Engineering Democracy in Poland

This is the text of a talk given by Professor Jerzy Przystawa of the University of Wrocław in Poland. Prof. Przystawa is a physicist who specialises in quantum theory, and has been an active civic intellectual as well. He has also participated in the TriaLogos Festival run by the Foundation Hereditas in Tallinn, Estonia.

by JERZY PRZYSTAWA — 22 JULY 2000

“Sensible” democracy and “sensible” sovereignty

By the end of 1918, after generations of fighting and struggling for a free and independent Poland, the Polish people had created their first truly free and independent state for 123 years. However, the independent Polish State merely survived two decades. 71 years later, the first non-communist Prime Minister in the so-called Eastern Europe, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, proclaimed, in the famous shipyards of Gdańsk, that “Poland lives! Free and Independent!”. The majority of the Polish people readily welcomed the newly acquired freedom.

Since that time many factors began to cloud this rosy picture and many people in Poland now have doubts if the contemporary world is indeed interested in a “free and independent Poland” and that the powers of the West, who are somehow considered to be the godfathers of this new Polish State, indeed intend to create something like a sovereign, self-governing Poland. About a month ago, an important American politician, former security adviser and Secretary of State in the Carter administration, Professor Zbigniew Brzeziński, was receiving his honorary doctorate at the prestigious Jagiellonian University in Krakow. In his solemn address to the learned audience, when he proclaimed “the best decade in the entire Polish history”, he did not dwell upon the question of sovereignty and independence. He rather reappealed to the Poles, a number of times, for “wisdom” and “sensible” or “reasonable democracy”. He did not state exactly what “sensible democracy” he had in mind. But from the general context of his speech there can be little doubt that the “sensible Polish state” should be a state with “limited freedom”, “limited independence”, and “limited sovereignity”. It is then also clear that this “sensible democracy” must also be a “limited democracy”.

How to “engineer” democracy?

There are many ways in which to limit the sovereignty and democracy of the states that emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Perhaps the most important is the exploitation of the enormous economical superiority of the West over the impoverished Eastern societies and the ideas of the so called “free” and “open” international markets. However, it is not my intention to discuss how these countries, unable, under the circumstances, to efficiently compete with the West, are becoming, by economical measures, subordinated and subjugated to foreign rule. I shall also not speak about the rules imposed on our countries by the demands of the European Union. It is the liberty of a free country to make treaties and impose any limitations on its functioning to which free people may consent. My talk will be devoted to the political mechanism that may prevent free people from expressing their will in a democratic way and to have their interests properly represented and protected. A major instrument to achieve such a goal are the electoral rules that have been imposed on Poland, and, as a matter of fact, on other post-communist countries as well. This is the so-called Proportional Representation (PR).

Naturally, there are many people, who will maintain that there are various electoral systems in use all over the world and that it is, to a large extent, a matter of taste, which system is chosen for a given country, since none of them is perfect. But let us have a look at what happened after the World War II, when the victorious allies started to engineer democracy in the defeated countries.

“Sensible democracy” after the World War II

We need not dwell on how the Soviet Union went about constructing democracy within its sphere of influence, but it is worth reflecting on how the best democracies in the world, the United States, Great Britain or Canada and Australia built democracies in the countries under their domination and responsibility. What electoral systems were “suggested” to Japan, Germany, Italy or Austria? Or even France, their less than terribly responsible ally? Should one not be tempted to expect that all those established democracies would propose their own electoral systems as a model of democracy? Would it have been unreasonable to suppose that they should strongly advocate their electoral systems, of which they benefited so much?

As we know well, nothing of the sort happened. On the contrary: America and England, with the help of their Soviet ally, imposed on Japan, Germany and Italy electoral systems totally alien to their own, totally different from their ways of electing national parliamentary representation. Instead of the so well-functioning First-Past-The-Post (FPTP) majoritarian rule, they imposed on their defeated enemies the so-called Proportional Representation! We know that they did so against the will of some important politicians of those countries. For example, one of the major proponents of the European Community, Konrad Adenauer and his Christian Democrats, the CDU, intended to introduce the Westminster FPTP system in Germany, but the occupying powers had not agreed to that! There is little doubt that similar “good advice” was given to Japan and Italy. And, of course, it must not have been very difficult to persuade them: their trustful Soviet ally was certainly in favour of such a solution; the communist parties they created, especially in France and Italy, strongly supported the idea, and all the socialist illusions, prevailing all over Western Europe at that time, made the task so much simpler and easier. We are now entitled to analyse why electoral systems were so important to them.

