D6.16 Policy Recommendations Reports

Strengthening European integration through the analysis of conflict discourses Revisiting the Past, Anticipating the Future

9 November 2020

RePAST Deliverable D6.16

Policy Recommendations for

Tomasz Rawski & Katarzyna Bojarska Widok Foundation

This project has received funding from the ’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 769252

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D6.16 Policy Recommendations Reports

Project information Grant agreement no: 769252 Acronym: RePAST Title: Strengthening European integration through the analysis of conflict discourses: revisiting the past, anticipating the future Start date: May 2018 Duration: 36 months (+ extension of 6 months) Website: www.repast.eu

Deliverable information Deliverable number and name: D6.16 Policy recommendations reports for each of the countries (8) and the EU in general (1) for addressing the troubled past(s) Work Package: WP6 Dissemination, Innovation and Policy Recommendations / WP6.6 Developing Policy Recommendations (Activity 6.6.1 Developing roadmaps for the countries and the EU to address the issues arising from the troubled past(s) Lead Beneficiary: VeCo/UL Version: 2.0 Authors: Tomasz Rawski, Katarzyna Bojarska Submission due month: October 2020 Actual submission date: 9 November 2020 Dissemination level: Public Status: Submitted

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D6.16 Policy Recommendations Reports

Document history Version Date Author(s) / Organisation Status Description Distribution Tomasz Rawski, Katarzyna First draft for 1.1 21/07/2020 1st draft Internal Bojarska (Widok) internal review Second draft, ready Email for submission to the communicatio Tomasz Rawski, Katarzyna 1.2 26/08/2020 2nd draft EU and Polish policy- n to policy- Bojarska (Widok) makers and makers and stakeholders stakeholders Third draft, revised in accordance with Tomasz Rawski, Katarzyna the inputs of six EU 1.3 14/10/2020 3rd draft Internal Bojarska (Widok) and Polish policy- makers and stakeholders Fourth draft ready Tomasz Rawski, Katarzyna for peer-review of RePAST cloud 1.4 29/10/2020 4th draft Bojarska (Widok) the RePAST folder consortium Final document, Submitted to revised in line with Tomasz Rawski, Katarzyna EU 2.0 Final the RePAST Bojarska (Widok) Participants consortium Portal comments

Peer reviewed by:

Partner/Body Reviewer RePAST Consortium Anke Fiedler, LMU

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D6.16 Policy Recommendations Reports Table of Contents

1. Introduction 5 2. Methodology 5 3. The EU’s approach to the troubled past in Poland 6 4. Proposing strategies for mitigating the challenges arising from the troubled past: policy recommendations 8 4.1. Media 9 4.2. History 11 4.3. Politics 13 4.4. Arts and culture 14 5. Conclusions 16 References 17

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D6.16 Policy Recommendations Reports 1. Introduction Before World War II about one-third of the population of Poland were members of national, ethnic and religious minorities, including Ukrainians, Jews, Belarusians, and Germans. However, as a result of the Nazi and Soviet invasion of Poland, (when about 90% of Polish Jews were exterminated), the expulsion of Germans and the resettlement of Ukrainians, the post-1945 Poland became an ethnically homogeneous nation- state. It is estimated that about 5.7 million Polish citizens died as a result of the German occupation and about 150,000 Polish citizens died as a result of the Soviet occupation. In the aftermath of the war Poland was a state of reduced sovereignty. The communist Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR) gained firm control over domestic politics, which nonetheless remained under the Soviet influence. In the period 1945-1989, the country’s memory politics was fully dependent on the narrative dictated by the state and influenced by the pro- Soviet optics. However, the collective memory, the acts of oppositional memory, and oppositional commemorative acts recurred in this period and re-emerged in the early 1990s. This is when many troubled past issues entered public sphere from various vantage points and in various ways including the Holocaust, the Roma , forced sexual labour of women and rape as a war crime, the Polish-Ukrainian conflicts, the Polish anti-Semitism and the role of Poles in the Nazi genocide, the participation of Poles in the communist regime, the participation in Poles in oppositional movement against the regime. These and many other elements of the troubled Polish past have been used and abused in public debates, i.e. addressed by the politicians, by cultural and artistic institutions, writers and artists, NGOs and academics. Although in post-1989 Poland this conversation has been multidimensional, two dominant competing trends/narratives can be distinguished: the so-called “pedagogy of shame” vs. the so-called “patriotic pride.” The former one is associated with European integration, modernisation, emancipation and equality within the EU, where Poland features a partner who has worked through its historical traumas, recompensated for the guilts. etc. It was called the pedagogy of shame by the right-wing historians. The latter one is associated with nationalistic, catholic, conservative and anti-European positions. The discourse of pride counters the discourse of guilt and shame by refusing to acknowledge the collective entanglement and, at times, complicity of Poles in the war and post-war crimes, in the wrongdoings against the minorities. It focuses mostly on stressing the victimhood of the Polish nation. In the RePAST research project, we have revisited some of the episodes from the Polish troubled past and analysed their effects in the present. Precisely speaking, we investigated the troubled past, as it appears in four different domains: i) history; b) politics; c) media; d) arts and culture. In this deliverable, which is one of the final outputs of the project, we thus build on the insights gained so far as a result of a multi-method research design employed by the RePAST project. Based on our research in Poland, and in line with the RePAST instructions for WP6.6 set by the University of Ljubljana (in agreement with the consortium) in early 2020, this document outlines the policy recommendations (a country-specific roadmap) for Poland to deal with its troubled past. This document is structured as follows. In Chapter 2, we explain our methodological approach regarding this task, e.g. we: (a) describe the rules of interviewee selection; (b) elaborate on the main factor that influenced the selection process (COVID-19 pandemic); (c) list the names of the interviewees who gave their feedback to us. In Chapter 3, we reconstruct the EU’s approach to the troubled past in post-1989 Poland, divided into four main periods. In Chapter 4, which constitutes the main part of this document, we propose policy recommendations for each of the areas covered by RePAST, i.e.: (i) media; (ii) history; (iii) politics; (iv) arts & culture. Finally, we close our recommendations with concise conclusions.

