Constitutions, Elections and Legislatures of Poland, 1493-1993: A Guide to Their History, by Jacek Jędruch
(For professors, college students, and interested adults.) The paragraphs below are taken from the Foreword written by Norman Davies, one of the world’s most respected historians noted for his publications on the history of Europe, Poland, and the United Kingdom.
“In the English-speaking world, it is absolutely natural that England’s parliamentary history should hold pride of place. After all, it was the English parliamentary tradition which bred the family of democracies that now stretches across the globe, not just from the United Kingdom to the USA, but also to Canada, Australia and New Zealand, to India, and to many other Commonwealth countries.”
“Nonetheless, one must equally recognize that the English-speaking world has often been unaware of parliamentary traditions other than their own.”
“One suspects that it will be complete news to hear that Poland of all places had established the principle of Habeas corpus nearly three centuries before England and had accepted the idea of ‘No taxation without representation” long before England’s American colonies had even been founded.”
“It is in this connection that Jacek Jędruch’s study of Polish constitutionalism can render a signal service. It is a very thorough and systematic survey of a long, complex, and interesting subject that has been sidelined too often.”
“First, Jędruch documents the development and evolution of his subject over five hundred years. In this way, he shows that Polish constitutionalism’s period of catastrophic decline in the eighteenth century, which was ridiculed by the philosophes of the Enlightenment and which is the only a piece of the story to figure in history books, forms one short stage in a much longer process. The Liberum Veto, which was greatly abused, was not necessarily half so stupid as Voltaire and others would have us believe. While recognizing the failures and imperfections, one can only see the whole picture if one also takes into consideration both the ‘Golden Age’ of the sixteenth century and the remarkable series of adaptations to adversity and foreign rule in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was Jefferson, I think, who complained about people looking on the constitution as on ‘arks of the covenant, too sacred to be touched.’ Jefferson knew instinctively that a constitutional tradition is a living organism, which must change and grow if it is to survive. The important thing about it is the way it develops dynamically over time. The Polish case is no exception, having developed dynamically over a very long time indeed.
Second, Jędruch demonstrates the extraordinary diversity of the Polish constitutional tradition in a wide variety of places and historical situations. Unlike many Polish commentators, he does not confine his attention to the Seym or Parliament of the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, to the famous and glorious but ineffective Constitution of 1791, or to the affairs of the interwar republic between 1918 and 1939. In the pre-partition period, he explores the workings of the provincial assemblies, of the self-governing cities, of the so-called ‘confederations’ with their astonishing right of legalized rebellion, and of the far-reaching autonomy granted to Poland’s large Jewish community. In the period of the Partitions, when most people might assume that Polish constitutionalism was completely abolished by the autocratic rule of Russia, Prussia, and Austria, he shows how it repeatedly re-emerged in new forms and new locations in Napolean’s Duchy of Warsaw, in the Tsar’s ‘Congress Kingdom,’ in the Prussian Duchy of Poznań, and in the Austrian Kingdom of Galicia. In the twentieth century, he traces the long struggle against the authoritarian tendencies of the interwar Sanacja Regime, against the murderous onslaught of totalitarianism, and in the most recent phase after 1989, against the stubborn legacy of Communism.
I think it particularly welcome that Jędruch should have included a section on the Polish People’s Republic as part of the overall sequence. He aptly calls it ‘Making the Best of Stalin’s Worst.’ It is a tale worth telling, if only as a foil for what went before and what is coming after. Of course, and competent scholar would know that the Soviet-style, Communist structures which were imposed after 1945 were incompatible with everything associated with terms such as ‘constitution,’ ‘law,’ parliament,’ ‘election’, or ‘democracy.’ On the other hand, the dictatorship of the Communist Party, and of the Soviet comrades over their Polish underlings, was exercised behind a face of state institutions which used democratic-sounding slogans and which often misled the naiver sort of western political scientist. Without a knowledge of communist usage, it was easy to be deceived. The People’s Republic did possess a handsome constitution. It impressed all those who did not realize that the clause about the Communist Party’s ‘leading role’ rendered all its other clauses inoperative. There was a law of sort, but a sort that was totally dependent on political convenience. There was a Seym or parliament. It was a legislature which proposed, debated, and passed laws in a framework that was completely subordinate to the organs of Party control. There were popular elections at every level. But they were elections in which there was no real element of choice since the party pre-elected all candidates. There was widespread lip service to democracy, ‘the rule of the people.’ In reality, the people were systematically excluded from power. As the Polish saying went, genuine democracy bore the same resemblance to the ‘socialist democracy’ of the People’s Republic that a ‘chair’ bears to an ‘electric chair.’
Of course, one had to laugh. Yet as long as Communist dictatorship lasted, it was no joke. It was ruinous as it was oppressive. What is more, it deliberately distorted all that was best and most valued in the nation’s collective memory. Its baleful legacy will not be overcome in a day.
Like any historian, I have found many elements in Mr. Jędruch’s study that I would like to query and debate. But such questioning lies in the very nature of historical inquiry. The author has provided a fine exposé, amply supported with biographical portraits and textual appendices, which will permit his important subject to be far more widely questioned and debated than previously. We are in his debt.”
Norman Davies
Oxford, 1997
