Harald Wydra

Continuities in Poland's permanent transition

Preface The Continuity of Second Reality PART I The Continuity of Permanent Transition The Continuity of Historical Antagonisms The Continuity of Backwardness PART II The Continuity of the Image of the West The Continuity of the Image of Solidarity The Continuity of the Image of 1989 The Continuity of Expecting Discontinuities Bibliography Index

Victims and new wars

Interpretations of ‘new wars’ are contradictory. While some stress the asymmetry of intentions, strategies, and capabilities of antagonists, others emphasize the identity of warring parties in sharing the same space of political violence. Introducing elements of a political anthropology of victimhood, this paper suggests that the polarity in new wars is driven by self-representations of collective victimhood. Modes of total warfare in the twentieth century shifted the moral centre of gravity towards representations of humanity as a transcendent victim. The universalist sacred of protecting humanity as a victim, however, masks the polarity between antagonists who legitimize aggression by defensive propositions in the name of suffered victimhood. On the one hand, moral justifications of revenge for victimhood support claims for the asymmetry of polarity. On the other hand, this asymmetry of proliferating victims conceals an ongoing symmetry of rivalry. Ultimately, the focus on political agency and on moral justifications maintains the illusion that the other is the aggressor. A new moral economy requires acknowledging the deep interdependence of rivals. The aggressor has always been aggressed. If the moral core of warfare is in the de-humanization of the enemy, possible paths of reconciliation require the moral recognition of the enemys same humanity.

Introduction Understanding New Wars

The papers in this section are a selection from the conference ‘Victims and New Wars’ that was organized in cooperation with the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH) in Cambridge in February 2010. The main interpretive line is inspired by anthropologist René Girard’s recent book Battling to the end. Girard revisits Clausewitz’s conception of war as a ‘duel’, which unduly focuses on modern warfare as a ritualised form of struggle. Rather, he emphasizes the fact that war is always structured as a ‘hand-to-hand combat’ (Zweikampf) and, for that matter, remains uncontrollable. In open warfare, antagonists are bound up by forms of symmetric reciprocity that may lead to an escalation of aggression. In periods of peace the polarity of war is suspended but reciprocity is still active, albeit unacknowledged. The central idea of ‘Understanding New Wars’ was to identify such ‘suspended reciprocity’ in the form of narratives of victimhood and suffering as the driving forces of patterns of rivalry. Such polarity compounds itself in times of peace until these forces explode in open warfare. Grievances due to traumas and victimhood suffered in the past are rationalized into legitimate propositions of aggression in the name of defence. The three articles discuss the role of victimhood for contemporary conflicts through the lenses of mimetic theory. Wydra’s article suggests that the justification of war through self-attributed victimhood has now become ‘global’. After 9/11 (‘we are all Americans’) even the ‘international community’ has based security strategies and interventionism on the experience of being victim to terrorist attacks. Modes of total warfare in the twentieth century blurred the distinctions between combatants and non-combatants, democratized trauma and shifted the moral centre of gravity in war towards representations of humanity as a transcendent victim. The universalist sacred of protecting victims masks the underlying polarity. Defensive propositions in the name of suffered victimhood can underpin reciprocal aggression. If, as Clausewitz argued, the concept of war originates with the defence, the globalized twenty-first century, with its dominant victimary imagination as legitimate ground for self-defence, bears the potential for a ‘war without limits’. Adversaries never stop accusing the other of having started hostilities. Ultimately, the focus on political agency and on moral justifications maintains the illusion that the other is the aggressor. Wydra argues that a new moral economy requires acknowledging this deep interdependence of rivals. The aggressor has always been aggressed. If the moral core of warfare is in the de-humanization of the enemy, possible paths of reconciliation require the moral recognition of the enemy’s same humanity. Roberto Farneti’s article brings mimetic theory to bear on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Farneti (Free University of Bolzano/Bozen) argues that a number of contemporary armed conflicts are modelled around this arch-conflict, which can be considered, to follow Herfried Munkler’s words, a ‘miniature copy’ of current global political line-ups. They display the same mimetic structure and replicate the same pattern of mutual hostility. So-called ‘new wars’ are replicas in Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 2013 Vol. 26, No. 1, 159–160, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09557571.2013.770290

The Politics of Transcendence

Modern politics dogmatically separates politics from religion, the state from promises of salvation. This article makes a case for the fundamentally political nature of transcendence. It argues that the changing relationships between authority and salvation depend on culturally crafted engagements of the spiritual and the temporal. In a first part, I examine four key configurations of the political in the history of the West, which can be grasped as extraordinary form of “absolute” politics. From the adoption of Christianity by Constantine, the Gregorian reform, Luther’s Reformation, and the French Revolution, secular forms of territorial power are grounded in an engagement between the spiritual and the temporal. In a second part, I show how ultimate ends influenced the emergence of secular forms of power. Although they lack tangible immediate effects and appear impracticable, ultimate ends shaped meanings of secular politics. Ultimate ends have been ritualized in practices of the modern state and the modern self, making the return of religion an inherent pillar of political modernity. Finally, the politics of transcendence must go beyond the friend–enemy distinction by incorporating the potentiality of forms of nonviolent political action, where the ends are superior to the means.

