WARSAW – On being designated prime minister of Poland last December, Mateusz Morawiecki made the extraordinary statement that he and his government want to "transform [the European Union], to re-Christianize it."
Struck by this grand vision of Poland's destiny, and particularly interested in the near-total ban on Muslim migrants (Morawiecki again: "we will not accept migrants from the Middle East and North Africa in Poland"), I just spent a week in Warsaw to understand why that country differs so sharply from Western Europe and what this implies.
I found a raging debate over the country's civilizationist (usually and inaccurately known as "far-right") party, called Law and Justice (PiS, pronounced peace). More precisely, Poles disagree on: Did PiS foment or respond to anti-Muslim feelings?
 The leading Polish nobleman Stanislaw Szczuka (1654-1710), in a Sarmatian outfit. |
In this interpretation, PiS and compliant media raised the specter of violence and other tensions concerning Muslims in Western Europe, scaring sufficient numbers of Poles that it could form the first single-party government of the post-Communist era. Critics argue that PiS demagoguery debases and endangers Polish democracy while undermining the European Union.
PiS supporters reverse this account. In their telling, a steady diet of news from Western Europe of jihadi violence, taharrush, "grooming" gangs, honor killings, female genital mutilation, criminal activity, welfare fraud, and cultural aggression prompted a demand from below for the party to adopt an anti-immigration and -Islamization platform. The Merkel Tsunami of 2015-16, with its million-plus Muslims walking through Europe, frightened Poles. Accordingly, some 75 percent of them reject Muslim immigration. So, even if PiS' main rival reaches power, they note, the Muslim ban will stay.
Of these two interpretations, I find the second far more convincing. PiS is no more responsible for the fears of immigration and Islamization than Europe's other civilizationist parties, such as Austria's Freedom Party or Italy's League. They all respond to a growing unease, mainly from the bottom of the socio-economic spectrum. They represent Europeans who fear for their civilization.
That said, there is much to criticize about PiS. It lavishes money on welfare payments the government cannot afford and has adopted the idea of "dependent market economies" from the anti-capitalist economic theorist Thomas Piketty. In a surprising nod to the Communist past, PiS wants to make the state more powerful, for example, by taking control of the judiciary. It engages in conspiracy theories (especially about the airplane disaster in Smolensk in April 2010). It sponsored the idiotic law that would land someone in jail for referring to "Polish death camps" then made things worse by talking about "Jewish perpetrators" of the Holocaust. (Though, under international pressure, it did back track last week on the threat of prison.)
Noting these problems, I maintain that the party should be educated and monitored, not demonized, so it can learn from its errors while protecting the country from the potentially existential threat of Islam's intrinsic drive for power.
Why have Poles responded so differently from Western Europeans to Muslim migration? The homogeneity of the country and its precarious history (it disappeared from the map for over a century) are both factors but what I found decisive was Poles coming late to the game, seeing the massive errors of their western neighbors, and resolving not to repeat those.
 No Sarmatians here: Pictures, such as this one from 2015, are what most changed Polish opinion. Note the near-absence of women and children. |
What are the long-term implications of excluding Muslim migrants? That Poland avoids Western Europe's looming crisis. As countries, starting with Italy, try to control their borders and expel illegal migrants, tension, insurrection, and violence will follow. In contrast, Poland (and its former Soviet-bloc neighbors) will sit out that crisis and may take in expatriates from Western Europe.
Though those expatriates head primarily to Australia, Canada, and the United States, Poland might soon – given its proximity, personal security, and inexpensive cost-of-living – become an attractive destination, especially for pensioners and for Jews, singled out as targets in Europe's West but increasingly safe in Poland.
So, while the EU won't be re-Christianized anytime soon, neither will Poland be Islamized.
Mr. Pipes (DanielPipes.org, @DanielPipes) is president of the Middle East Forum. © 2018 by Daniel Pipes. All rights reserved.
 Washington Times illustration for this article. |
July 10, 2018 update: I wrote above that Poland's PiS party "should be educated and monitored, not demonized." Ivan Krastev makes this point in greater detail today:
in the same way European liberal democracies in 1970s and 1980s succeed at deradicalizing the far-left and integrating some of its legitimate demands in the mainstream, it should do the same with the far-right. People who today are scared by some of the radical ideas coming from the far-right should remember that many centrists of the 1970s regarded Germany's anti-establishment leftists such as Joschka Fischer — later to become Germany's foreign minister — as a threat to the capitalist, democratic West.
July 20, 2018 update: Filip Mazurczak elaborates in "Poland's Christian Migrants" on a point I made in passing above:
In 2016, according to Eurostat, Poland issued 586,000 first residence permits to nationals of non–European Union countries. Poland issued more such permits that year than did any other EU member-state except Britain—and more than Germany (505,000), which has more than double Poland's population. The vast majority of these non-EU migrants have come from the former Soviet Union, especially from Ukraine.
Indeed, with its low birthrate, Poland is looking to Ukraine to bolster its population. Of course, Ukrainians are linguistically, culturally, and racially similar to Poles, so that's an easy fit. More interesting is that the Polish government is also
negotiating with the Philippine government a bilateral agreement that would bring to Poland thousands of immigrants, who would work above all as caretakers for elderly persons. Like migrants from the former Soviet Union, Filipinos hold many of the same cultural values as Poles. Eighty percent of Filipinos are Catholic, and, like the Poles, Filipinos have a long history of fighting against subjugation by foreign powers. Filipino migrants have assimilated rapidly in countries as diverse as the United States, Italy, Israel, and the United Arab Emirates. Stateside, they are often referred to as an "invisible minority."
Those last two words – "invisible minority" – are the key. If there is any migrant population that is visible, that would be the Muslim one.