I think there might be little doubt that the real reason for this was a sensible intention to make certain that the Japanese, German and Italian states, that were about to be rebuilt and reorganised, should be politically weak, unable to ever become a threat to the world again. And one efficient, civilised and “democratic” measure to achieve that was the so called Proportional Representation. The Soviets achieved similar effect by direct fraud, without going through any subtleties. The Western democracies embarked on a more sophisticated approach. Of the many “qualities” of PR, the most important of all was that PR weakens the state and thus prevents it from being a real competitor on the political arena.

Why is PR a proper tool for such games?

The answer is simple: because PR creates “party states” and makes the political life of a country into a field of eternal and continuous battle among the political parties. It gives enormous privileges to parties and their leaders at the expense of citizen’s rights, it deprives the voters of any control over elected deputies, it eliminates then accountability of the MPs, and the political parties cease to be responsible for their actions. Such a system does not inspire confidence among voters, is conducive to large abstention from voting, and it does not allow any political party to win the parliamentary majority. In this way, the system enforces coalition governments, thus governments are weak, torn by continuous party battles among the members of the coalition. It exerts pressure on the state budget which weak governments cannot resist. This, in turn, deepens the budget deficit. As it has been proven on numerous examples of many countries, the system generates political corruption. The list could be continued.

France, Italy and Japan try to shake off “sensibility”

It is only recently that all these ills of PR have become intolerable in countries that aspire to a leading role in the world or European politics. The first to shake off the chains of PR was France. But it required the will-power and determination of General de Gaulle to achieve that. Italy has been a particular example of how PR led to unstable governments and political corruption. In the historical referendum of 1993 the PR had been abolished and a system called “matarellum” was introduced. The new system is FPTP in 75% and PR in 25%. Similar effort has been made in Japan, where since 1997 2/3 of parliamentary seats are taken by deputies elected by the FPTP principle. In recent years we have also witnessed the continuous effort of the Italian people to wipe out the remainder of proportionality completely. Soon after the 1993 referendum, many Italians began to realize that there can be no compromise between the PR and FPTP systems and that to leave some parliamentary seats at the political parties disposal is a grievous mistake.

In what follows I shall confine myself to the Polish situation and the Polish example.

Round Table Agreement instead of decommunization

If we remember how democracies have been engineered in countries like Germany, Italy or Japan, we know that besides imposing PR the occupying forces also put a ban on the existence and functioning of political forces of totalitarian and fascist regimes and that in all those countries the process of “denazification” took place. After the collapse of the communist regimes one might expect that similar procedures of decommunization would be introduced in the countries that suffered so much during so many decades. Poland is a particularly clear example of a country in which communism was generally hated and met with abomination. It was only natural to expect that a free and independent Poland would swiftly introduce measures preventing any possibility of a communist succession. As we now know, nothing of the sort has happened. Tadeusz Mazowiecki, while assuming his office of the first non-communist Prime Minister in the communist Europe in 1989, in full compatibility with his Christian philosophy, announced immediately the policy of a “thick line”, the line separating the communist past from post-communist future, and declared that from now on we should be only looking into the future and dismiss the past. The so- called Round Table Agreement divided the future Polish Parliament in a peculiar way: 2/3 of the seats were to be secured for the communist party representatives and 1/3 were to be offered for a free election. As a result, those 1/3 of seats were subsequently taken, in 100%, by the nominees of Lech Wałęsa. Thus the Polish D-Day, the Day of Democratic Victory, the 4th June of 1989, the day of the parliamentary election, was a witness to the election in which 2/3 MPs have been, in fact, nominated by General Jaruzelski, the communist ruler of Poland, and 1/3 by the Solidarity hero, Lech Wałęsa.