Spells of the sacred in a global age

This article argues that quests for sacrality are creative forces in the formation of collective identities in the global age. Shifting the vantage point towards extraordinary politics of liminal globality, the first part captures borderline experiences where political reality is broken and markers of certainty dissolve. Taking the lead from mimetic theory, the second part looks at the ambivalent sources of the sacred. Symbols of peace, reconciliation and order originate in violence. The third part illustrates varieties of the global sacred by looking at the democratic imagination and the politics of humanitarian reason. Finally, the constitutive role of the sacred is examined for the background of cultural frames and with a view to the unconscious and non-agentive drivers of global processes. Rather than a fundamentalist remainder in a secular world or a foundational principle, the sacred is a transitional and processual reality that performs a hinge function that balances the fragility of political reality.

Reviews: Featured Title

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The Continuity of the Image of Solidarity

While many volumes have been written about the trade union Solidarity, two central themes have guided research on this topic. They either deal with Solidarity’s unity or with its splitting apart.1 Before December 1981 the contrast between us (Solidarity/society) and them (the communist state) had been constitutive. Despite the complex political situation, the one-dimensionality of Solidarity’s self-image in 1980 and 1981 took into account only two forces: ‘us ‘and ‘them’ (Staniszkis, 1984:145–6). In order to highlight the refusal of the communist regime, and inspired by experiences of the Gdansk community (Kubik, 1994a), unity became the catchword after the August strikes of 1980 had finished. Against currents that favoured a decentralized union organization, a unified Solidarity with its core in Gdansk became essential to streng then Solidarity’s collective identity (Ost, 1990:101–2). To a large extent, it was the claim of total representation of society against and outside the communist system that sustained Solidarity’s unity before the proclamation of martial law.

The Continuity of Transition

Two assumptions about the significance of the year 1989 for Poland’s political future have guided scholars. The first holds that Poland’s transition from state socialism was initiated in 1989 by consensual elites, and thus amounted to a revolution from above (Staniszkis, 1991a; Osiatynski, 1996; Higley et al. 1998). The second assumption suggests that neither the state power nor Solidarity were weak (Ekiert, 1996; Poznanski, 1992). ‘In 1989, the regime of Jaruzelski was not particularly weak, and there were no signs of rapid demoralization of army or policy. There was also no evidence of unusual lack of order, with people feeling afraid for their lives or property … power was taken over by the opposition through negotiations or rather handed over to them by the Communist party.’1 Ekiert’s argument holds that demobilization policies pursued by the communist regime failed because of Solidarity’s particular strength, which was not fundamentally affected by martial law and the underground period (Ekiert, 1996:286–9).

The Continuity of Second Reality

This book deals with continuities in Poland’s transition. A book on continuities may be a surprise to the reader familiar with the social science literature on Eastern Europe. Politics and societies in Eastern Europe are nowadays primarily associated with political and social change on a broad scale. The strong impact of change is reflected in different domains of the social science literature. Accordingly, the demise of the communist system has induced research on conceptual alternatives for a new system (Hankiss, 1990; Beyme, 1993; Merkel, 1994; Offe, 1997; Holmes, 1997a). The emergence of individual autonomy and the liberation from a closed system have stimulated works on civil and open society (Keane, 1988; Ash, 1990; Dahrendorf, 1990; Ekiert, 1994; Gellner, 1994). Changes in the regime of Eastern Europe became a major and controversial study of object of transitology and its sub-discipline, consolidology (Linz and Stepan, 1996b; Schmitter and Karl, 1994, 1995; Offe, 1996; 1997; Elster et al., 1998; Holmes, 1997b). In this vein, scholars were recommended to shift their thinking ‘from the heady excitement and underdetermination of the transition from autocracy (…) to the prosaic routine and overdetermination of consolidated democracy’.1

The Continuity of the Image of the West

The image of the West was frequently evoked both in pre- and post-1989 Poland. Unsettled by recurrent crises, Poland had to ‘turn towards the West, because otherwise a complete catastrophe menaced’.1 The jump to the market economy was induced by the ‘economic spirit’ that wanted a ‘return to Europe’.2 A standard definition of the image of the West is based on two main constituents. The first is the emergence of the co-existence of three logics: capitalism, industrialization, and democracy (Feher, 1995:56–8). These logics are conceived as dynamic on the basis of distinct institutions and institutional networks which presuppose a relatively independent learning process in each case. These logics are more or less independent. The second constituent is supposed to be the West’s inherent universalizing project. Western ideology and the social organization implicit in its project managed to learn and assimilate the competing civilization in the East, while retaining its identity and claim to superiority.