2. Methodology The first version of the policy recommendations, based on the initial results of RePAST research regarding Poland, was ready in late spring 2020. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, all interviews with the policy-

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D6.16 Policy Recommendations Reports makers and stakeholders were conducted a little later, in and September 2020. We decided to wait out the period of greatest pandemic social chaos and tension, and turn to our interviewees during the period of partial normalisation. As shown by the quite high response rate (~50%), this was a good decision which provided us with a valuable input from the interviewees. Importantly, due to COVID-19 pandemic all interviews were conducted online, via videoconferencing ( Meet). In our interviewee selection process, we were guided by the principle of equal representation of experts from national and EU-levels. We also ensured a proportionate representation of the two main expert groups, i.e. policy-makers and stakeholders. More precisely, at the EU-level we focused on inviting policy-makers, i.e. people who are best informed about what European policies towards the troubled past are at the same time most needed and most feasible. In turn, at national-level we gave the floor primarily to stakeholders who represented think-tanks and public institutions, and are critically oriented towards the policies of the current right-wing government in Poland. In this way we attempted at providing the widest possible response to our recommendations. Eventually, the following interviewees provided their feedback to the first version of the document: 1. (EU-level) Włodzimierz Cimoszewicz – a Polish center-left MEP (2019-2024); the former Prime Minister of Poland (1996-1997) and Foreign Minister of Poland (2001–2005). 2. (EU-level) Danuta Hubner – a Polish center-right MEP (2019-2024); the former European Commissioner for Regional (2004-2009); a member of the International Honorary Council of the European Academy of Diplomacy (since 2012). 3. (EU-level) Michał Boni – a Polish center-right MEP (2014-2019); the former Minister of Administration and Digitization of Poland (2011-2013). 4. (national-level) Bartosz Machalica – a historian and political scientist; the co-founder of the Ignacy Daszyński Centre think-tank, an institution focused, among other things, on cultivating the memory of the achievements of Polish social . 5. (national-level) Katarzyna Wielga-Skolimowska – the former director of the Polish Cultural Institute in , at present the Director of the Goethe Institute in Saudi Arabia. 6. (national-level) Paweł Machcewicz – a Polish historian and university professor; the former president of the Bureau of Public Education at the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN; 2000-2006) and the director of the Museum of the Second World War in Gdansk (2008-2017).

After receiving comments from the interviewees, we revised the first version of policy recommendations and came up with this (final) version of the document.

3. The EU’s approach to the troubled past in Poland The EU approach to the troubled past in post-1989 Poland is worth seeing as part of a broader EU approach to troubled past in Central Eastern Europe (CEE). In the case of Poland, this trend can be divided into four main phases, of which the third one is the most significant. These phases are: (1) the 1990s (until Poland joined NATO); (2) the period 2000-2004 (until Poland joined the EU); (3) the period 2005-2015 (until the right wing Law and Justice, PiS, took power in Poland); (4) the post-2015 period (until today). Regarding (1), i.e. the 1990s (until Poland joined NATO); During this period memory politics in the EU and Poland largely did not go hand in hand. On the one hand, at the EU level, the turn of the 1980s and 1990s marked the emergence of a direction for building a common, Europe-wide historical narrative with WW2 and the Holocaust as key elements (Berger 2010: 134). This strategy, developed throughout the 1990s, assumed that it was possible to build a sense of Europeanness based on a consensus on what were the common elements of European culture and history. On the other hand, the main trend in Poland at that time was the new cleansing of the past (Karge 2010: 139) after the period of communism, marked by a complete turn away from Communist memory politics in favour of a return to the tradition of national martyrdom and national uprisings interpreted

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D6.16 Policy Recommendations Reports according to the following scheme: victim /the Polish nation/ – executioner /foreign invader/ – local collaborator /to the foreign invader/ (Ochman 2013: 1-3). For Polish memory politics regarding WW2 and the Communist past, this meant adopting a perspective in which the Polish nation appeared as a double victim – of on the one hand and of Communism on the other. In short, while in the 1990s EU-level political actors were looking for what was common, supra-national, in Poland the focus was on appreciating what was particular, national. This also meant pushing into the distant plan such problems as Jewish victimhood during the Holocaust, the role of Poles in the Holocaust, or the role of Poles in the installation of communism. Although such problems were episodically addressed and tackled both by some liberal-left politicians and academics, no systematic policies were implemented.

Regarding (2), i.e. the period 2000-2004 (until Poland joined the EU): This period should be considered as a transition phase between (1) and (3), marked by the EU's early efforts to Europeanise Poland's past by promoting key values such as openness, tolerance, human rights, minority rights, plurality of historical perspectives. On the one hand, these efforts found some allies among the prominent Polish political forces, such as the post- communist Democratic Left Alliance party (SLD), which saw liberal Euro-integration as a way to modernise Poland and ‘return’ it to Europe. On the other hand, these efforts meant a certain alienation of prominent right- wing parties (e.g. the coalition Solidarity Electoral Action, AWS), which, although not explicitly Eurosceptic, considered the EU's cultural efforts as a threat to Polish national culture (Wagner 2003: 200). As a result, after 2000, a fundamental conflict emerged in Polish memory politics between the pro-EU liberal perspective and the right-wing perspective focused on forcing a martyrological-heroic narrative about the great Polish past (Ochman 2013: 5, Wagner 2003: 191). A good example of an event during which this conflict was very strongly articulated and polarized is the 2001 case of Jedwabne pogrom, i.e. a massacre of Polish Jews by the local inhabitants of the town of Jedwabne on 10 July 1941, which coincided with the EU policy of cementing the key significance of the Holocaust for European memory (Clarke 2014: 5). The Jedwabne case was sparked by the book 'Neighbours' written by US-based Polish historian Jan Tomasz Gross.

