had such a decisive impact on the dis-
course of Poland’s 1980s democratic opposition. In common perception, the role
played by the Roman Catholic Church in Polish society is often taken for granted.
Yet as obvious as this may seem, there is nothing natural about this undeniable fact.
Indeed, the linkage between Catholicism and Polish culture is, as Brian Porter
observes, “more tenuous than is usually assumed.”36 Therefore, the Catholic
Church’s strong position in both communist and post-communist Poland has to be
considered a historical problem in need of explanation.
In assessing this problem, it is useful to start with a common observation concern-
ing Solidarity’s political culture.37 As Jerzy Szacki shows, the Polish oppositional
discourse had a deeply individualistic character. A major goal of political activity
was the reconstitution of an individual identity opposed to the lies forced on it by the
state. However, within the context of an authoritarian system controlling most
aspects of public life, this opposition individualism was a collective individualism.
It set the individual against the authorities or the system but not against society.
Freedom meant the freedom to speak one’s mind in public, to reclaim a public space
and to participate in it. Individual liberty was therefore held to be possible only by
participating in and contributing to a community; democracy, in turn, was not under-
stood merely as an institutional structure guaranteeing individual rights and process-
ing conflicts but as the constitution of a moral community that was considered the
indispensable context of and precondition for individual liberty.38
As noted above, the vision of this moral community was constructed in a dis-
course rife with Catholic symbols. How then did Polish Catholicism come to play
such an important role for the elaboration of this political vision?39 Clifford Geertz
once argued that the power of religious symbolism rests in its ability to “formulate
conceptions of a general order of existence” that seem to its believers “uniquely reali-
stic.”40 Therefore, religion “seems to mediate genuine knowledge, knowledge of the
essential conditions in terms of which life must, of necessity, be lived.” The applic-
ability and plausibility of religious meaning systems rests, consequently, on the
establishment of “a meaningful relation between the values a people holds and the
general order of existence,” that is, religion synthesizes an ethos with a worldview,
relates an axiology to a cosmology, a normative ought to an empirical is. Within the
context of a successful religious system, proper behavior is thus only “common
sense because between ethos and worldview, between the approved style of life and
the assumed structure of reality, there is conceived to be a simple and fundamental
congruence such that they complete one another and lend to one another meaning.”41

Thus, religion legitimizes (or, crucially, delegitimizes) a social order by showing that
its system of norms is in congruence (or in incongruence) with a perceived “actual
state of affairs.” Whatever the general value of this definition, it works extremely
well to assess the importance of Catholicism for the emergence of Solidarity. Polish
Catholicism’s relevance lay exactly in its ability to formulate a universal set of val-
ues and relate them to a specific view of the structure of society in such a way as to
render these values plausible; Catholicism grounded an ethos in a worldview.
The role of Catholicism in the articulation of Solidarity’s ethos seems to have
been that it helped to invigorate one of the main moral categories on which the
movement was based: the dignity of the human person. As noted above, it was not
until the 1970s that the Church became an important ideational inspiration for the
Polish opposition. The reason for this was that by that time the Catholic Church
had—following the Second Vatican Council—started to embrace questions of
human rights and dignity in its social thought.42 For Polish dissidents, this Catholic
interpretation of human rights seems to have been highly attractive for at least two
reasons. First, it helped break the regime’s cultural hegemony over the public dis-
course by showing that “there was a non-Marxist discourse in which social and politi-
cal problems could be articulated in what were widely perceived as morally
unambiguous terms.”43 Second, it supplied the claim to human rights with a tran-
scendent fundament. Dignity was understood to be given to men and women by God;
it resulted from “a natural order” implied by divine creation itself.44 Thus, religious
discourse provided a vocabulary to criticize the regime as violating this transcen-
dent, even objective order, as being, that is, in denial of the “natural state of things.”45
But Catholicism not only contributed to the articulation of Solidarity’s ethos. It also
grounded it in a specific worldview centered around a vision of the Polish nation so
that the moral community appeared to many Poles not only as desirable but also as
authentic, even natural. The reason for this is to be found in a peculiarity of Poland’s
Church: Students of nationalism have shown that in many societies nationalism
replaced religion as the source of sacred symbols and, through the “sacralization of
politics,” even became a religion in itself. In Poland, in contrast, there has been a some-
what different relationship, as Zubrzycki observes. Here “it was not political institu-
tions and symbols that were sacralized and became the object of religious devotion, but
religious symbols that were first secularized and then resecularized as national.”46
Thus, the rites of Poland’s Catholic Church are not purely religious but perpetuate a
specific master narrative of Poland’s history. Both the origins of Polish statehood as
well as the nation’s survival at critical times in its history are presented as depending
on its religious fidelity. In sum, Catholic rituals are embedded in the social imagery of
a Polish nation whose fate is assumed to be so indissolubly linked with Catholicism
that Poland would virtually cease to exist if it was deprived of its—alleged—spiritual
identity. Therefore, practicing religious cults, Polish Catholics somewhat unavoidably
constituted, invoked, and celebrated an “imagined community.”

