Poland, Ukrainian refugees, and the fight to preserve democracy in the European Union
Poland, Ukrainian refugees, and the fight to preserve democracy in the European Union
Anne Applebaum is very familiar with issues of post-1989 democratic transition in eastern Europe, particular Poland. She holds dual American-Polish citizenship and is married to Radosław Sikorski, a former Polish Foreign Minister (2007-2014) who is currently a conservative (Christian Democratic) Member of the European Parliament.
I recently read Applebaum’s book Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine (2017) about the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33 also known as the Holodomor. I plan to write more about that book here. But there and in her commentary on the Russia-Ukraine War, she shows what seems to be an excessive appreciation for hardline anti-Russia narratives.
But when it comes to democracy in Poland, she recommends an article by Piotr Kosicki that takes a serious look at the democratic deficits in the current Polish government, however much she might sympathize with Poland’s particular positions on the current war.1
Ukrainian refugees as a potential political target
I was beginning to be surprised - pleasantly - to see that xenophobic parties and groups in the EU didn't seem to be raising a stink about the upwards of five million Ukrainian refugee in the EU. Over a year's time beginning in early 2015, around 1.1 million refugees fled into the EU. And that event was called a huge "refugee crisis." But with around five times that many coming into the EU from Ukraine alone in the year after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the politicians haven't been having remotely the freakout they staged in 2015 and afterwards. Which tells me the 2015 "crisis" was almost exclusively a crisis of governance and political leadership.
The social-democratic Landeshauptmann (Governor) of the Austrian state of Tyrol recently provided a classic example of how disconnected from reality the rhetoric in the EU about refugees often is. In calling for more restriction on refugees entering the US, he said, “Incidents at the borders such as those in 2015 and 2016 must not be repeated.”2
Dude, 2015-16 was the year the EU had one-fifth of the refugees that it had in the comparable period of 2022-23! 2015-16 was just repeated, five times over! And the public infrastructure is holding up fine. Even in Poland (population: 37.5 million) that currently has around 2.3 million Ukrainian refugees. (It’s an interesting coincidence that the Landeshauptmann’s current girlfriend is a member of the Italian Parliament of the ruling “post-fascist” Fratelli d'Italia party of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.3)
I had two theories about why it might be that the far-right has been holding back on anti-Ukrainian xenophobia. One was that maybe the EU actually learned something from their ridiculous freakout in 2015. (They did, actually.) The other was that Russia was sending rightwing European Putinists a signal not to make an issue out of it because they wanted the Ukrainian refugees to stay away.
But Kosicki seems to think that is changing, at least in Poland:
The outpouring of Polish solidarity with Ukrainians was genuine, unprecedented, and extraordinary. But it will not last, as Poles blame both cyclical and structural problems in their social services on the Ukrainians who have sought refuge in their country. Already in November of last year, Polish headlines announced the troubling results of major studies of public opinion: “Poles are for Ukraine, but against Ukrainians,” as sociologists Przemyslaw Sadura and Slawomir Sierakowski put it. They sum up their interviews as follows: “In every social group, age group, in big as in small towns, without differentiation by gender, negative feelings predominate toward refugees from Ukraine. And so we are sitting on a ticking time bomb.” A January 2023 survey by Warsaw Enterprise Institute/Maison & Partners notes that 62 percent of respondents agreed that “Poland cannot afford” Ukrainian refugees and 41 percent said that “refugees from Ukraine are in truth economic migrants.
Around 1/3 of the Ukrainian population is currently displaced from their homes, including a couple of million or more refugees in Russia and hundreds of thousands in the small and poor country of Moldova.
Democratic backsliding in Poland and its allies’# reaction
Kosicki is concerned that Poland’s importance in the NATO coalition supporting Poland’s neighbor Ukraine is causing Western leaders including President Biden to downplay the real backsliding in the democratic system of Poland. He sketches the history of how the ruling Law and Justice Party has moved the country in a distinctly authoritarian direction, especially since 2015.
