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 Poland Tomasz Rawski & Katarzyna Bojarska Widok Foundation This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 769252 1 / 19 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 2 / 19 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 3 / 19 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 4 / 19 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, the Holocaust (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 genocide, 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- 5 / 19 D6.16 Policy Recommendations Reports makers and stakeholders were conducted a little later, in August 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 (Google 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 democracy. 5. (national-level) Katarzyna Wielga-Skolimowska – the former director of the Polish Cultural Institute in Berlin, 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).