Two factors supplied this integration of an ethos and a worldview with “external
validity.” First, religious rites and symbols not only perpetuated the narrative of an
alternative community. In a society in which the public sphere was largely controlled
by the authorities, religious rites and the organization of Church life also provided
an opportunity to experience that alternative community very directly. Thus, the nar-
rative of the Catholic nation acquired a very real face, when the organization of reli-
gious activity or the common construction of new churches created new social bonds
beyond the tutelage of the state.47
Second, the narrative of the Catholic nation also contrasted in a specific way with
the official rhetoric of the Polish People’s Republic. Notably, the party discourse was
characterized by a symbolic universe that displayed significant parallels with reli-
gious doctrine.48 In the communist discourse, however, ethos and worldview were
increasingly out of tune: the Polish United Workers’ Party (Polska Zjednoczona Partia
Robotnicza [PZPR]), the country’s self-acclaimed “vanguard of the proletariat,” saw
itself repeatedly confronted with resistance from the very class they were supposed to
lead—the workers. In the face of these increasingly embarrassing contradictions, the
party started to recast its ideology in terms of “socialist patriotism” in the early 1970s.
The rhetoric of class struggle was replaced by the imagery of a national community
beyond both party membership and religious affiliation. The central idea of socialist
patriotism was that whatever the party’s ideology, its rule was fundamentally in the
national interest. It was only the PZPR that assured ethnic homogeneity, safe borders
to the West, and economic development. Therefore, it was the party that according to
this paradigm, continued the noblest traditions of Polish history through its program
of modernization, thus embodying the vital interest of the nation. The socialist state,
the fatherland, and the nation appeared as an indissoluble unity making, as one slo-
gan had it, the “program of the party, program of the nation.”49
Despite a significant propagandistic effort and initial successes, the paradigm of
socialist patriotism could only temporarily rationalize the contradiction between the
system’s proclaimed values and the country’s realities. This failure had a number of
reasons: One was that the regime failed to live up to the expectations it had created.
By 1980, at the very latest, it turned out that the regime had failed to keep its part of
the agreement. But the failure of socialist patriotism seems to have stemmed not only
from economic crisis but also from this discourse’s meaningful structure. Trying to
equate the socialist state with the nation, socialist patriotism had to draw on new, and
thus obviously invented, traditions having no or almost no personal or family conti-
nuities in Polish society. More importantly, it had to rationalize a number of inconve-
nient facts: Polish socialism had not resulted from a revolution of the working class,
but it had been imposed on Poland by the Red Army. This had happened following a
war in which the Soviet Union had seized a significant part of Poland’s pre-war ter-
ritory, deported and terrorized many of the Polish inhabitants of this region, commit-
ted a massacre of Polish officers in Katyń, and had passively watched German troops
crush the Warsaw uprising in 1944. Against this historical background, the friendship

between Poland and the Soviet Union had to be presented as an imperative of patri-
otic responsibility.50
It was in contrast to these developments that the master narrative of the “Catholic
nation” acquired a sense of constituting a community that seemed deeply authentic.
It could, in sharp contrast to the official discourse, draw on an enormously rich sym-
bolic arsenal of folk traditions, on romanticism or Henryk Sienkiewicz’s historic
novels, and on new traditions deriving from the experience of Polish resistance dur-
ing World War II. To be sure, these traditions were no less constructed, that is, they
too did not follow from the sheer factuality of history, but were interpretations.51
However, their origin lay in a much more distant past and they had been “invented”
less consciously. What is most important, this discourse was not characterized by
such apparent contradictions as socialist patriotism.
The contradiction between the two master narratives had an additional dimension.
The ideal society, which the master narrative of socialist patriotism implied, was the
vision of a new society that moreover was described in inherently ambiguous terms;52
it was a promise, and one that had been repeatedly broken at that. In stark contrast,
the Catholic nation narrative claimed that the moral community of the Polish nation,
albeit oppressed, already existed. It needed not to be built but saved. The Solidarity
paradigm thus claimed merely to reconstitute something that was, allegedly, already
there. As Sergiusz Kowalski notes, Solidarity’s anticipated social order was
the only true order, the only one which was possible for the Poles. [… Its] shape was
given a priori […] and [Solidarity’s] ideology did not foresee the possibility of any
form of negotiation on that point, not only not with the authorities, but also not within
society. Albeit the social utopia of Solidarity was a utopia of tomorrow, social percep-
tion saw its content to be derived from history and it belonged to history in its entirety:
to build the new society did not mean a creation but a recreation. (emphasis added)53
Finally, the contrast between regime and church discourse also related to the
public sphere. Whereas the party discourse appeared increasingly hollow, it was still
endlessly enacted in the state’s numerous public rituals. Church rituals, in contrast,
appeared as spontaneous or authentic. This difference became most fully apparent in
1979 when John Paul II visited his home country. In the mass mobilization that the
visit triggered, a “whole generation experienced for the first time a feeling of collec-
tive power and exaltation of which they had never dreamt.”54 In addition, the Pope’s
sermons provided this experience of authentic social power with a specific interpre-
tive framework. Melanie Tatur aptly captures the effects of the papal visit in this
respect, writing that “the moral language used by the Pope enabled the atomized
people to generalize their experience of everyday life and thus understand their suf-
ferings as a common fate” (emphasis added).55
Returning to this section’s main question, why did Polish Catholic symbolism
constitute such a powerful discursive framework for the Solidarity movement? The

answer seems to be that it helped to articulate a strong ethos of human dignity that it
grounded in a worldview centered around the “imagined community” of the Catholic
nation; not only did it describe a system of values, it also related them to a commu-
nity that could be experienced very directly in the organization of religious rituals.
The persuasiveness of this discourse stemmed from its apparent contrast with the hol-
low, yet all-pervasive, rhetoric of socialist patriotism. Zubrzycki is thus right to focus
on the contrast between Catholic symbols and the Communist regime; it is important,
however, to analyze both the internal meaningful structure of the two discourses and
the common discursive framework they established at a specific historical juncture.
Martial Law, the Round Table Talks,

