Helena Chmielewska-Szlajfer - Reshaping Poland’s Community after Communism: Ordinary Celebrations

Komiski University, Warsaw, Poland

In the mid-1990s, the prominent Polish sociologist Jerzy Szacki wrote about Communist Poland as a nation wanting to return to Western Europe (Szacki , p. 304), Polands aspirations toward joining the idolized West, that is, Western Europe and the United States, as a place of political freedom, wealth, and pop culture only became greater. Yet the world Poland regained access to was no longer just the West: it was a complex and quickly changing international, political, economic, social, and cultural reality. This opening to the outside world meant that Poland was suddenly exposed to a multitude of choices that were unavailable under a Communist regime wary of its ideological, economic, and cultural monopoly.

The outside world is now profoundly present in Polish society: it may be embraced or rejected, but after the lifting of the Iron Curtain , it became clearly visible. Shifts in key meanings related to Poland as a community , as it is envisioned by its membersincluding such shared elements as religion, social empathy, and civil societyare among the many effects of political and economic transformation . While the implications of the Polish transformation from the point of view of community and its cultural practices have been the object of some media discussion, research focused on Polands progress in modernizing itself to fit to the standards of the idealized West has proved too narrow to capture cultural processes. The emerging post-1989 narratives that fuel the transformations of the social imaginary go beyond the analysis of outcomes of political and economic transitions. Still, the concept of Poland as a post-Communist country catching up with the established democratic and capitalist world illustrates a common thread in social research that uses the dominant versus minority culture perspective, and to a large extent, equates the experience of postcolonial and post-Communist countries. According to this argument, countries of the former Soviet Bloc are to be treated as minority cultures struggling against the dominant culture of the West. What is lost in this reasoning, however, is that Western culturefilms, music , and bookswas significantly present in some of the formerly Communist countries, carefully rationed by authorities or distributed unofficially. For example, the prestigious Paris-based Polish-migr literary and political magazine Kultura (Culture) served as a bridge between the two worlds, publishing authors such as Czesaw Miosz and Albert Camus. Furthermore, it is a culture Poles have felt historically members of both during and long before the Communist era. This notion of belonging is particularly noticeable in the case of Poland, but it was exceptionally captured by Milan Kundera in his famous essay The Tragedy of Central Europe . However, after over a decade of Polands membership in the European Union , the concept of catching up has become increasingly contested. The European refugee crisis and recent terrorist attacks carried out in major Western European cities, including London and Paris, have led to a visible shift in Poles attitudes toward European valuesboiled down to inviting terrorists, in addition to imposing gender equality and gay rightscontrasting them with traditional Polish-Catholic ones. As a result, since 2015, Poland has been ruled by the nationalist, authoritarian, and increasingly EU-skeptic Law and Justice (PiS) Party, which won both presidential and parliamentary elections playing not on notions of catching-up but on fears of the West.