Regarding (3), i.e. the period 2005-2015 (until the right-wing Law and Justice, PiS, took power in Poland). This period is marked by an EU-approach aimed at complementing the European historical narrative with the experience of CEE, and Poland has become one of the main vehicles of this experience (Malskoo 2009: 662). In general, CEE (Polish) political actors at the EU-level were primarily concerned with levelling out the disparities in the European narrative, where the experience of the Nazi Past was considered much more significant and was more commemorated than the experience of the Communist Past. The resultant of this openness of the 'old-EU states' to the CEE perspective and the determination of the 'new-EU states' to shape it by focusing primarily on the Communist past was the common course to promote and legitimize the narrative of two (Ghodsee 2014) that afflicted Europe in the 20th century: the Nazi and the Communist one, the narrative where the memory of the Holocaust would occupy a special place. CEE (Polish) efforts at the EU-level seemed to go in two directions. On the one hand, there were efforts, as Laure Neumayer (2018: 229) put it, to criminalize communism, i.e. to build a "Europe-wide narrative of indictment of Communism, which makes the criminality the essence of the communist ideology and of the Socialist regimes across all national contexts and historical periods". Key milestones in this respect have been achieved between 2008 and 2011. Precisely speaking, in 2008, The MPs signed or adopted two key resolutions setting this commemorative direction: The on European Conscience and Communism1, initiated by the Czech government and Vaclav Havel, that equated the crimes of and Communism was signed by several dozen MPs on 3 July, and on 23 September the EP adopted the proclamation on European Day of Remembrance for Victims of and Nazism (the )2 that was set

1 See more: https://www.praguedeclaration.eu/ (Accessed 14 July 2020). 2 See more: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//TEXT+TA+P6-TA-2008- 0439+0+DOC+XML+V0//EN (Accessed 14 July 2020). 7 / 19

D6.16 Policy Recommendations Reports on , i.e. the anniversary of the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. In subsequent years, Poland was the leading CEE exhibitor of this perspective. This can be seen, for example, in the statements of , then President of the European Parliament, who, on the 2010 Black Ribbon Day, described the Molotov Ribbentrop Pact as "the collusion of the two worst forms of in the history of humanity" (Buzek 2010). This can also be seen in the activities of the Polish government during the Polish Presidency of the EU, such as the 2011 conference on the occasion of the Black Ribbon Day, during which The was adopted, which proclaimed that crimes of totalitarian regimes in Europe should be condemned from whatever ideological background3. On the other hand, Poland remained aloof from the EU-led trend of emphasizing the pan-European dimension of the Allied victory over fascism in WW2 (8 May 1945). The emergence of this EU-led trend was made possible thanks to 's unambiguous joining the European memory project at the turn of the 1990s and 2000s (Korzeniewski 2011: 94). Poland was sceptical about the spread of this trend from the beginning, which should date back to 2005, when two events commemorating the 60th anniversary of the end of WW2 took place, i.e. the V-Day: the pan-European anniversary celebration in Moscow hosted by (9 May) and the anniversary resolution of the European Parliament4 (12 May). Polish representatives took part in the parade in Moscow mainly in order to emphasize the differences between victorious narrative developed by Russia and ‘old-EU states’ and narrative of complex CEE experience (Malksoo 2009: 664), while the anniversary resolution adopted by the Polish Parliament had an anti-fascist and anti-communist overtones at the same time (Rawski 2019: 925). This discrepancy existed also in subsequent years. It was supported at the national level by the increasingly powerful right-wing memory politics which was launched with the opening of the Warsaw Uprising Museum in 2004 and tested during the 2005-2007 first term of office of the Law and Justice party (PiS). In the case of the Holocaust commemorations, the EU-led trend has consistently sought to articulate the key importance of its universalist interpretation, i.e. presenting the Nazi genocide against the Jews as a unique tragedy in human history, as part of ‘two totalitarianisms’ narrative. This interpretation was anchored in International Holocaust Remembrance Day (27 January), which is evidenced e.g. by statements made by EU officials in 2005 (Berger 2010: 134; Clarke 2014: 7); 2007 proposal to criminalise the Holocaust denial made by the German EU Presidency (Traynor 2007) or the 2012 Seventy Years Declaration on the Anniversary of the Final Solution Conference at Wannsee, signed by 70 EP MPS, that condemned attempts to diminish the unique, global significance of the Holocaust5. Polish officials participated in this trend but at the same time were preoccupied with an internal conflict over the Polish nation's complicity in the Holocaust, that sparked – as mentioned above – in 2001 and consistently returned in subsequent years without coming to a solution. Regarding (4), i.e. the post-2015 period (until today), the existing analyses of this period focus primarily on showing Polish, national-level, memory politics as a soft-power tool of a broader policy of dismantling the rule of law in Poland in the form of commemorative law-making (Bucholc 2019) aimed at ensuring legitimacy and consolidation of the illiberal democracy (Agh 2016). The EU approach to this still requires in-depth research.