and the Narrative of Poland’s “Unfinished Revolution”
It is not difficult to detect the parallels between the Polish opposition’s cultural
scenario organized around the idea of democratization as the cultural restitution of
society and the one of the opponents of the 1997 constitution. Solidarity, however,
was a collective experience that was as all-encompassing as it was short-lived. Why
then did its main cultural frame sustain its vitality for at least a significant part of
Poland’s political elite well beyond communism’s demise?
Following the imposition of martial law in December 1981, the most important
question that the opposition had to answer was why Solidarity had been defeated so
easily despite its broad appeal.56 It seems that in the 1980s underground society there
emerged two answers that resulted from two different understandings of Solidarity’s
identity. Solidarity, Michael Carpenter argues, “articulated a civic ideology that
championed civil, political, and economic rights while mobilizing members on the
basis of an ethnic sense of national identity.” Thus, Solidarity’s invocation of
national and religious symbols could be interpreted in two ways: “either as symbols
of common citizenship or as symbols of common ethnic identity.”57
When confronted with Solidarity’s defeat in 1981, adherents of the first, civic
interpretation, particularly the movement’s “protoliberal” intellectual advisors, seem
to have reached the conclusion that the assumed relationship between a cultural
community and democracy was wrong. In 1990, Adam Michnik argued that Polish
historical consciousness was in fact not an asset but a liability for democracy.59
Moreover, he and other intellectuals increasingly recognized that for better or worse,
the opposition had to accept the rule of the PZPR. Instead of trying to overthrow it,
they proposed a gradual change through social protest and eventually by finding
some kind of compromise with the regime.59
For proponents of the second interpretation of Solidarity’s identity, martial law
rather reinvigorated the oppositional dichotomous view of social reality. As Kubik
argues, the “cultural vitality and political significance of [Solidarity’s] polar frame
[. . .] not only did not decline, but seems to have increased” during martial law and

its aftermath.60 Again, the interaction between the official discourse and the opposi-
tion’s cultural frame is important. In 1981, the authorities not only crushed society’s
“self-realization” but did so in the name of a “national interest” in restoring “order”
and “normalization” and even claiming “national salvation.”61 In addition, following
two papal visits and the murder of the charismatic pro-Solidarity priest Jerzy
Popieĺuszko, the link between nation and religion intensified and the religious vocab-
ulary became more radical. Speeches like Popieĺuszko’s sermons completely substi-
tuted a vocabulary of economic reforms and worker self-organization with a rhetoric
of a “struggle of ‘good’ against ‘evil’. The Catholic people of Poland were rising
against the ‘Anti-Christ.’ The priest’s murder seemed only to confirm and consecrate
his words.”62 The adherents to this vision of social reality, whom Steven Stoltenberg
has called Solidarity’s “new right,”63 provided the second answer to the question as to
how to react to the restitution of the communists’ control of society. In addition to a
small group of radicals who proposed a revolutionary uprising, a more pragmatic
approach developed among the new right. Following examples such as Roman
Dmowski’s nineteenth-century national movement or Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński’s
theology of the nation, the goal of the new right’s strategy was to increase the Polish
nation’s “internal sovereignty” so that it would be able to fully restitute its indepen-
dence once communism had collapsed. Thus, the new right tried to organize a politi-
cal counter-elite, develop a program for independent Polish politics, educate society
patriotically, nurture religious values, and increase society’s economic independence
through market reforms. Differently put, the major strategy was to force the system
to accept if only a minimal autonomous social space within which to sustain a “world
of truth.” Just like the strategy of the “proto-liberal” opposition activists, this interpre-
tation also required pragmatism and allowed for a compromise with the authorities.
This compromise, however, was merely meant to be a precondition for society’s cul-
tural restitution and its “purification” from the remnants of the communist system.
In 1989-1990 then, when Poland’s clandestine oppositional organizations were
transformed into political parties, there were two different, albeit not yet fully and
explicitly articulated, cultural paradigms among the (post-)Solidarity elite. Both par-
adigms suggested scenarios according to which the Round Table was a legitimate
strategy to reach the goals defined by the two paradigms. Their differences, though,
became more and more visible once the Round Table agreement became obsolete
and it was clear that Poland’s former ruling party had surrendered power and dis-
solved. Within the first paradigm, the fact that the regime had peacefully given up its
power and the communist party had dissolved was taken as proof of the fact that
totalitarianism was defeated. Building democracy was now primarily a matter of
building those institutions that would enable the Poles to create a civil society that
would allow Polish society to become democratic. The second interpretation pro-
ceeded from a more substantivist idea of democracy. To the adherents of this para-
digm, the Round Table was supposed to be a prerequisite for a complete
“re-appropriation” of Polish politics through the moral community of the nation and

