Poland has entered an unprecedented period of transition from totalitarian rule to democracy. We were the first post-communist nation to launch an ambitious programme of political, economic and social reforms which, we hope, will lead us back into the community of democratic nations.
To my generation, in our late thirties, it was something of a miracle that communism in Poland collapsed without outbursts of wild violence. Yet it is often said that we do not seem to be happy enough - there are no crowds singing and dancing on the streets. I do not think this is a fair criticism. Rather, to me, it is a sign that we are more mature than some of our neighbours in facing the very real challenges which are now beginning to appear on our horizons.
Apart from the disasters the communist system has left us with - a rundown economy, a horribly polluted environment, a foreign debt of $40 billion, to name just a few of the most serious - there is the burden of a post-communist mentality inside almost every one of us. Our mental and, to a degree, social habits are those of a collectivist society. We are afraid of taking major risks or launching serious business enterprises. At the same time we are well trained in making claims of all kinds from the government and its agencies, as if we were unable to act on our own. The fatal division of 'us' and 'them' is still alive, without us realizing that there is no 'them' -'them' meaning the communist nomenclature depriving the people of their rights - once we have regained our national independence.
We had been fighting for our freedom as a nation and as individuals for almost 200 years, apart from a short break during the Second Polish Republic of 1918-39. We mastered the art of fighting for 'freedom from' rather well. But we did not master well enough the art of 'freedom to'. One cannot blame the reds for everything. In our long struggle with foreign and native oppressors we seem to have lost a coherent vision of our long-term aims and goals.
The concept of solidarity, based on commonly shared values of individual dignity, human rights and non-violent resistance to totalitarian rule, has indeed saved us from total national decomposition and apathy in the face of a brutal, seemingly invincible communist tyranny. Unbelievably, we won. But, once we had won, we realized that the very concept of national solidarity could prevent us from entering the path which leads from serfdom to a fully-fledged, pluralist democracy. We are afraid to acknowledge that differences and divisions are building up within our self-liberated society.
The same challenge is facing our Catholic Church. For a long time, the Church has served as a genuine caretaker of our national identity in our struggles with the aggressively atheistic institutions of the communist state. Throughout the years of communist-run Poland, it was mainly the Church that reminded us that the struggle would have to go on in our very souls. The spiritual dimension was what mattered. There was no serious discussion of the social, political and economic dimensions of the national struggle.
That changed significantly during the Solidarity era. The period of martial law - which was imposed by a communist junta on 13 December, 1981 - was very important. The Church granted its protective umbrella to many different groups of socially active people without asking where they came from. The Church emerged out of martial law strengthened but at the cost of maintaining the noble myth of a national and social unity which is now beginning to disappear.
The institutional Church - the bishops and the clergy - do not seem to welcome this. They would rather stick to the role they have mastered - that of shepherds leading their flocks along carefully selected paths inside the fold. To them, the emerging pluralist democratic order seems to threaten their pastoral mission by shaking the deeply rooted patterns of thought, piety and behaviour which give the lay people a passive rather than an active role in the drama of national history.
As for the West, it is quite likely that the signs of disillusionment with its stance vis-a-vis post-communist nations will multiply. It is difficult for Poles to forget the hypocrisy, bad faith or naivety on the part of some leading Western politicians in dealing with, for example, the Katyn forest massacre of twelve thousand Polish military officers by the Soviets in 1940 or the Yalta agreement which abandoned Eastern Europe to the dreadful grip of Stalin's USSR. More recently, our people cannot understand the rationale behind the richest Western nations' unwillingness to reduce our foreign debt substantially in order to help us with our reforms.
Despite all this, there is still plenty of hope inside us. Otherwise we would be bound to lose our miraculous victory over the communist system. This hope has at least two sources. First, that the invisible hand of Providence will not cease to guide us in our search for an ethical, Christian-based foundation for the new system which is beginning to emerge out of the post-communist chaos. And, secondly, that this foundation can be linked to the structures of the modern pluralist democracy which many of us would like this new system to be. Would you, our friends in the rest of the world, help?
by Adam Szostkiewicz, a member of the editorial board of the Polish weekly, 'Tygodnik Powszechny' in Krakow.