4. Proposing strategies for mitigating the challenges arising from the troubled past: policy recommendations

The following strategic proposals are guided by two main goals. The short-term goal is to push back the increasingly entrenched positions of the right-wing Polish government that, in memory politics, promotes a strongly identity-oriented, nationalist narrative regarding the troubled Polish past. The long-term goal is to

3 See more: http://www.memoryandconscience.eu/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/warsaw_declaration.pdf (Accessed 14 July 2020). 4 See more: https://op.europa.eu/pl/publication-detail/-/publication/2f5f36d1-541f-4b46-95b9-09e78d7683af/language-mt (Accessed 14 July 2020). 5 See more: http://defendinghistory.com/70-years-declaration/29230 (Accessed 14 July 2020). 8 / 19

D6.16 Policy Recommendations Reports promote such ways to deal with the troubled Polish past that would foster a wider, firm shift in Polish mainstream memory towards liberal-left positions that are based on the central tropes connected to modernization and the pragmatic belief that further European integration is a good way to eventually overcome troubled past issues.

4.1. Media Here, the recommendations include suggested ways of counteracting key negative trends on the Polish media scene regarding troubled past (WW2 and Communist Past). The origins of these trends can be traced back to the 1990s, its emergence in public sphere should be dated for ~2005 and its intensification for 2010. They are, as follows: (1) growing polarisation of the media scene into two conflicted camps: liberal-left mainstream media and right-wing/nationalist challengers; this polarization largely facilitates the development of the following two trends; (2) increasing politicisation of the media scene, especially Governmental politicisation of some right- wing/nationalist media; (3) increasing change in optics towards troubled past among mainstream outlets from idealism to pragmatism. Furthermore, another stable negative trend was identified: (4) consistent lack of gender perspective on troubled past, on the whole media scene. Regarding (1), polarization could be countered especially by supporting those liberal-left mainstream (and non- mainstream) outlets/journalists that/who are oriented towards: (a) building and articulating complex interpretations of the Communist past in Poland. These are interpretations that shift the emphasis from the plane of political conflict towards the dynamics of social, cultural and economic life in this period, i.e. processes that had both negative and positive consequences from the point of view of people's everyday life. Strengthening such interpretations and ensuring their long-term presence in the public space would allow to: (‘) break the current domination of an extremely simplistic right-wing anti-communist narrative, which has been negatively assessed by most interviewed mainstream journalists and focus group respondents as both untrue and easily factionalised for current political purposes. (‘’) articulate past conflicts from that period in families, which today remain a silenced part of family histories to such an extent that it is difficult even to determine their impact on contemporary family relationships and the political divisions among their members. (b) maintaining a pro-European perspective on WW2 and the Holocaust. Two issues seem to be most important here. (‘) Firstly, maintaining strong position of the universalist interpretation of the Holocaust (as the globally exceptional crime in the history of mankind), symbolically anchored to the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, by extending the existing perspective focused mainly on suffering of innocent Jewish victims, with the perspective of witnesses and bystanders of the genocide. In this way, it would be possible to counteract in particular the visible increase in the number of sceptics among centre-right mainstream journalists, who tend to partially undermine this interpretation, being too much inspired by right-wing/nationalist narrative, according to which the universalist interpretation of the Holocaust is essentially particularistic, i.e. pro-Israeli and anti-Polish. (‘’) Secondly, strengthening the symbolic significance of pro-European V-Day commemorations, which in Poland definitely lost its importance after 2004, in spite of the fact that during the 1990s productive debates around it continued. Strengthening the V-Day could allow, in particular, to counteract right- wing attempts to blur the symbolic boundary between war and communism. Such attempts serve the

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D6.16 Policy Recommendations Reports right-wing radicals to build a narrative about Polish nation continuously persecuted by external forces from 1939 to 1989(2015). Regarding (2). As for the media scene in general, interviewed journalists unanimously reported that the deterioration of the journalistic job market over the past 15 years meant the devaluation of the profession, and one of its main consequences was the decline of journalistic independence. The point was that journalists are increasingly ceasing to be spokespersons for public affairs, becoming exponents of opinions favourable to various interest groups. Therefore, one way to strengthen journalistic independence would be to support the stability of employment in the journalistic profession, especially in private mainstream media. As for the Governmental politicisation of the right-wing outlets, this can be countered by putting pressure on modifying legal regulations regarding money flows between the state budget and media outlets. Regarding public media, currently the most important thing is to regulate the issue of the Act on RTV license fee, which is the primary source of abuse of public media financing by the right-wing government. Although in Poland the license fee is the main source of financing for public media, which should make them independent of the direct influence of the ruling parties, after 2015 the right-wing government introduced an additional stream of financing flowing directly from the state budget, which significantly disrupted this independence. Regarding private media, it seems crucial to regulate the issue of their budgetary co-financing through advertising fees paid by state-owned companies. The right-wing government uses this tool to co-finance its adherents among far-right media outlets. This can be countered, e.g. by supporting the introduction of the ‘principle of maximum diversity’, according to which state-owned companies would have to advertise themselves in maximally diverse media outlets and would be placed under restrictions regarding maximum amounts of money that could be spent on advertising fees in one outlet. Regarding (3), this turn from idealism to pragmatism is essentially a turn from a vision of Europe as a community of pan-European values to Europe as a conglomerate of national interests. This was largely reflected in the opinions of focus group and oral history respondents, who perceived the European Union and Europeanness primarily in pragmatic terms, paying less attention to common values. Since this trend seems to be already quite strongly embedded in public opinion, counteracting it should not simply seek to stop and reverse it. Instead, it would be desirable to support such narratives and attitudes to troubled past in which common values would be linked to their pragmatic justifications/rationale. This could effectively weaken the dominant right- wing/nationalist optics, which in recent years has challenged, for example, the universalist interpretation of the Holocaust not only from an idealistic-moral perspective (i.e. by claiming that the Polish nation maintained moral purity in WW2, so Poles cannot be considered complicit in the Holocaust), but also from an economic perspective (i.e. by claiming that the focus on Jewish victimhood in the Holocaust is a symbolic justification for the allegedly real property claims of the contemporary Jewish community against the Polish state). Strengthening the link between idealism and pragmatism would help to consolidate the pro-European position by referring to the deep roots of the EU, as a community founded on both common values and interests. Regarding (4), male dominance should be counteracted in both aspects: among journalists themselves and in the media discourse about troubled past. In the first case, journalistic awareness of the reasons for this dominance should be strengthened by providing them with professional knowledge about its socio-cultural mechanisms. Although basically all interviewed mainstream journalists noticed the very existence of male dominance in their profession – both in terms of numerical disparities between men and women and the presence of women in discourse about the past – very few of them were able to diagnose why this was the case. In the second case, it is desirable to provide support for developing such interpretations of the troubled WW2 and Communist past that take into account active role of women as subjects of history, i.e. that show both their momentous contributions to historical breakthrough moments (e.g. the emergence of the "Solidarity "movement in 1980) as well as their major impact on everyday social life. As FGI respondents pointed out, counteracting