for the “purification” of society from the remnants of the communist system.64
Poland’s post-1989 development, though, fulfilled neither of these two conditions:
The proto-liberal intellectuals, increasingly disturbed by Polish society’s alleged
religious fundamentalism, shunned from ascribing the Catholic Church a prominent
role in public life, former nomenclature members controlled parts of the economy,
and former communists made a spectacular political comeback in the 1993 and 1995
election. For the new right then the Round Table became the Third Republic’s neg-
ative myth of foundation: instead of being seen as bringing about society’s cultural
restitution, it was viewed as an agreement that Solidarity’s “treasonous” left-wing
liberals struck with the communists to their mutual advantage and at the expenses of
the Polish nation. Thus leaving the Solidarity revolution, in this view, unfinished or
even betrayed, the Round Table symbolizes “for those who negatively or critically
evaluate the current situation of the country, [. . .] the beginning of the wrong path
Poland has taken since the end of communism.”65
In conclusion, one should not take it for granted that the legitimacy of the Third
Republic is widely accepted among Polish politicians. To a significant segment of
them, 1989 does not mark a definite closure of the communist period or of the 1980s
struggle between “us” and “them.” Indeed, Jan Kubik and Amy Lynch have shown
that the lack of a symbolic closure is the Third Republic’s “original sin.”66 Therefore,
the Round Table became a powerful discursive nodal point of an interpretational
framework within which Polish right-wing politicians trace the hardships of the
transformation or their own political misfortunes back to what they see as an unfin-
ished revolution. In this way, Poland’s negotiated transition became the social mech-
anism that transferred the cultural paradigm of Solidarity’s new right to the Third
Republic and also determined the cultural cleavage that structures Polish politics.
Solidarity’s Legacy and the Origins of the Fourth Republic
Solidarity’s cultural legacy described in the preceding section also set the para-
meters for the debate on the constitution. The arguments of the opponents of the offi-
cial draft were shot through with references to the communist past, and the new
constitution’s adoption was described as a continuation of the Round Table. In con-
trast, the campaign of the AWS was cast as an attempt to “finish the revolution.”67 In
a text in Tygodnik Solidarność outlining the citizens’ draft’s main institutional
choices, Witold Kalinowski wrote that although Solidarity had never been a politi-
cal party, “six years after the ‘round table’ it turns out, that Solidarity has the most
complete and coherent vision for the future of the state.” According to the author,
this could be explained only partially by the “ineptness” of the ruling political elites.
“There is,” Kalinowski claimed, “a second, more important, deeper reason. [. . .] The
people of Solidarity remained faithful to the idea of a democratic Poland—this beau-
tiful, though not fully recognized idea [. . .] which was included in the 21 Gdańsk

demands.” It was due to this faithfulness to the idea of democracy developed in 1980,
Kalinowski wrote, that only Solidarity’s citizens’ draft solved the relevant problems
so that “Poland becomes a NORMAL state. This is based on the experience, that,
despite verbal declarations, Poland’s return to the family of modern, democratic
states founded on the rule of law, begun in 1989, has not yet been accomplished.”68
The summarizing symbol of the Round Table, in its negative form, thus suggested
that the constitutional debate was not so much a dispute between political adver-
saries defending interests. Rather, it continued the fundamental struggle of society to
restitute its “true” Polish identity in order to make democratic and successful poli-
tics possible again. What the right-wing critics of the 1997 constitution questioned
was, as Paweĺ Śpiewak notes, “the moral and ideological fundament of the order that
was established after 1989, and even more after [the elections of] 1993.” And they
did so because they held “that the revolution of 1989 was betrayed. [. . .] In their
view, instead of a genuine revolution, Poland fell victim to a creeping counterrevo-
lution.”69 In this semantic context, Solidarity’s alternative draft appeared, as a writer
for Tygodnik Solidarność put it, not as merely one more draft submitted by a partic-
ular group of citizens but as “a form of self-organization of society in defense of its
elementary rights.”70
What is the contemporary relevance of this cultural frame? Among the critics of
the 1997 constitution was also later Prime Minister and PiS chairman Jarosĺaw
Kaczyński. He said that the new constitution’s preamble reminded him of a speech by
Wĺadysĺaw Gomuĺka, the PZPR’s general secretary from 1956 to 1970, because it
divided the nation into “party members and non-party members, believers and non-
believers.”71 Kaczyński’s then-party, the Center Accord (Porozumienie Centrum
[PC]) issued a resolution that established a very explicit link between the draft’s fail-
ure to reflect the claimed “true” identity of the Polish nation and the charge that the
constitution was actually an attempt by the communists to prolong their power. The
value system of the preamble meant, the declaration said, not only a “negative choice”
of rejecting “an invocatio Dei, rejecting the idea of the continuity of the Polish State,
not using the term Nation, not referring to the traditions of the First and the Second
Republic, the traditions of the struggle for independence, and finally the tradition of
Solidarity.” All of this was, according to the party’s presidium, also part of a positive
choice. For instance, the exposition of the division into believing and non-believing
Poles “characteristic of the official rhetoric of the People’s Republic” was interpreted
as the expression of “leftist-liberal ideology.” According to the document, this was not
just any kind of liberal creed but one that constituted the end-point of the ideological
evolution of the former members and activists of Poland’s communist party. Thus, the
Center Agreement concluded, the new constitution was not the appropriate fundament
of a Polish state and, more importantly, merely continued the nomenclature’s rule.72
Kaczyński’s opinion about the 1997 constitution did not change in the years
following its adoption. In 2003, he subjected it to a fundamental critique. He
attacked the text primarily for failing to create a completely new state after forty

years of dictatorship. Instead, he argued, the constitution had merely conserved a sit-
uation of national disintegration and moral decay. He saw the reason for this in the
fact that the text reflected a specific compromise between the “post-communist left
and the post-Solidarity center-left,” the result of which was what Kaczyński called an
“inconsequential liberalism.” This was, he claimed, already visible in the preamble:
The term “nation,” which the constitution uses rather sparingly, was defined as the col-
lectivity consisting of all citizens of the Republic—and thus also of those who declare
to have another national affiliation—between whom the main fault line runs along the
axis believing-non-believing. This is a completely anachronistic division which is
deeply rooted in the People’s Republic when, as one can say, the authorities were non-
believing which gave that part of society that rejected religion a special significance.
Thus, the basic law fulfills here—in the axiological dimension—the function of petri-
fying the previous, as we have described it, abnormal state.
He further accused the constitution of a lack of an invocatio Dei, which, he

argued, would have had both an axiological dimension and was important for the
nation’s identity. Thus, Kaczyński concluded, the 1997 constitution contributed to a
“national disintegration,” which he described as all-encompassing. As a conse-
quence, he went on, the constitution became “an element, and an important one at
that, of confirming a situation the roots of which reach back at least to the seventies
and which directly began with the imposition of martial law and its consequences in
different spheres of life.”73 Summing his views on the 1997 constitution up, he said
that it was characterized by “being to a certain degree a continuation of practices of
the People’s Republic” and ascribed to it a great “destructive force.”74
The new constitution, which Kaczyński’s new party the PiS drafted, is introduced
by a preamble that reads,
In the Name of God, the Almighty!

