“Poland is a heaven for the nobility, purgatory for the burghers [urbanites; clarification is mine], and hell for the peasants.” — an idiom during the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
While the idiom itself has come under a lot of scrutiny as of late, as the original was made at a time when tensions between Poles and Jews were high and are still high, thanks to Warsaw’s attempt to censor research into Polish collaboration and responsibility during the Holocaust, it expressed a common grievance against the Polish-Lithuanian politics and economy at the time, which was marked with punitive serfdom, constant noble infighting, and extreme opposition towards merchant-run towns and urbanization.
It is a stark contrast to the Polish and, to some extent, modern Western narrative of the Commonwealth as a time of great development and tolerance, which contrasted itself against the many principalities and kingdoms in Europe that were expelling Jews. That mythologized legacy is also used to portray modern Poland as a bastion of sensibility amidst the ongoing immigration crises and leftist radicalization in the West without the baggage of association with whatever is more right-wing than standard pro-deportation rhetoric. The “Golden Liberty,” so goes the mythology, is perhaps one of the largest myths maintained by Poland and the post-1989 West.
“Golden Liberty” for Whom?
Contrary to Polish and modern Western romanticization of the era as a time of tolerance, and hence, a time of advancement, the opposite is true in regards to economic development. The Polish economy, like post-Reformation Prussia and Russia, was composed of a massive peasantry laboring under a punitive serfdom administered by absentee landlord nobles, and urban towns that operated under German laws (namely, the Magdeburg Rights) and/or were part of the Hanseatic League. In the latter case, much of the tradesmen and artisans were a mixture of the predominant Germans, Flemish, and English extraction, and were “enclaves of Western Europe culture,” to quote Thomas Sowell.
But these enclaves were far from being wealthy, despite their relative wealth compared to the vast Polish hinterlands. Towns like Danzig, Posen, Elbing, etc. existed with this particular configuration due to the Polish crown’s need for modernizing the economy—the West had already abolished serfdom by then, dramatically reduced the burden placed onto the peasantry, and allowed them to settle into towns by becoming craftsmen under guilds. But the attempts to introduce urbanization came into competition with the Polish szlachta, the Polish landowning military-nobility, as the towns were undercutting export revenues the szlachta by providing a source of unhindered competition.
Decrees, privileges, and statues prohibited landownership, forbade town-dwellers from earning a profit of over 7 percent per annum, stripped them of representative rights in the sejm (the Polish parliament), imposed movement restrictions on the peasantry, and allowing only one member of each peasant family to move to the towns to destroy any chance of urbanization. The szlachta was able to impose such punitive restrictions came from the political and territorial configuration of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, as the consolidation of the Commonwealth began when Poland was a kingdom under dynasties through incorporation of other Eastern noble families and principalities before the creation of the noble republican Commonwealth. To further consolidate control, the Polish crown and, later, the sejm can appoint Catholic bishops via the Piotrkow Statutes, created a society dominated by a very powerful szlachta who controlled both the Polish Church and secular administration.
In other words, the “decentralization” of power was a deliberate hindrance of economic competition between the szlachta and the German-run towns, with a majority of the population languishing as serfs in the countryside where the szlachta is the law. Just as with the fallacy that the economy is a fixed pie, power isn’t a fixed pie either and can expand vertically and horizontally. What the szlachta did was simply socialize the costs of their inability to compete with the process of Western urbanization to earn revenues from grain exports by using military coercion, and ultimately, that consolidation also created the infamous liberum veto, which ultimately played a key role in the First Partition of Poland with the help of many szlachta houses. For most of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth’s existence, it was much poorer than Western Europe, less free, and when urbanization did take place, it was often under German laws and was nonetheless hampered by the szlachta’s meddling.
A Very Convenient Identity
The economic and institutional repressiveness of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was not an exception confined to Poland, but was also the norm in Tsarist Russia where Orthodoxy was more explicitly controlled by the state, through the symphonia concept and the Ober-Procurator system, with an extremely repressed peasantry (serfdom in Russia was abolished in 1861, the last European state to do so). Simultaneously, Russia also relied heavily on on foreign advisors, elites, and settlers (particularly Baltic German advisors, Volga German farmers, and other Western counterparts) to implement a top-down, conflict-ridden, and barely-baked modernization process that created a gigantic but poor and brutal Tsarist Empire that was succeeded by an even more brutal Soviet regime.
The difference here is almost entirely public narratives: whereas the Russian example is often rightfully remembered as backwards and bred a bloody revolution, the Polish example is only criticized at an academic level. The reason why Poland was seemingly integrated into the West is a “return to Europe” rhetoric. That vision rests upon conflating any Western Bloc countries to be “capitalist,” which ignores differing cultural and philosophical differences that produced the whitewashing of the Commonwealth, only when Poland saved Christendom at Vienna or was a Great Power is to be remembered. It must never acknowledge the German towns, Danzig or Thorn, as hopes of urbanization which were vanquished by the same szlachta estate that played a role in enforcing punitive serfdom against Poles and played a role in the partitions. It must paint whatever foreign aspect, especially German, as merely a relic of militarism and occupation. It must paint the millions of people, before and after 1945, as interchangeable with Nazis, regardless of actual individual responsibility or the simple fact that those Germans who were expelled were often descendants of intermarriages between Germans and the natives there were the ones who might have been able to introduce one of the first proto-market systems and urbanization.
And when partial liberalization arrived for a “purely” Polish nation, the creation of uneven forms of prosperity meant the process must be written off as failures and unfulfilled promises, because at least everyone went hungry during the communist era. As much as many prefer to bash France as case and point for burdensome bureaucracy and its consequences, Poland makes a far more compelling case for criticism, especially when factoring in corruption, tax complexity, and the consequences of treating the population as merely a resource rent to be extracted through “inflation targeting,” while still failing to converge with the French in terms of wages and productivity. Forty years after communism, Poland has only achieved productivity parity with highly indebted and lagging Portugal, which had its own history with corporatism and flirtations with revolutionary socialism. If the Polish “tiger” is roaring right now, from centuries of partition to “redeem” Europe, then it must square off against why the youth are reproducing at a rate comparable to China and South Korea. Is there something more basic and grounded than just nationality and one’s clan or collective?
This is still just a brief coverage of Poland, not an extensive primer on post-1989 Eastern European or African trajectories that failed to liberalize or whose variant of “capitalism” can simply be boiled down to extraction rents and wage repression. Even when genuine fragments of economic freedom were introduced, the broad consensus of many non-Western societies often treat such changes as merely emergency changes or, in worst cases, a form of ontological violence against their particular ways of life. What many paleolibertarians have been aware by now is this: the free market isn’t an entity that exists in a vacuum, but a social condition that exists under a specific cultural strand that respects individuality and proportionality in regards to competition—willingness to accept loss when outcompeted, rather than lobbying for government protection like the szlachta did. To use two Prussian terms, they’re Unbestechlichkeit and Opferbereitschaft, which, here, are incorruptibility and willingness to accept loss as a price of principle, respectively.
Of course, the West also faces a similar problem, insomuch as many of the Prussian Junkers themselves who were at the heart of the Osthilfe bailout scandal, though however smaller it may be compared to the East. The West is also increasingly becoming Easternized; the left wants internationalist and “anti-colonialist” policies so the state becomes a patron for non-white ethnic groups who proudly shout “we built this country” while their homelands are often in shambles, while parts of the nationalist right now worship FDR and Richard Nixon. The West has its own sacred cows and mythologies, though they live in a tension alongside individuality and locality, though this requires an entirely separate part of its own.