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D6.16 Policy Recommendations Reports male domination would be about displaying and de-stereotyping women at the same time, i.e. showing them as significant historical actors in other roles than those envisaged by a conservative discourse that shows them at most as caring mothers, innocent victims, etc.

4.2. History Here, the policy recommendations cover three main areas: (1) the role of academic historians and public research institutions dealing with troubled past; (2) the relationship between the academic and public spheres; (3) history teaching in schools.

Regarding (1), it is desirable to counteract the emergence of political divisions in the academic historians’ circles, which are deepening as a result of the increasingly intense attempts of Governmental politicization of historical science regarding WW2 and Communist past. Although here the divisions are smaller than those inside the journalist community, they are still deep enough to be visible even to non-historians. This can be done in several ways: (a) by supporting the reform of a key, non-academic public research institution dealing with the history of WW2 and Communist past, i.e. the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), which was established in 1998 on the political initiative of the then ruling right to settle the crimes of the Communist period and remains to this day an institution operating between academia and politics. (') On the one hand, it is desirable to support the opposition to Governmental attempts to make the IPN a tool of political struggle – as was the case with the attempt to amend the Act on the IPN in January 2018, which was eventually ‘softened’ by the right-wing government thanks to combined pressure from Polish and international opinion-makers. The efforts aimed at de-politicizing the IPN – i.e. at closing the IPN’s prosecution department – should be supported. There is no longer need for IPN to have over 100 employed prosecutors who investigate communist and Nazi crimes. ('') On the other hand, the reliable research activities of the IPN should be supported, e.g. by striving to significantly spread the knowledge about the availability of IPN archives from the communist period. Although the archives are widely available to the public since 2004, it is not common knowledge even among journalists. This could prevent the production of biased interpretations of the past which are difficult to prove biased due to lack of general access to the sources. This would also prevent right-wing politicians from using blackmail against political opponents by making allegations they cooperated with or actively supported the communist repression apparatus. Although this method was particularly popular at the turn of the 1990s and 2000s (so-called “wild ”), it still remains a real political tool. (b) by supporting other independent important public institutions involved in both the study of troubled WW2 and Communist past and the dissemination of produced knowledge, such as Museum of the Second World War in Gdansk6 or European Solidarity Centre in Gdansk7. This can be done e.g. by taking a clear political position in disputes about the politically motivated changes in management boards, as was the case with the Museum of the Second World War in Spring 2017. This is necessary in order to create a counterbalance to the activities of the Pilecki Institute, i.e. the second main government-controlled institution (after the IPN) that is strongly oriented towards right-wing instrumentalization of the Polish past. (c) by supporting grassroots, collective initiatives made by reliable academic historians in order to oppose attacks by politicized historians and prevent deepening divisions of the academic milieu – such as a 2016 letter of the opposition signed by 200 historians against the attack made by an IPN historian, Bogdan Musiał, on