We, the Polish Nation,
Grateful to Divine Providence
For the gift of regained independence,
Grateful to anterior generations for their constant work, devotion, and sacrifice for
Poland, throwing off the yoke of foreign oppression and communism,
Responsible to preserve and strengthen the independence of a Polish State,
Remembering our one thousand years’ history bound up with Christianity,
Desiring a Republic strong through truth, honesty, and justice,
Express our freedom and our responsibility for the fate
Of the present and future generations of the Nation
On these pages of the Constitution
Which is the highest law for the Republic of Poland.75
This new constitution was supposed to lay the fundament under the Fourth
Republic already mentioned in the introduction. In 2005, the PiS made their draft a

cornerstone of an election campaign on which they won both the presidency as well
as the largest number of parliamentary seats. Therefore, the question arises why the
narrative of an “unfinished revolution” still commands significant symbolic power.
In answering this question, it is once more necessary to focus attention on how
this narrative interacted with the development of the Third Republic in the 2000s.
Two processes are important in this respect: In the late 1990s and early 2000s,
Poland’s economic situation had started to deteriorate notably; economic growth was
sluggish and the unemployment rate remained at around 20%. The ensuing sense of
decay and failure was exacerbated by a second development. Since December 2002,
two parliamentary commissions as well as numerous journalist investigations uncov-
ered a far-reaching degree of political corruption permeating most levels of govern-
ment and reaching up to its highest echelons. Indeed, two of the most far-reaching
scandals at least seemed to involve such high-ranking SLD politicians as Leszek
Miller, prime minister from 2001 to 2003, and Aleksander Kwaśniewski, president
from 1995 to 2005. In addition, these corruption scandals not only discredited lead-
ing SLD politicians but also threw a certain light on the editor-in-chief of Gazeta
Wyborcza, Adam Michnik. In July 2002, Michnik himself had been approached by
film producer Lew Rywin with the suggestion that for a significant bribe as well as
political concessions on behalf of the SLD, legislation concerning media privatiza-
tion could be amended in a way favorable to Agora, the corporation that owns
Gazeta Wyborcza. Whereas Michnik made that offer public, he did so only in
December 2002 after having allegedly talked about it with the prime minister and the
president. Thus, his role in the affair appeared somewhat suspicious. Moreover, the
ensuing investigation showed that he seemed to have an extraordinarily good rela-
tions with the government.76
The affairs of 2002 and 2003 thus revealed that there were a number of informal
channels between former communists and one of the most prominent representatives of
those liberal intellectuals and politicians who defended the Round Table and propagated
the idea of a reconciliation between former communists and former oppositionists. It
seems that for conservative and right-wing politicians, intellectuals, and citizens, these
developments again endowed the discursive framework reconstructed in this essay with
“external validity.” In the view of Poland’s right-wing politicians and intellectuals, the
problems of the early 2000s were due to the fact that the revolution of Solidarity had
fallen prey to a false compromise that served left-wing liberals and former communists
and that prevented society’s “purification” and cultural reconstitution.77
As it turned out, the triumph of the PiS proved to be short-lived. It merely resulted
in an awkward coalition with the ultra-nationalist League of Polish Nations (Liga
Polskich Rodzin [LPR]) and the deeply corrupt and populist rural-based party Self-
Defense (Samoobrona). After less than two years, the coalition broke up, leading to
early elections in October 2007 in which the liberal-conservative Civic Platform
(Platforma Obywatelska [PO]) beat the PiS by a significant margin. Nevertheless,
the party of the Kaczyński brothers still won about a third of the votes and, compared

to the elections in 2005, it increased its share of the ballot by 5% and its total number
of votes by almost two thirds.78 The cultural legacy analyzed in this essay therefore
seems bound to structure Polish politics for the time to come.
Conclusions
The aim of this article was twofold. It was supposed to contribute to refining the
theoretical concepts with which we study cultural legacies in order to help understand
why the political discourse of Poland’s Third Republic remains dominated by con-
flicts over collective identity and the role of religion in public life. As I hope to have
shown, a semiotic concept of culture that analyzes cultural meanings in relation to
their social and political environment can help to understand that Poles do not have a
collective psychological inclination for disputes about collective identity or religion.
There is, for instance, nothing obvious or “natural” about Catholicism’s role in public
or social life. These debates rather stem from the fact that a certain discursive frame-
work, inherited from the Solidarity period, still interacts with its social and political
context in a way that helps to “make sense” of politics for at least a significant seg-
ment of Poland’s political society. The politics of culture, which characterize contem-
porary Polish political discourse, are therefore rooted in the act of foundation of the
Third Republic. Zubrzycki is undoubtedly correct to insist that Poland’s political and
intellectual elites largely understood the transition to democracy “in terms of the
recovery of a sovereign state and of national independence” and that this interpreta-
tion spurred debates between more or less pluralist conceptions of collective iden-
tity.79 These debates, however, acquired their political significance only within the
context of a symbolic frame (cultural legacy) that led a large segment of Poland’s
political society to question precisely the legitimacy of the Third Republic.
But there is a second point I hope to have shown. From the point of view of semi-
otic cultural theory, it is not surprising that the social conflict of the 1980s was pri-
marily about legitimacy, authority, and the cultural hegemony underpinning both.
Indeed, any institutional framework is constituted and sustained by a symbolic order
that determines which interests or utilities are legitimate and, more importantly, pos-
sible. From this perspective then, politics in established democracies, where eco-
nomic interests predominate, do not lack a symbolic dimension. Rather, the systems
of meaning that organize political action in such societies have ceased to be the
objects of political struggle and so their role is less obvious, but not less important.
Notes
1. Poland’s contemporary state is counted as the Third Republic following the first, eighteenth-
century gentry republic and the second, twentieth-century interwar republic.
2. Paweĺ Śpiewak, Pamie˛ć po komunizmie (Gdańsk: sÂowo/obraz terytorium, 2005), 162-73.