Elections preceded by purification of rank

One should also mention another important factor in the political games in post-communist Poland. Such a 100% victory of the Round Table Agreement might have not be possible without another measure, implemented before the Poles were allowed to go to the election polls. As we remember, in December 1981, Martial Law was introduced in Poland and the Solidarity Trade Union was delegalised. The following 8 years were the years of the underground resistance of Solidarność and of the Polish people in general. Naturally, an underground resistance always produces “unreasonable elements”, with which it might be difficult to create eventually the “reasonable democracy” Professor Brzeziński was requesting. Therefore, before the general election, some process of purification of the ranks of Solidarność had to take place. I may call this process “reverse-denazification” for it was a process of getting rid of people who fought stubbornly for a free and democratic Poland! It so happened that many active underground Solidarnośc members were not wise enough to accept the conditions and the dictates of Lech Wałęsa and they even demanded democratic elections within Solidarnośc itself! This was, of course, unheard of, and all such people were craftily eliminated from political life and, most importantly, from any access to the Parliament.

“Sensibility” guaranteed in the Constitution of Poland

This is how the political scene of Poland was constructed.

Following the 1989 elections, the PR rule was implemented and cemented by the fundamental law, i.e. by the Constitution of Poland. It is worth noting, however, that merely 40% of the Polish voters took part in the constitutional referendum, but, by a decree of the Parliament, the referendal quorum required by the Polish law was exceptionally suspended and the constitutional referendum was declared valid despite the low turn-out.

I have mentioned only two major steps in the engineering of democracy in Poland. There have been many others, more subtle and crafty. But this might be a subject for another presentation. What is important is the fact that all that engineering was efficient and brought about the desired effect: a weak Polish State, eternally torn by party fighting and party politicking, disillusioned society, a country totally opened to foreign influences, a country with political elite unable to defend and protect its interests. The extent to which the Polish people lost confidence in democratic procedures is demonstrated by recent senatorial by-elections in a number of districts: merely 3-to-5% of voters bothered to go to the polls and vote.

Citizen movement to reject “proportionality”

In the beginning of 1993, a citizen movement was initiated to change the electoral system in Poland. In this Movement we demand rejection of the constitutional requirement of PR and introduction of the Westminster FPTP system. The Movement is collecting signatures demanding a national referendum on these matters. We organize conferences, meetings and public actions all over Poland. The Movement is supported by local self-governing bodies and councils. A few dozen councils, on various levels, from communal, municipal councils and county councils to land councils are demanding change and are writing petitions to the Parliament and the President of the State. Since last November, three national conferences have been organized under the title “One MP from every county” (County = powiat). In these conferences local council members, mayors, academics from all over Poland participated.

The Movement, under the political conditions in Poland, develops slowly and has virtually no access to the public media, national TV, Radio or press. The Italian Transformation, which nearly wiped out from the political scene nearly all of the then-existing political parties, is, for Polish politicians, a gloomy forecast of what could happen if they give in to the Movement demands. The inner parties’ cliques fear the change and are determined to resist it at all cost. And however weak these parties might be, they seem to be strong enough to oppose it so far. A good example of that is the Czech Republic, where so prominent a politician as President Havel himself, who has been advocating the FPTP system since as long ago as 1992, cannot win over the party interests. Similarly in Poland. During the last conference of the Movement, that took place in June in the City of Poznań, the Movement received support from Maciej Płażyński, the Speaker of the Sejm (The Lower House). This does not disturb the party parliamentarians: a new version of the electoral law that institutes PR in its extreme version is already drafted and will soon be put forward before the Sejm for voting.

However, for independent Poland there is no other way but to reject PR. Therefore we believe that the Polish instinct of survival will eventually prevail and that the Movement will gain sufficient support to introduce necessary changes and that we shall be seeing Poland as an independent, sovereign and self-governing partner of the European politics.

A proposal for Europe

A majoritarian voting system may also be a good proposal for many other European nations that may not fully appreciate the ways in which the EU evolves. The FPTP majoritarian rule takes state affairs out of the clutches of party politicking, reduces the power of political parties, strengthens citizens rights and makes their interests better protected. This might be healthier for all of us, both within and outside the EU.

Talk presented at the VII Conference “Mut zur Ethik”, Zurich, 22 July 2000

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