Poland still does have competitive elections, and a national election is scheduled for October. It will be interesting to see if the ruling party will start actively demagoguing against Ukrainian refugees. Xenophobia is currently the most toxic political theme of the anti-democracy far right in Europe. The signs Kosiciki cites aren’t encouraging:
Since late 2022, Amnesty International has reported more and more anti-Ukrainian hate speech on Polish social media. Public officials also broadcast these messages. The state superintendent for schools in the Malopolska region, a prominent Krakow-based activist for Law and Justice, tweeted, “The wave of Ukrainians fleeing the war has given our country’s anti-Polish circles hope that they can finally succeed in watering down Polish identity. They demand an end to teaching Polish history and literature, under the pretext of coddling the feelings of Ukrainians. We refuse to surrender our Polishness!”
As Kosicki indicates there, nationalistic historical claims are part of the mix. (All versions of nationalism necessary involve some form of historical narrative.) Like Russia and Ukraine, Poland and Ukraine also have historical grudges against each other. One of the Polish nationalist themes against Ukraine is a massacre of Poles by Ukrainian partisan forces in the region of Volhynia during the German occupation during the Second World War. Before the war, Volhynia had been part of Poland.
If you think eastern Europeans history is full of issues involving small regions most people have never heard of, you’re not wrong! Since the 900s, Volhynia has been part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (Poland-Lithuania), the Mongols, Russia, the Soviet Union, Poland, and now Ukraine.4
Map of Volhynia5:
Andrii Portnov provided a description in 2016 of how the politics of the Volhynia has played out since 1989.6 It involves the infamous Stepan Bandera, who constantly comes up in polemics about Ukraine.
Kosicki points out the (chronic) reality that American foreign-policy rhetoric about democratic virtue - Democracies vs. Autocracies is the latest incarnation - often takes a back seat to geopolitical considerations:
One could argue that Poland is just one of many places—including India, Israel, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia—where Biden’s human rights promises are taking a backseat to strategic interests. [Yes, one could argue that …] And indeed, Israeli protesters against Benjamin Netanyahu’s government regularly cite Poland as an example that they do not wish their country to follow. But if Biden cannot speak for human rights in a frontline NATO country, where can he?
Good question. But it’s important to recognize that Poland is part of the European Union, which makes laws in many areas that are binding on all member states. And joining the EU requires achieving a basic level of democracy and rule of law. So democratic backsliding presents a more direct problem for other member nations’ basic institutions that just being the neighbor of a non-democratic country. The EU’s responsibility in addressing Poland’s democracy deficit is a more immediate one than that of the US. It’s also one in which domestic values and geopolitical ones overlap in very practical ways.
By the way, NATO also has a requirement that member states have to be democracies But Turkey, Hungary, and Poland don’t face any immediate threat of being kicked out of that alliance. The “rules-based international order” has exceptions for American geopolitical priorities.
But I’m with Kosicki when he writes, “There should be a consistent call for the safeguarding of Polish democracy - rather than simply praise for a Polish solidarity [over Ukraine] that may not be there tomorrow.”
Appelbaum, Anne (2023): X [formerly known as Twitter] 07/31/2023. <https://twitter.com/anneapplebaum/status/1685723847511683072> (Accessed: 2023-31-07).
Tirols SPÖ-Chef Dornauer spricht sich für restriktive Migrationspolitik und ÖVP-Koalition aus 02.08.2023. <https://www.derstandard.at/story/3000000181376/dornauer-ge> (Accessed: 2023-16-11). My translation from the German.
Dornauer im Liebesglück mit Meloni-Mandatarin. Puls 24 03.08.2023. <https://www.puls24.at/news/politik/georg-dornauer-im-liebesglueck-mit-meloni-mandatarin-alessia-ambrosi/304254> (Accessed: 2023-03-08).
Editors (2013): Volhynia. Encyclopedia Britannica 04/29/2013. <https://www.britannica.com/place/Volhynia> (Accessed: 2023-03-08).
Volhynia. Wikipedia 07/10/2023. <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Volhynia&oldid=1164632708> (Accessed: 2023-03-08).
Portnov, Andrii (2016): Clash of victimhoods: the Volhynia Massacre in Polish and Ukrainian memory. OpenDemocracy 11/16/2016. <https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/clash-of-victimhood-1943-volhynian-massacre-in-polish-and-ukrainian-culture/> (Accessed: 2023-03-08).