3. Melanie Tatur, “Institutionenbildung in Osteuropa,” in Wolfgang Glatzer, ed., Ansichten der

Gesellschaft: Frankfurter Beiträge zur Soziologie und Politikwissenschaft (Opladen: Leske und Budrich,
1999), 129. For survey research confirming these observations, see Krzysztof Jasiewicz, “Portfel czy
.
róz aniec? Wzory zachowań wyborczych Polaków w latach 1995-2001,” in Radosĺaw Markowski, ed., System
partyjny i zachowanie wyborcze: Dekada polskich doś wiadczeń (Warszawa: ISP PAN, 2002), 75-100.
4. Zdzisĺaw Krasnode˛bski, “Modernisierung und Zivilisierung in Polen: Tradition und Gegenwart,”
in Zdzisĺaw Krasnode˛bski, Stefan Garsztecki, and Klaus Städtke, eds., Kulturelle Identität und sozialer
Wandel in Osteuropa: Das Beispiel Polen (Hamburg: Krämer, 1999), 98.
5. Mirosĺawa Grabowska, Podzial´ postkomunistyczny: Spoléczne podstawy polityki w Polsce po 1989
roku (Warszawa: Scholar, 2004).
6. See, e.g., Jon Elster, Claus Offe, and Ulrich K. Preuss, Institutional Design in Post-Communist
Societies: Rebuilding the Ship at Sea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 247-70.
7. For a rather graphic example see “Kto jest tam, gdzie staĺo ZOMO?” Gazeta Wyborcza, 3 October 2006.
8. See, e.g., the contributions to Frank Bönker et al., eds., Postcommunist Transformation and the
Social Sciences: Cross-Disciplinary Approaches (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002); Grzegorz Ekiert
and Stephen E. Hanson, eds., Capitalism and Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe: Assessing the
Legacy of Communist Rule (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
.
9. For earlier studies of the constitutional debate see Elzbieta Haĺas, “Constructing the Identity of a
Nation-State: Conflict over the Preamble to the Constitution of the Third Republic of Poland,” Polish
Sociological Review 149 (2005): 49-68; Geneviève Zubrzycki, “‘We, the Polish Nation’: Ethnic and Civic
Visions of Nationhood in Post-Communist Constitutional Debates,” Theory and Society 30 (October
2001): 629-68.
10. Aleks Szczerbiak, “The Polish Right’s (Last?) Best Hope: The Rise and Fall of Solidarity Electoral
Action,” The Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics 20:3 (2004): 55-79.
11. “Otwarcie na zmiany,” Gazeta Wyborcza, 3 January 1997.
12. “Projekt ustawy zasadniczej przyje˛ty,” Rzeczpospolita, 17 January 1997.
13. Alicja Grześkowiak, speech given in the National Assembly on 24 February 1997. All quotations
from speeches in parliament have been accessed at http://ks.sejm.gov.pl:8009/forms/kad.htm?k=2
(accessed November 2007).
14. Editorial, Tygodnik Solidarność, 8 July 1994, 1.
15. Milena Kindziuk and Agnieszka Rybak, “My, naród polski . . .” Tygodnik Solidarność, 1 July
1994; Michaĺ Drozdek, “Konstytucja i ‘konstytucja,’” Tygodnik Solidarność, 30 June 1995.
16. Biuletyn Komisji Konstytucyjnej Zgromadzenia Narodowego, 46 vols. (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo
Sejmowe, 1993-1998), vol. 42, 40.
17. Ryszard Chruściak, ed., Projekty konstytucyjne 1993-1997, 2 vols. (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo
Sejmowe, 1997), vol. 1, 294.
18. Marian Krzaklewski, speech given in the National Assembly on 25 February 1997.
19. Biuletyn Komisji Konstytucyjnej, vol. 41, 123.
20. For a more extensive exposition of this argument see Robert Brier, “The Constitutional Politics of
Culture: Symbols, Interests, and Constitution-Drafting in Poland’s Third Republic” (PhD diss., European
University Viadrina, Frankfurt[Oder], Germany, 2006).
21. Grzegorz Ekiert and Jan Kubik, Rebellious Civil Society: Popular Protest and Democratic
Consolidation in Poland, 1989-1993 (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1999), 4-5.
22. Zubrzycki, “‘We, the Polish Nation,’” 631-32.
23. Geneviève Zubrzycki, The Crosses of Auschwitz: Nationalism and Religion in Post-Communist
Poland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 68.
24. Zubrzycki, The Crosses of Auschwitz, 78.

