Rethinking stereotypes

The past decade has given the lie to the stereotyping of the Czechs as a passive, pliant people in the shadow of the courageous, tough Poles fighting for their freedom. Since the collapse of communism, the Czechs have been far more thorough and consistent in dealing with their past than the Poles have. Poland's post-Solidarity elite must have looked on in envy at what happened in the recent elections in the Czech Republic. Some of the right might have been disappointed that Vaclav Klaus's conservatives failed to win the day. However, all of them will note that in the Czech Republic both the major left and right-wing parties have roots in the democratic dissident movement and that the communists, despite polling around 20%, have not had a sniff of power for the last 12 years. In the Czech Republic, the joyous velvet revolution was followed by a process of tough screening of all state officials and the creation of a political scene in which it was the anti-communist forces that created the right, the left and the center. In Poland it took years to get any action on vetting state officials. The former Solidarity dissidents did at first dominate the political scene but very soon began to lose ground to the post-communist Democratic Left Alliance (SLD) and its rural sidekick, the Peasants Party (PSL).

None of this happened by accident. As always it is the individuals that mattered. Instead of building a non-communist center-left, the left-leaning Solidarity activists such as Zbigniew Bujak and Władysław Frasyniuk and intellectuals such as Jacek Kuroń, Adam Michnik and Bronisław Geremek chose to go for one enormous democratic movement called the Citizens' Committees. When that failed because more conservative politicians such as the Kaczyński brothers refused to play ball, the left-wingers still refused to set up a left-wing shop and chose to create a liberal one instead - the Democratic Union, which later became the Freedom Union (UW). This meant that the ground on the left of Polish politics was free for the post-communist SLD to exploit. Unchallenged they became the main opposition to the right. Their sense of purpose and political professionalism contrasted well with the quarrelsome right. It is the perhaps an admirable yet politically naive trait of being very willing to forgive and forget that has landed the former Solidarity in this mess. Michnik, Kuroń and Geremek were so concerned that Poland should not be accused of being too harsh on its former communist rulers that they argued for a lenient approach. It was so lax that it paved the way to power for the ex-communists.

Instead of blaming the communists for a period of 40 wasted years, the people soon blamed Solidarity for the pains of the transformation. This has become a national style here. Instead of haranguing the national football team for going meekly out of the World Cup, the players were received as heroes for having got there in the first place and having won a game when it no longer mattered. The first few months of this SLD government have demonstrated that the party still has a long way to go before it can be a real social democratic party like its Czech counterpart. It is not enough to make all the right noises on Europe, NATO and the free market. Actions speak louder than words. In this sphere we are faced with a series of moves that make one shudder. The media bill is a pretty blatant attempt to restrict the independent electronic media. The threatened attack on the autonomy of the National Bank of Poland can lead to far greater government control of the economy. The very liberal use of public prosecutors to harangue former government ministers brings back memories of the way deposed apparatchiks were treated by those who succeeded them in communist times. The omens are not good.

When the Czech public media was under threat from the government, thousands marched in its defense. The Czechs also demanded the right to have access to their security police files and demanded to know everything about the past of their politicians. Instead of forgiving the communists, they passed a law that banned former communists from government jobs for a number of years. Their dissidents, despite the lack of visible successes, soon showed themselves to be far shrewder and tougher than their Polish counterparts. In doing all this, the Czechs proved right those observers who argued years ago that the difference between a Pole and a Czech is that the Pole is white on the outside, but red inside, whereas with the Czechs it is the other way around. The emergence of the SLD and now Andrzej Lepper's Self-Defense seems to suggest that they were right.

Chris Mularczyk is a Warsaw-based consultant. He can be e-mailed at cmularczyk@wbj.pl.