6 See more: https://muzeum1939.pl/ (Accessed 15 July 2020). 7 See more: https://www.ecs.gda.pl/ (Accessed 15 July 2020).

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D6.16 Policy Recommendations Reports recognized scholars of Polish-German relations, whom he accused of “favouring German interests”, “providing arguments to Erika Steinbach” and “reproducing theses of communist propaganda”. Regarding (2), it seems necessary to strengthen the connection between independent liberal-left media and independent historians/researchers, particularly by strengthening the public role of historians and sociologists as the main actors who narrate the past in a responsible way, i.e. open and profile public debates, indicate which past and historical traditions the society prefers to refer to, shows complexity of possible positions and interpretations of troubled events and periods. This could allow to: (a) strengthen public trust to the role of historians and reduce the dominance of politicians and historical journalists in troubled past issues; (b) dismiss the still recurring public belief that historical science and the public sphere are two spheres separated by a hard border which the historians should not cross; (c) articulate the difference between academic disputes that are deeply rooted in the tradition of Polish historical thought and the instrumentalization and simplification of these disputes for political purposes; (d) change the public language of memory politics which is now too saturated with terms introduced by and useful to the political right (e.g. both sides of the dispute regarding the attitude of Poles towards Jews during WW2 are framed in the right-wing optics, as ‘pedagogy of shame’ and ‘pedagogy of pride’); (e) provide a more complex picture of troubled past in media, which is important particularly for media users from smaller cities, for whom, as demonstrated by oral history interviews, participation in particular discursive group or "bubble" is decisive in shaping opinions, attitudes and historical-political engagements. This applies especially to younger users who don't have their own biographical experience of real conflict, yet are engaged on everyday basis in radical symbolic/discursive conflicts in social media. Regarding (3), two basic actions related to educational institutions would be desirable: (a) providing greater support for school teachers outside of large cities – launching training and education programs dedicated particularly to teachers from smaller towns and villages, as well as supporting initiatives aimed at increasing their monthly salaries, is desirable. This will allow to counteract the negative tendency identified in oral history interviews that residents of local communities distant from large centers perceive their local life-worlds as completely detached from historical events, as separated milieus that are not affected by "big world" problems. So this action would aim at breaking this sense of separation and developing a sense of being active part of socio-historical processes. (b) reform of history teaching at all levels of educational system – although the number of hours of history in school curricula seems sufficient, these curricula need modifications in at least three aspects: (‘) introducing more twentieth-century history, which is the main period of troubled past events, at the cost of reducing the history of earlier centuries. Respondents' statements indicated that the school program was overloaded with material related to the 18th and 19th centuries, as a result of which teaching usually stops at WW2 - its end (1945) or even the beginning (1939), while later events are rarely discussed. Equalizing these proportions in favour of twentieth-century history would improve students' knowledge of the post-war period, which could in turn reduce the social credibility of simplistic narratives about it that currently dominate in public space. (‘’) introducing more social perspective (including everyday life of social masses, relations between various social classes, changes in social structure), gender perspective (presenting them as active agents of changes) and the history of national minorities (including in particular the longue durée perspective on Polish-Jewish cose relations) at the expense of majority-elite-dominated political history focused on great historical breakthroughs. Equalizing these proportions would increase the sense of agency of wider social strata and minority groups, that they are all equal subjects of the historical process, i.e. that history equally influences all members of society. (‘’’) introducing more critical understandings of history at the expense of nation-affirmative perspective. This would allow teaching about the complexity of interpretations regarding key troubled past events (e.g. the Warsaw Uprising dispute) as well as show more negative sides of history (e.g. crimes committed by Poles on Jews during WW2).

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D6.16 Policy Recommendations Reports 4.3. Politics Here, the recommendations include suggested ways of counteracting the following negative trends: (1) increasing tilting of the increasingly polarized political scene to the right; (2) rise of the right-wing populism; (3) decline in the ruling party’s confidence in further EU integration

Regarding (1), it is desirable to counteract the offensive of the two main, competing right-wing parties, which after 2004 permanently shifted the main axis of Polish politics towards a conflict between centre-right liberalism (, PO) and far-right conservatism (Law and Justice, PiS). In this way liberals were put into the corner of political scene and the left has undergone a longer period of decomposition, the latter recently (October 2019) overcome by the left-wing coalition that got into the parliament as the third political force. This counteraction can be done by: (a) supporting the interest of liberal parties in involvement in troubled past issues. This would reduce the very large disproportion between the strongly identity-oriented far right parties (incl. mainstream PiS and the populists), which are keen to develop and promote the extensive political repertoires of interpretations regarding WW2 and Communist Past, and the other parties, which are much more inclined to stick to the central tropes connected to modernization and the pragmatic belief that further European integration will eventually bring overcoming of troubled past issues. The latter position: (') refers in part to the centre-right mainstream party (PO), which, despite some efforts in memory politics in the last decade, has not had any significant symbolic successes, mostly because it has focused mainly on attempts to correct trends imposed by the PiS without proposing an autonomous symbolic alternative; ('') refers fully to the newly emerging liberal parties and movements which are largely uninterested in troubled past issues (.Nowoczesna is a good example here). (b) supporting left-wing memory initiatives. The left-wing parliamentary coalition has shown large interest in troubled past issues, but it doesn’t have enough political clout to make its perspectives influential. There are two major commemorative trends worth supporting there: (') a trend oriented towards promoting a complex interpretation of the communist past, developed especially by the post-communist left (SLD). ('') a trend oriented towards the promotion of the idea of critical patriotism, mainly through the introduction of complex interpretations of the Second Republic of Poland and WW2 past, developed especially by the independent new left (Party Together). Here, gender topics, topics related to the subjectivity of national minorities and topics related to the black pages of Polish history, including the Poles’ attitude towards Jews during WW2, are strongly exposed. Both trends seem to respond to the demand of the liberal-left media mainstream described above. Regarding (2), it is desirable to counteract the rise of populism, which is growing largely due to trend (1), as well as due to the fact that two dominant mainstream parties (PO and PiS) are less and less capable of meeting changing citizens’ expectations. Counteracting populism can be done by: (a) strengthening citizens’ initiatives aimed at monitoring transparency and accountability of political elites. These are initiatives that follow the example of those consolidated that hold public officials accountable for the fulfillment of political promises made to citizens, for their truthfulness and adherence to the acceptable limits of public debate (e.g. use of hate speech). One of the largest Polish initiatives of this type is Mamprawowiedziec.pl (transl. 'Ihavetherighttoknow.pl'). Supporting them seems to have a particular potential to neutralize precisely the populists, whose political success depends to a large extent on skillful taking advantage of numerous weaknesses of civil society – including information gaps in public space, low-quality journalism etc. – as well as on translating social discontent/anger into political support using non-complicated discursive dichotomies, incl. the most fundamental one between ‘good people’ and ‘bad elites’. (b) improving trust in state institutions. In post-1989 Poland it was never high, but after 2015 it decreased even