27. Jan Kubik, “Cultural Legacies of State Socialism: History Making and Cultural-Political
Entrepreneurship in Postcommunist Poland and Russia,” in Grzegorz Ekiert and Stephen E. Hanson, eds.,
Capitalism and Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe: Assessing the Legacy of Communist Rule
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 318.
28. See in particular William H. Sewell, Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). See also the contributions to Lynn Hunt, ed., The New
Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt,
eds., Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1999).
29. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 89.
30. Geertz, Interpretation of Cultures, 363.
31. Kubik, “Cultural Legacies of State Socialism,” 321.
32. Sewell, Logics of History, 168.
33. Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, ed. John B. Thompson, trans. Gino Raymond
and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 236.
34. Robert H. Bates, Rui J. P. De Figueiredo, and Barry R. Weingast, “The Politics of Interpretation:
Rationality, Culture, and Transition,” Politics and Society 26:4 (December 1998): 631.
35. Marshall Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), viii.
36. Brian Porter, “The Catholic Nation: Religion, Identity, and the Narratives of Polish History,”
Slavic and East European Journal 45:2 (2001): 289.
37. For a recent review of the literature on Solidarity, see Guglielmo Meardi, “The Legacy of ‘Solidarity’:
Class, Democracy, Culture, and Subjectivity,” Social Movement Studies 4 (December 2005): 261-80. See also
the contributions to Antoni SuÂek, ed., Solidarność. Wydarzenie, konsekwencje, pamie˛ć (Warszawa: IFiS PAN,
2006).
38. Jerzy Szacki, Der Liberalismus nach dem Ende des Kommunismus, trans. Friedrich Griese
(Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2003), 76-77, 82. See also Marek A. Cichocki, “Doświadczenie pierwszej
‘Solidarności’ – mie˛dzy moralnym absolutyzmem a polityczna˛ samowiedza˛ Polaków,” in Dariusz
Gawin, ed., Lekcja sierpnia: Dziedzictwo “Solidarności” po dwudziestu latach (Warszawa: IFiS PAN,
2002), 77-101; Sergiusz Kowalski, Krytyka solidarnościowego rozumu: Studium z socjologii myślenia
potocznego (Warszawa: PEN, 1990), 138.
39. It should be noted that the relationship between Solidarity and Church was much more compli-
cated than the prominence of religious symbolism in the movement’s discourse suggests. This was prob-
ably best captured by David Ost, who writes that “Solidarity always felt closer to the Church than the
Church felt to Solidarity.” David Ost, Solidarity and the Policits of Anti-Politics: Opposition and Reform
in Poland since 1968 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 157.
42. Jarosĺaw Gowin, Kościól´ w czasach wolności 1989-1999 (Kraków: Znak, 1999), 18-23. On the
evolution of Catholic social thought on human rights see Daniel Philpott, “The Catholic Wave.” Journal
of Democracy 15 (April 2004): 32-46; Bernhard Sutor, “Katholische Kirche und Menschenrechte.
Kontinuität oder Diskontinuität in der kirchlichen Soziallehre?” Forum für osteuropäische Ideen- und
Zeitgeschichte 12, no. 1 (2008): 141-158.
43. Jan Kubik, “Who Done It: Workers, Intellectuals, or Someone Else? Controversy over Solidarity’s
Origins and Social Composition,” Theory and Society 23:3 (June 1994): 455.
44. Ireneusz Krzemiński, “‘Solidarność’: Mit i rozczarowanie,” Spoléczeństwo Otwarte 5:4 (1994): 10.
45. Adam Michnik, “The Moral and Spiritual Origins of Solidarity,” in William M. Brinton and Alan
Rinzler, eds., Without Force of Lies: Voices from the Revolution of Central Europe in 1989-1990 (San
Francisco: Mercury House, 1990), 246; Adam Michnik, Letters from Freedom: Post-Cold War Realities
and Perspectives, ed. Irena Grudzińska-Gross, trans. Jane Cave (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1998), 89-90.


47. Maryjane Osa, “Creating Solidarity: The Religious Foundations of the Polish Social Movement,”
East European Politics and Societies 11:2 (March 1997): 339-65.
48. MichaÂ Buchowski, “Communism and Religion: A War of Two World View Systems,” in
Iva Doležalová et al., eds., The Academic Study of Religion during the Cold War: East and West (New York:
Peter Lang, 2001), 39-58.
49. Jan Kubik, The Power of Symbols against the Symbols of Power: The Rise of Solidarity and the
Fall of State Socialism in Poland (Pennsylvania University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1994),
31-74; Marcin Zaremba, Komunizm, legitymizacja, nacjonalizm: Nacjonalistyczna legitymizacja wládzy
komunistycznej w Polsce (Warszawa: TRIO, 2001), 353-77.
50. Raymond Taras, Ideology in a Socialist State: Poland, 1956-1983 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1984), 257-58.
51. See, e.g., Jan Rydel, “Sacrum Poloniae Millenium: Bemerkungen zur Anatomie eines Konflikts
im ‘realen Sozialismus,’” in Emil Brix and Hannes Stekl, eds., Der Kampf um das Gedächtnis:
Öffentliche Gedenktage in Mitteleuropa (Wien: Böhlau, 1997), 246.
52. Kubik, Power of Symbols, 64.
53. Kowalski, Krytyka solidarnościowego rozumu, 79.
54. Michael Szkolny, “Revolution in Poland,” Monthly Review 33:2 (1982): 10.
55. Melanie Tatur, “Catholicism and Modernization in Poland,” The Journal of Communist Studies 7:3
(1991): 345. See also Edmund Wnuk-Lipiński, “Solidarność - na fali procesów globalnych,” in Antoni
SuÂek, ed., Solidarność. Wydarzenie, konsekwencje, pamie˛ć (Warszawa: IFiS PAN, 2006), 36-37.
56. For the development of the 1980s opposition see Steven Stoltenberg, “An Underground Society:
The Evolution of Poland’s Solidarity, 1982-1989” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1993);
Krzysztof Ĺabe˛ dź, Spory wokól´ zagadnień programowych w publikacjach opozycji politycznej w Polsce
.
(Kraków: Ksie˛ garnia Akademicka, 1997); Roman Bäcker, “Przeobrazenia wizji świata spoĺecznego
dziaĺaczy ‘Solidarności’ lat 1980-1989,” in Roman Bäcker, ed., “Solidarność”: Dwadzieścia lat później
(Kraków: Arcana, 2001), 17-31. Jan Skórzyński, “‘Solidarność’ w drodze do Okra˛gÂego StoÂu. Strategia
polityczna opozycji 1985-1989,” in PaweÂ Machcewicz, ed., Polska 1986-1989. Koniec systemu, vol. 1
(Warszawa: TRIO, 2002), 59-73; Andrzej Friszke, ed., Solidarność podziemna 1981-1989 (Warszawa:
ISP PAN/Stowarzyszenie “Archiwum Solidarności”, 2006).
57. Michael Carpenter, “Civil Society or Nation? Re-evaluating Solidarity Ten Years after the
Revolution,” Polish Sociological Review 127 (1999): 347.
58. Michnik, Letters from Freedom, 178-83.
59. Ĺabe˛ dź, Spory wokól´ zagadnień programowych, 74-89.
60. Jan Kubik, “The Polish Round Table of 1989: The Cultural Dimension(s) of the Negotiated
Regime Change,” in Michael D. Kennedy and Brian Porter, eds., Negotiating Radical Change:
Understanding and Extending the Lessons of the Polish Round Table Talks (Ann Arbor: Center for
Russian and Eastern European Studies, University of Michigan, 2000), 91.
61. Zdzisĺaw Mach, Symbols, Conflict, and Identity (Kraków: Uniwersytet Jagielloński, 1990),
142-43; Zaremba, Komunizm, legitymizacja, nacjonalizm, 383-95.
62. Tatur, “Catholicism and Modernization in Poland,” 346.
63. Stoltenberg, “An Underground Society.”
64. Kubik, “Polish Round Table,” 104; Sergiusz Kowalski, “Prawo moralne i rza˛dy prawa: Czy wol-
. .
ność mozna wynegocjować?” in Marek Czyzewski et al., eds., Rytualny chaos: Studium dyskursu pub-
licznego (Kraków: Aureus, 1997), 293-323.
65. See Dariusz Aleksandrowicz, “Cultural Paradigms and Post-Communist Transformation in
Poland,” FIT Arbeitsberichte - Discussion Papers, vol. 6 (Frankfurt[Oder], Frankfurter Institut für
Transformationsforschung, 1999).
66. Jan Kubik and Amy Lynch, “The Original Sin of Poland’s Third Republic. Discounting ‘Solidarity’
and Its Consequences for Political Reconciliation,” Polish Sociological Review 1/153 (2006): 9-38.

