Uprooted: How Parliamentarism, Professionalization, and a Conservative Backlash De-legitimized Polish Environmentalism

The surprising and perhaps even paradoxical demise of a mass environmental protest movement in Poland after its heyday in the late 1980s has already drawn significant scholarly attention (Glinski and Koziarek, 2007; Szulecki et al. 2015; Van Eeden, 2016). So has the wider process of the “NGO-ization” of civil society in post-communist contexts (cf. Saxonberg and Jacobsson, 2013), and the role of pre-accession EU conditionality and “Europeanization” in re-shaping Poland’s legislative and ideational landscape related to environmental protection (Grodzinska-Jurczak and Cent, 2011; Szulecka and Szulecki, 2013). This article is an attempt to put all those dispersed arguments together under one analytical narrative. We trace changes in legitimacy of environmentalism in Poland since 1989 on three levels: of practice, organizations and discourse. The article will begin with a brief reconstruction of the ideational and socio-political evolution of environmentalism in Poland, and the history of the rise and fall of the mass environmental protest movement between 1985 and 1990. We argue that at communism’s end, Polish environmentalism boasted a strong legitimacy in all three dimensions – its practice of civil disobedience met wide societal support, its organizations had significant membership and obligatory power, and its rhetoric had broad appeal. We trace the evolution of Polish environmentalism through the 1990s to show the challenges it faced. Firstly, the de-legitimization of its practice by established parliamentary elites; secondly, the de-legitimization of its organizations due to their professionalization and loss of a societal base, with growing dependence on donors and top-down EU support; and thirdly, we show the discursive change and an apparent ‘conservative backlash’ that undermined the legitimacy of environmentalist rhetoric in public debate. We then look at some early hopes for change around the Rospuda campaign, and the revised approach of new initiatives around the problems of smog, nuclear energy and clear cutting the Białowieża forest, pointing to some visible strategies to regain legitimacy in these three dimensions.