Sunday, 25 October 2015, proved a political turning point in Poland. In May 2015, the presidential election had already brought an unexpected upset when the incumbent, supported by the governing Civic Platform, was routed by the right-wing candidate, Andrzej Duda. It was obvious that a major turnover was on the cards. However few, if any, envisaged the magnitude of the bombshell. In the October 2015 parliamentary elections, the conservative-nationalist Prawo i Sprawiedliwos´c´ (Law and Justice) party won an absolute majority in the Sejm—an unprecedented result in Poland’s post-communist history. The pis also claimed 61 of the hundred seats in the Senate.footnote¹ Meanwhile Civic Platform, the liberal-conservative formation that had dominated the political landscape since 2007, saw its vote plummet by 15 points to 24 per cent and lost a quarter of its seats. For the first time since 1990, no left or centre-left party managed to pass the 5 per cent threshold for entry to parliament. However, new political forces robustly asserted their presence. In third place came Kukiz’15, a novel formation centred round Paweł Kukiz, a 53-year-old punk rocker, which ran in alliance with the far-right National Movement, advocating a switch to first-past-the-post, single-member constituencies as a panacea for all the ills of Polish democracy.footnote²

The first months of the pis government have shown rather clearly the political direction in which the country is likely to be heading in the next few years. Wielding full political control—Sejm, Presidency, Senate—the party has proclaimed that, having obtained a mandate from the nation, it is determined to follow through on its electoral promises and implement a radical programme of ‘good change’. Its leaders’ statements imply that this will transform Poland’s model of democracy to make it an instrument of the national community. The key question, then, is how ‘community’ is actually comprehended here. Indeed, the relation between community and democracy is one of the most intractable, if also most intensely debated, points of contemporary political theory.

The difficulty lies in the fact that the two concepts—liberal democracy and community—have developed along separate lines, often not simply oblivious of but even overtly inimical to each other. Liberalism takes as its starting point an isolated, autonomous individual whose relations with others are harmonized in the public sphere by procedures of a largely legal nature. By contrast, ‘community’ highlights the role of ‘the people’—of the national community—as a vehicle of values that materialize in social life. A problem inherent in this approach is the relation between the community and political power. While the community is ‘live’, ‘warm’ and ‘all-embracing’, political power is ‘frigid’ and ‘distant’, with the state as ‘the coldest of all cold monsters’, as Nietzsche famously put it. If the notion of liberal democracy is embedded in Enlightenment thinking, the notion of community draws rather on Romanticism, with its distrust of the overarching power of reason and, in particular, of its universalizing claims. The history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century political thought may be interpreted as an ongoing contest of the two concepts—although the dichotomy, of course, requires qualification. Democracy can neither arise nor develop without the people’s support; and without the backing of the masses, democracy is reduced to a game between elites. Nevertheless, a key question is still to determine the conditions under which popular protest can be transformed into stable democratic institutions, or augment society’s democratic potential.

The dispute over ‘democracy’ versus ‘community’ has resulted in a rather feeble compromise between the two competing perspectives. This does not mean that a new theoretical framework has emerged, but rather that the two sides to the debate have agreed to make some concessions. Some liberals have acknowledged that, even in the public sphere, people are not merely autonomous individuals without any prior history. Rather, they are immersed in certain traditions that shape their lives and form their political beliefs, which implies that in politics not only autonomous individuals but also groups and collective identities are at stake. And most communitarians no longer deny the validity of procedures, instead asserting that these must be filled with the live content of communal values. The question that still remains unresolved is how much community democracy actually needs, with the concomitant query as to at what critical point a strong community comes to be destructive of democratic society.

For the problem of democracy lies in its volatile, elusive nature. This was perhaps best captured by Claude Lefort, who saw democracy as a system organized around ‘an empty place’—previously occupied by the monarch—and with its central notion of ‘the people’ necessarily constructed and reconstructed all over again, constantly ‘up for grabs’. Unsurprisingly, then, democracy is inherently susceptible to the temptations of both authoritarianism and anarchism. The former is related to a recurring tendency to fill in the ‘empty place’ with definite symbols, such as the nation or the proletariat. At the same time, democracy is also always at risk of dwindling into anarchy, when its precarious balance begins to crumble. In this perspective, democracy is framed as a grand call to boundary-crossing, to transgression of what is actually there.footnote³ As Cornelius Castoriadis insisted, the Athenians’ momentous discovery was the realization that institutions are a human product rather than a divine work. In his monumental study, Castoriadis convincingly argues that institutions, including the essential one, i.e., ‘the imaginary institution of society’, create individuals, being created by them at the same time. This reciprocal relation between individuals and institutions presupposes individual autonomy as an essence of democracy.footnote⁴

On this view, it is clear that democracy, as a system with the changeability of institutions and individual autonomy at its core, may quite easily find itself on a collision course with community—founded upon unity and tradition, and on a view of the individual as the expression of communal values. It may, but it does not have to; and any answer to the question of how much community democracy needs will largely be an empirical one, related to and predicated upon particular political and cultural circumstances. Democratic societies, as we know, emerged within national states in tandem with acceptance of their pluralistic character. Yet as democracy was consolidated, these very societies would be transformed, ushering in a growing approval of political and ethical pluralism. Consequently, the national community would become increasingly self-reflexive.

To say that communal attitudes are pervasive in Poland is to state a banality. Despite the significant and, in many senses, pioneering accomplishments of the gentry-based democratic tradition, it was the loss of independent statehood that determined the trajectory of political and social thought in Poland. Nineteenth-century Polish intellectuals found themselves challenged to formulate a concept of the nation outside and beyond the national state—a concept that would help the national idea survive the times of partition and subjection. The titanic efforts of Polish intellectual elites sustained the continuity of national identity, but that success came at a price. The nation emerged as a projection of hopes and anxieties—or, to use a psychoanalytical term, as a phantasm that left a heavy imprint on the lives of multiple generations of Poles. At its heart lay a dream of absolute national unity and the appended belief that it was almost tangible, within reach. By definition, a phantasm not only resists reality but creates a symbolic sphere that holds sway over people’s beliefs and effectively motivates human action. As a phantasm is, clearly, saturated with emotion, going beyond it or opposing it is an unusually painful process. No wonder that a loss of national unity, a consent to the pluralization of the nation and tolerance of divergent attitudes on fundamental issues, might seem a horrifying prospect.