Authoritarian Blueprint vs Authoritarian Reality: The Case of Poland in Comparative CEE Perspective

This paper focuses on the causes of the unexpected decline in the quality of democracy in Poland, and argues that the reasons for what has transpired do not stem directly from the socialist system blueprint and its allegedly lasting legacy in the form of Polish Homo Sovieticus, but rather indirectly from the enduring effects of the Poles’ successful subversion of real-socialism through various form of "adaptive resourcefulness." These adaptations ranged from entrepreneurial activities in the shadow economy, to the construction of social support networks based around close-knit groups of family and friends, to turning to the Catholic Church as an ideological (also political) alternative to the socialist party-state. These and other adaptations played a part in the breakdown of the old system, yet they simultaneously left as their legacy a number of traits and dispositions unconducive to high-quality democratic governance: widespread and deep individualism, low trust, low bridging social capital, an almost exclusive focus on the family as a supreme value (combined with indifference to the public good), and resulting ethical dualism concerning the public versus private spheres – all related to the high trust in Church under communism and the experience of operating in a significant private sector in the economy. Some of these traits can be traced back to the era of the nobility’s "golden freedoms", the weakness of bourgeois culture, and to lacking own statehood for most of the last two centuries. The current – post-2015 election - developments and the gradual emergence in Poland of a system I tentatively call clientelistic authoritarianism, I submit it is not a reproduction of the socialist blueprint, but rather an effect of accumulated societal, cultural and institutional reactions to this blueprint - reactions which once so powerfully contributed to socialism’s demise, now are proving harmful to democracy as well.