67. See the speeches by Grześkowiak and Krzaklewski given in the National Assembly respectively
on 24 and 25 February 1997.
68. Witold Kalinowski, “O Polske˛ normalna˛ (1),” Tygodnik Solidarnooć, 17 May 1996.
69. Paweĺ Śpiewak, “The Battle for a Constitution,” East European Constitutional Review 6:2
(Spring/Summer 1997): 90.
70. Marta Miklaszewska, “Kto sie˛ boi konstytucji?” Tygodnik Solidarność, 26 August 1994.
.
71. “Postulaty raczej ideologiczne niz ustrojowe,” Rzeczpospolita, 4 February 1997.
72. “Stanowisko Prezydium Porozumienia Centrum,” Polska scena polityczna 1:2 (January 1997): 6.
73. Jarosĺaw Kaczyński, “Konwencja konstytucyjna Prawa i Sprawiedliwości: Wysta˛pienie prezesa
Jarosĺawa Kaczyńskiego” (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, Warszawa, 2003, available at http://www.pis.org.pl/
dokumenty.php [accessed November 2007]), 5-6.
74. Kaczyński, “Konwencja konstytucyjna,” 13.
75. Konstytucja Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej: Projekt Prawa i Sprawiedliwości” (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość,
Warszawa, 2005, available at http://www.pis.org.pl/dokumenty.php [accessed November 2007]).
76. Jan Skórzynski, “Adam Michnik - od dyktatury do demokracji,” in his, Od SolidarnoŚci do wolnoŚci
(Warszawa: Trio, 2005), 126.
77. Bronisĺaw Wildstein, “Co nam zostaĺo z IV RP?” Rzeczpospolita, 18 August 2007.
78. Official election results are available at http://www.pkw.gov.pl/gallery/10/71/37/107137/
OBIESZCZENIE_PKW_DO_SEJMU.pdf (accessed November 2007).
Robert Brier is a historian and political scientist whose research focuses on the recent political history and
contemporary affairs of Poland. Having previously analyzed the relationship between culture and politics
in Poland’s Third Republic, his current research project focuses on the impact of transnational discourses
and systems of meaning on the prehistory of the Polish transition. He received his PhD from the European
University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder) in Germany and is currently a post-doctoral research fellow at the
German Historical Institute in Warsaw.

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East European Politics and

Solidarity’s Cultural Legacy

ew scholars analyzing politics and society in Poland’s Third Republic1 fail to

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national sovereignty.2 Poland’s main political cleavages therefore evolve around

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To focus this discussion, my analysis concentrates on a specific event in the history

Central Cultural Patterns of Polish Politics:

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In line with this “we–they” schema, the Constitutional Commission of the

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A national [constitutional] compromise will be possible, if we all acknowledge, that

Studying Cultural Legacies

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Democratization as the Cultural Reconstitution of Society:

Religion, Ethos, and Worldview in Solidarity’s Political Culture

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Martial Law, the Round Table Talks,

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Solidarity’s Legacy and the Origins of the Fourth Republic

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He further accused the constitution of a lack of an invocatio Dei, which, he

In the Name of God, the Almighty!

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3. Melanie Tatur, “Institutionenbildung in Osteuropa,” in Wolfgang Glatzer, ed., Ansichten der

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46. Zubrzycki, The Crosses of Auschwitz, 219.

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