EU - what's next?

Morawiecki is the developmentalist face of the PiS government. He has a good image in the West. He likes to cite Thomas Piketty and Mariana Mazzucato, even writing the preface to the Polish edition of the latter’s The Entrepreneurial State. Morawiecki has articulated a grand vision of re-industrialization and modernization. The “Morawiecki Plan” aims to uplift the poorer, eastern “Poland B” through economic development. Morawiecki and his team consciously harken back to Poland’s patriotic developmentalist tradition, especially to the figure of Eugeniusz Kwiatkowski, the interwar technocrat who undertook the construction of the port of Gdynia and the industrialization of central Poland. This vision is backed by Kaczyński, who is enamored with its patriotic pastiche.

Much of Morawiecki’s plan, however, remains on paper, and some speculate that many of its projects amount to little more than PR stunts. Initiatives Morawiecki has celebrated, like the Solidarity Transport Hub, are the culmination of a decade of infrastructure investment, financed in large part with EU funds. The center-left SLD stabbed itself in the foot with its single-minded focus on EU accession, keeping expenditures at a minimum so as to meet European deficit limits, while the beneficiaries of that accession have been the two right-wing parties that have been showered with money from Brussels.

The underlying unity of PiS’s economic, social, and cultural policies comes from a goal to cleanse Polish society of the legacies of the PRL. PiS’s project of building a new state supported by the Catholic Church is not based on populism, but on conservative moralism. While the rhetoric against “post-communist deals” is directed against businessmen and politicians, Kaczyński has stated that he regards the legacy of “post-communism” as a society-wide pathology. In an interview with journalist Teresa Torańska conducted in 1994, he spoke of a web of dependencies and privileges going down to the level of factory brigade. In this regard, Kaczyński’s views are not too distinct from the Polish neoliberals who viewed the common Pole as a hopeless “Homo Sovieticus,” completely dependent on the state—except that while neoliberals believed that this “condition” needed to be shattered through the shock of the market, Kaczyński believes it is the role of the state to take action to cleanse society, with private enterprise acting as a junior partner.

PiS offers Poles a moral pseudo-revolution that preserves the country’s post-1989 trajectory, in which the social question can only be understood in relationship to a communist past that needs to be thrown off. It does not represent a backlash to Polish transformation, but rather its final consolidation: the construction of a new anti-communist political superstructure. PiS’s narrative of a previously lawless privatization process and a restoration of justice serves the illusion of a state existing independently of society and social classes. The more PiS feels comfortable in its position of power, the more the illusion will wear.

Pax Mediterranea !

— Emmanuel Macron (@EmmanuelMacron) September 10, 2020