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D6.16 Policy Recommendations Reports more due to the actions of the ruling party (PiS) that began dismantling some of the basic institutions of liberal democracy, including independent judiciary. Here, social trust might be improved through supporting independent NGOs that organize mass protests and social campaigns against these changes. One of the most important, stable organizations of this kind is the Democratic Action (akcjademokracja.pl) that operates in Poland since 2015. Regarding (3), this decline seems to have accelerated especially after two crises at EU level occurring in 2014- 2015, i.e. refugee crisis in Europe and Russian aggression on Crimea and East Ukraine. Those events radicalized the attitude of the ruling right (PiS) and the populist right (2015-2019 it was Kukiz, after 2019 it is Confederation) towards Euro-integration. Both these groups used both crises to further support the nationalist- conservative agenda in the domain of culture and identity. As for vision of the EU integration, the ruling right became even more willing than before to promote a strictly pragmatic vision of EU integration as interest-driven cooperation of independent nation-states and seek greater political rapprochement with the than the EU, while the populist right introduced the claim that because the EU does little to improve international security in Eastern Europe, Poland is facing serious danger of Russian military aggression. Conflict in Ukraine was important also because it aroused discourses regarding troubled past experiences of Russian expansion in the region that has been the case since 18th century until 1945-1989. Counteracting this trend would require more intensive attempts among key EU-level political forces focused on showing their uniform commitment on how to solve key problems affecting the entire Union. This would dismiss the right-wing nationalist agenda in Poland that the shift towards nation-states and national interests must be seen as the only reasonable answer to deepening internal divisions in the EU.

4.4. Arts and culture Arts (both performative and visual) and culture (both institutional and grass roots) is doubtless one of the most important field where negotiation of collective memory takes place, where various conflicts over the shape of the cultural (political and social alike) collective are reenacted. Artistic and cultural field provides a laboratory of sorts where particular historical conflicts can be animated, relived, and where affective attitudes towards them can be renegotiated, traumas worked through and subject positions reconsidered and transformed. The crucial perspective for appropriate consideration of arts and culture in the context of troubled pasts and their present role / meaning is to treat them as equal (even though operating according to different procedures and thus analyzed and valued according to different methodologies) actors in the public sphere or co-creators of the counterpublics and artists and cultural workers as citizens or citizens of memory. On the one hand artistic and cultural field can be regarded as very powerful player, on the other as very precarious as regards support, financing, and modes of existence and dissemination (the latter has drastically changed due to Internet and social media). This dual and paradoxical position needs to be taken into consideration8. Our first (1) recommendation concerns support for cultural and artistic projects that address the troubled past in its multiple dimensions. To paraphrase the common proverb history is too important to be left to the historians. Past is relived, reenacted, interpreted and worked through via multimedia artistic operations and cultural artefacts and performances. Numerous conflicts, problems and difficulties in coming to terms with historical traumas can be approached from a different perspective and opened up to new approached and renegotiations. Art should not accompany state historical politics – even though such art is also needed as in state commissions for commemorative art, art in public space, monuments, etc. – nor should it be in line with memory politics of the collective. Its role is to experiment, to question existing or dominant modes of memory, to express resistance, to offer scandalous analogies (when it comes to revisiting different histories of violence and conflict, different victimized groups), etc. These practices should be encouraged in the society which wants to develop, to work

8 See more: https://www.batory.org.pl/doc/Sztuka_jako_rozmowa_o_przeszlosci.pdf 14 / 19

D6.16 Policy Recommendations Reports with its past in a productive rather than reductive ways, which is eager to face various aspects of its heritage (including its shameful or ambivalent aspects). The state patronage should provide support without exercising excessive control, let alone censorship. Initially unwelcome, some acts of artistic intervention (especially these considered scandalizing or provocative) may well turn out to be crucial for the processes of reworking social and memory structures, for reframing attitudes and even cognitive processes). With time they may turn out to be beneficial or even indispensable. Following this, the second (2) recommendation concerns diversifying sources of funding: state, local, private, European, NGOs, etc. Art and cultural institutions as well as individuals should have access to information and be able to apply for funding to agencies and subjects which in turn should not regard themselves as competitors but rather collaborators for the common benefit which is diversified creation and equal distribution of projects which address various aspects of the troubled past9. In relation to the above there comes the third (3) recommendation which stresses the necessity of programs aimed at the prevention of any form of state or institutional censorship and at the same time which clearly define and discuss in detail hate speech, discrimination and violence condemned and forbidden in artistic and cultural productions. These programs should be developed in collaboration with international experts and subject to public discussion and negotiation10. It is also (4) recommendable that artistic interventions be welcome/included in historical museums and intuitions devoted to historical education in order to allow historical narrative presented there to be interpreted from different perspective, commented upon with specific sensibility, contrasted with individual, potentially marginal voices and experiences of that past. Art within historical museums can offer a space for different kind of reflection on the past but also on confronting with the past in an institutional context. Such initiatives have been undertaken by Museum of the Warsaw Uprising or Polin. Museum of the History of Polish Jews among others. Our fifth (5) recommendation concerns education on all levels, so that artistic and cultural projects can be properly received, interpreted and valued. Most cultural and artistic institutions offer educational programs either as accompanying or independent events. It is however due to the lack of or inadequate education beyond these institutions that is oftentimes responsible for rejection or misinterpretation of artistic and cultural projects. Tools and technics need to be acquired early on for the public to eagerly and in an unprejudiced way participate, feel included and properly addressed. School teachers and headmasters should be encouraged to participate in public programs of art institutions and art institutions in turn should employ professionals to properly design educational programs and offer support and inclusive education to all regardless of their social status or political formation. There can hardly be a well-developed and fruitful artistic and cultural sphere or responsive audience without professional and progressive art and cultural critique/criticism. Therefore, our sixth (6) recommendation is to provide people involved in writing about art with chance to participate in workshops and programs which would allow them to improve their skills and provide them platforms for collaboration with critics from other historical and cultural context, which in turn provides global perspective and allows for discussing troubled pasts as expressed in arts in an international and comparative context. Critics are responsible for providing discourse (tools and language) to introduce art and culture in the living experiences of individuals and communities. The seventh (7) recommendation concentrates on the encouragement (calls for proposals, special programs) for collaborative projects which require working beyond national, ethnic, religious boundaries and divisions, which

