On Erudite and Utilitarian Aspects of Historical Political Thought: An Analysis of the Programme of the Émigré National Party [Stronnictwo Narodowe]

Abstract

On the threshold of the breakthrough events in the political life of the 1980s, Andrzej Micewski, in his article in Tygodnik Powszechny (1981, No. 9, p. 5) entitled “On the Weaknesses of the Polish Political Thought”, formulated a premise that historical Polish nationalist thought had lost its usefulness as a modern and prospective ideological and political offer for the contemporary generation, which seeks ideological inspiration in history, seen as the source of contemporary political concepts. The author’s doubts concerned the ethical sphere of Polish nationalism saturated with elements of ethnocentrism and national egoism. This premise gave rise to a discussion among journalists on the evaluation of the utilitarian aspects of the nationalist thought of the émigré Stronnictwo Narodowe (abbreviated: SN).

First, in the pages of Myśl Polska (1981, Nos. 7–8, p. 1) – the flagship organ of the SN – Wojciech Wasiutyński polemically referred to this premise, concluding that, under the ideological pressure of the Warsaw regime and the Sovietisation of political life, “Poland is doomed to nationalism”. He saw in democratic-national thinking the “only systematic school of political thinking”, a factor for a moral rebirth of the nation as a condition for the democratisation of social life. In the following years, at the request of Witold Leitgeber (secretary of the SN’s Political Committee), the postulates for making historical nationalist thought more flexible – given what was going on in Poland – were expressed by him in the question: “Should the national ideology, which was formulated in times different from our own, not be subjected to verification – not to use the word revisionism?”, and included in the agenda of the Political Committee (1984, 1986). In this form, they appeared in the forum of the last, 7^th Central Congress of the SN (1992), devoted to discussing the best ways of transferring the legacy of ideas and political experience of the nationalists-in-exile to Poland.

The research objective of this article is to analyse the political thought of the émigré SN from the point of view of identifying the permanent elements which defined its ideological character and at the same time led to the weakening of its usefulness in the process of democratisation of social life in the 1980s, and in the following years contributed to the electoral defeat of post-National Democracy groupings.