Poland – Faith In Europe

Civil Society in Postcommunist Poland

Jolanta Babiuch-Luxmoore

I see a difference beween Anglo-Saxon and Polish understandings of ‘civil society’. The former (derived from Locke and Hume) sees civil society as involving a contract on power-sharing between society and the state. The latter (derived more from Rousseau) sees society as essentially in conflict with the state.

In Poland discussion on civil society started in the 1970s and 1980s. The idea was to build civil society as an environment parallel to the state where citizens could ‘live in truth’, with respect for each other; the context was that nobody knew how long communism was going to last. It was to be a moral but apolitical civil society. Its apogee was the Solidarity movement. This was a very particular phenomenon: it was in fact a kind of ‘negative solidarity’ in that it brought together people who had in common only the fact that they were against the state. This negative nature was later to turn out to be a disadvantage: civil society as it evolved at this time in Poland was basically negative about the state.

Communism collapsed unexpectedly, and there was no Third Way because there was no time: suddenly the only agenda was neo-liberal. Postcommunist Poland has seen the rise of NGOs, which have been set up in order to take action in areas where the state has not been doing well. They have become neo-liberal, oriented towards money, getting grants from the West. They have lost the ethos of civil society, which in Poland was conceived as moral. They have largely become professionalised and cliquish closed shops, fulfilling the programmes of those who are giving them grants.

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The Current Attitude of Catholics in Poland to European Integration

Aleks Szczerbiak

I’m going to just start off by talking briefly about the role that the Polish Catholic Church has played in Polish history, culture, national identity and contemporary politics and society, a bit of contextual information. And then I’m going to move on to talk about the Church’s attitude towards the issue of European integration. I’m going to start by looking in quite broad terms at what have been the underlying drivers of the Polish Catholic Church’s approach to the issue of European integration. The I’m going to move on to talk in a bit more detail about how that attitude has changed, particularly how it changed in the run up to the EU accession referendum in Poland in June 2003 where it played quite an important role; indeed arguably the single most important intervention in that process was actually by a clergyman. I’m then going to move on to talk about some more contemporary matters: about the issues and concerns that the Polish Catholic Church has raised and continues to raise in the post-accession period. A lot of this is obviously talking about the Church hierarchy – the bishops and the leadership of the Church – so I’m then going to talk a little bit more about the attitudes of the laity and of the rank-and-file clergy towards European integration and Poland’s membership of the EU. Finally I’m going to talk about a phenomenon that some of you might be familiar with: a media conglomerate and a milieu of organisations clustered around a Catholic nationalist broadcaster called Radio Maryja, which is a very interesting and a very unusual case of how a Eurosceptic movement that is critical or outrightly hostile to European integration is inspired by the social teachings of the Catholic Church or what you might call Political Catholicism. I’ll also touch a little bit on the Eurozone crisis and how the Church has related to it.

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