9 See: https://www.culturalfoundation.eu/visionandmission; https://kulturstiftung.allianz.de/en_EN/funding-and- projects/call-for-projects.html https://eogkultura.mkidn.gov.pl/pages/en/homepage.php 10 See http://indeks73.blogspot.com/ also Jakub Dąbrowski, Anna Demenko, Cenzura w sztuce polskiej po 1989 roku, Fundacja Kultura Miejsca, Warszawa, 2014.

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D6.16 Policy Recommendations Reports enforce empathy as major factor in working through troubled pasts and past traumas, which prevent fixations uniqueness of suffering and national martyrology (stressed by nationalistic propaganda), competition of suffering, competing memories etc. but rather offer forms of open, collaborative patriotisms, understanding of complexity and interrelatedness of various historical events and subjects as well as the memories of different groups (dependent on class, gender and racial belonging). Finally, the eighth (8) recommendation concerns support for minoritarian artistic and cultural projects which deal with aspects of the past and history outside of the mainstream, frequently disregarded or even socially repressed, such as gender or class, ethnic minorities, violence against children, bodily historical experience, disability, etc. Artistic and cultural initiatives can introduce hitherto absent voices and experiences into public discussion of the past, make them visible and heard. Art allows for formation and transmission of cultural memories and prevents ignorance thus providing a kind of emotional and cognitive framework for acknowledging and respecting these minoritarian experiences not only in the past, but also in future.

5. Conclusions There are several key dimensions of the support that the European Union could give Poland to contribute more effectively to solving troubled past issues. (1) Financial support. There is a need to create a European grant fund dedicated to researchers, journalists and collective and individual cultural actors and activists who deal with troubled past. Such a fund would finance projects aimed at working out memory conflicts, encouraging transnational collaboration and perspective, at creating bridges of mutual understanding between the conflicted mnemonic actors, at finding common elements between the Polish and European past, etc. Such a fund should fulfill three basic functions:

(a) Offer systemic funding for a wide range of initiatives countering politicization and polarization around troubled past issues – from academic research through cultural projects (museum exhibitions, popcultural production, performances, happenings, street art, etc.) to different types of scholarships. (b) Strengthen international networks of people involved in working through troubled past issues. (c) Offer a specific channel of funding for people whose opportunities have been directly limited as a result of political persecution experienced in their home country. Particular attention should be paid here to grassroots, left-wing cultural and political activists as the most precarious group.

(2) Support for institutions. There is a need to support country-based struggles for the independence of various public institutions dealing with troubled past.

As for the historical museums, this applies in particular to efforts aimed at strengthening the autonomy of directors and collective (preferably international and interdisciplinary) councils and reducing the direct influence of the Minister of Culture on the functioning of these institutions (e.g. Museum of the Second World War in Gdansk; European Solidarity Centre in Gdansk). As for the media outlets, it is mostly – yet not only – about putting pressure on modifying legal regulations regarding money flows between the state budget and right-wing media outlets. As for the research institutions, it is primarily about a profound reform of the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN). As for the educational institutions (schools), it is about reforming history teaching at all levels of the educational system. Furthermore, in all the above-mentioned cases, it seems necessary to support both the stability of the employment and the collective initiatives aimed at increasing monthly salaries of the employees. (3) Support in communication. There is a need to establish a special Europe-wide channel of communication with nation-states, whose role would be to build a bridge between EU-level memory politics and national- level liberal-left memory politics. Such a channel could be a durable point of reference for those actors of

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D6.16 Policy Recommendations Reports the mnemonic field who are oriented towards maintaining a pro-European perspective on WW2 and the Holocaust, and towards articulating multidimensional interpretations of the Communist past in Poland. It would help to bring EU-level and national-level mnemonic actors closer together, to support and develop mutual understanding among them and, consequently, to solve troubled past issues more effectively. (4) Educational support. There is a need to provide more training and education programs dedicated to raising awareness about cultural and political mechanisms of solving troubled past issues, with a particular focus on gender history, among academic scholars, journalists and schoolteachers – especially those based in smaller cities, towns and villages. Furthermore, the support to already-existing educational citizens’ initiatives aimed at monitoring transparency and accountability of political elites (e.g. Mamprawowiedziec.pl) and at organizing social campaigns against the rise of right-wing populism (e.g. Akcjademokracja.pl), is needed. (5) Support for arts and culture sector. There is a need to encourage and support international exchange of cultural workers and artists working with troubled pasts in order to stimulate transnational perspective in addressing history, one which experiments with analogies and promotes unexcepted solidarities. There is a need to diversify funding in arts and culture sector so that cultural production avoids being dependent on current political agendas. Public institutions need to have international and interdisciplinary councils and groups of consultants. Various outlets for art writing and art criticism need to be provided to enable productive discussion within the field.

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D6.16 Policy Recommendations Reports Traynor, I. (2007). Germany bids to outlaw denial of Holocaust across continent. The Guardian, 16 Jan 2007. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/jan/16/germany.thefarright. Wagner, G. (2003). Nationalism and Cultural Memory in Poland: The European Union Turns East. International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 17(2), 191-212.

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