Being a Conservative in a Postcommunist Country.

INTERNATIONAL relations; POLITICAL doctrines; COMMUNISM; SOCIAL history; GERMANS; LIBERALISM; HISTORY

This article looks at the conservative position in post-communist Poland. There are some well-known explanations of why liberal thinking and practices were so weak before 1939 in Poland and most of the other East Central European countries. Most frequently, the main factor cited is a social structure with a fragile middle class. But this reasoning, in which cause and result are really the same thing but named differently to create the illusion of reasoning, is a classic sociological mistake. During the prewar period and even at the end of the 19th century, all the economic and social conditions necessary for the creation of a middle class were present in parts of Poland, but a Polish middle class did not appear. There was a middle class among the Germans in Poland, but not among the Poles, the largest national group. Much depends upon one's interpretation of the transition to democracy between 1989 and 1991. There are several schools of thought on the subject, and although they have methodological or historical differences, they have close political connections. They can be summarized as follows: (1) the transition to democracy was, in reality, an act of freeing the nation from oppression; (2) the transition to democracy is an opportunity to build a strong and independent liberal state; and (3) the transition to democracy is an enormous effort toward building a society or, as has been said too often, a civil society.