From September 2019 to August 2022, for almost three years, I experienced feelings that were tearing my professional conscience. As a member of the Polish diplomatic service, I remained a loyal official of my state, and on the other hand – as a citizen – I felt a growing abomination about the actions of my state towards its citizens. I was terrified of brazen surveillance, including not only opposition politicians, journalists, lawyers, but even state officials – judges and prosecutors. The style of operation of the police caused disgust, in particular when it was used as a shield to protect people in power, and it was resorting to brute force to intimidate demonstrating women, subjecting protesting citizens to humiliating harassment during detention. I was sickened by the political use of state and government offices, filling them with incompetent relatives and friends of the people holding power. Even in small administrative matters, I came across examples of extreme unprofessionalism that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. I was glad that my children did not have to send their children to state schools in Poland and expose them to the Czarnek’s misreform, that no one in my family studied at state universities in Poland. As an official of this state, I saw (and I myself became a victim of) the unprecedented de-professionalization of the foreign service. I saw how very competent employees who had given their heart to work for the country in the last 30 years were brazenly removed from the state service, to be replaced with inept people.
Years ago, in my books, I described the growing tension between the citizen and the state. I never thought it would get so personal.
This tension has a natural explanation. Both the state and the citizen have become as strong as never before in history.
The human individual has been strengthened in its sovereignity by the development of technology. It provided him with access to information, broadened his horizons of thinking. It made him have more time for himself. And the accumulation of prosperity pulled him out of the limitations of the paradigm of survival in the organization of life. Social welfare gave him a sense of security. The Internet has provided the ability to build network connections.
The power of the individual is already manifested in disruptive, destructive actions – terrorism, crime, private wars. The extent of the damage that an individual can potentially cause today is terrifying. The size of good deeds is still very limited.
The liberation of the individual, his empowerment was a natural process in Western societies. And Christian ethics played a key role in this. As Larry Siedentop once wrote, at the roots of our civilization, until ancient times, society was understood as a union of families, kinship groups, and not individuals. Christianity inscribed in the identity of the West the ideas of equality of souls, inherent rights, and human dignity. It sparked a moral revolution that led to a social revolution. The individual gradually supplanted the family, tribe, or caste as the basis of social organization. The Enlightenment currents gave rise to liberalism. Individualism became the prevailing social attitude in the West.
There is no shortage of sociologists who blame individualism for all the possible sins of Western societies – the disappearance of social bonds, egoism, consumerism, and especially for the crisis of democracy and political culture, because there is no healthy democracy without a sense of community. Individualism reached its peak and turned against the individual.
There are, however, those who believe that the peak of individualism is yet to come. Harari associates it with the entry by a human being, thanks to biotechnological and information technology achievements, on the fatal path towards immortality, happiness and divinity. This journey will be egoistically motivated, driven by an individual, not a community, such as the society or the state.
The state today performs an unprecedentedly wide set of functions. Originally, these were tasks related to security and justice. Habermas explained how, in addition to the administrative and fiscal state, came naturally the welfare state and the Keysian state after World War II. Today, new functions are being added to the state (like being the guardian of morality, as in Poland during the PiS era). It hardly copes with the burden placed on it in the social dimension.
Habermas assessed that today’s nation-state, incapable of compensating for the side effects of globalization, should be freed from this task by transferring the functions of the social state to supranational institutions. But not to international organizations as we know them, because it is, according to him, a utopian solution. Not to a world state. The weakness of the nation-state was an argument for Habermas in favor of institutions created by political powers that would generate international obligations in the spirit of cosmopolitanism, like the European Union. Only that the European Union still refuses to engage the community method to social welfare.
In sum, the human individual would like the state to be even more efficient, even more protective, and on the other hand, he trusts the state less and less, he is even afraid of the state, he believes that he has less and less influence over its actions.
The modern relationship of the individual with the state is reflected in the concept of citizenship. The concept grew out of the Enlightenment revolutions, when the “subject” was emancipated to a “citizen”. “Serfdom” (feudal dependence) was a highly one-sided dependency. But even “citizenship” remains a very asymmetric relationship. The duties of the citizen to the state are much greater than the duties of the state to the citizen. An act of disloyalty by a citizen to the state is subject to severe punishment, even the highest. The state’s disloyalty to its citizens (as many people devoted to the new Poland found out) sometimes costs the state nothing. The state can deprive anyone of citizenship at almost any moment and, as Theresa May, the prime minister of Great Britain, once said: ,,citizenship is a privilege, not a right”. At the same time, the state can trade citizenship, sell it for money (like Bahrain and many other states). A citizen cannot renounce his citizenship so easily, and sometimes even not at all. The European Convention standard states that a citizen may not renounce his nationality if he were to become stateless. International law treats statelessness as an extremely exceptional situation.
The emergence of virtual space allows citizenship to be liberated from the burden of asymmetry. There have been attempts to introduce virtual citizenship. At the same time, the term “netizen”, which improves the sense of sovereignty of a human being, has entered the dictionary.
As in China, the state can still try to tighten control over the citizen by means of total surveillance, it can try to mobilize the propaganda apparatus to brainwash him, but it seems that – at least temporarily – it is not able to enslave him.
The state used to be able to decide for him which foreigners to like and whom to hate. Today, it cannot program his emotions. Some PiS rulers of the Polish state suggested two years ago that Polish citizens should rejoice when Germany was eliminated from the group stage of the 2022 World Cup. They wanted us to fear the Germans that they are building a “fourth reich” under the European flag.
In the past, the state could even take people to the streets in patriotic exultation. Today it works only on the poorly educated. The state, even that run by the Iranian ayatollahs, no longer effectively disciplines individual emotions.
The principle of “dulce et decorum est pro Patria mori”, so effective in the past, is becoming weaker and weaker. Hundreds of thousands of young Russians fleeing abroad, fearing that they will have to fulfil this principle on Ukrainian soil, is a confirmation of this. After all, they did not cease to be patriots of Russia. But they want to be able to decide for themselves when the case of dying for their homeland is legitimate.
Because in all these considerations, perhaps the most important thing is that distrust of one’s own state does not mean a weakening of national identity. This identity is getting stronger.
Some supporters of European and global integration treat this strong national identity as an impediment in strengthening supranational institutions. This is indeed the case when trying to replace national identity with other types of identity (European and global identity). National identity will remain the basic anchor of our identity for years to come.
We paint our face in national colors (not only figuratively), when we set off to meet the world and try to satisfy our thymotic needs. Or in other words when we want the world to treat us with respect. Because we want the world to have the best opinion of us. We treat our heroic (sometimes full of suffering) history, the heroes of our wars and the geniuses of our culture and science, and today even stars of sport, as a reminder and a proof of our individual value. Copernicus, Chopin, Curie-Skłodowska are supposed to be arguments not to treat Poles from above, but with dignity and admiration. And if Copernicus, Chopin, Curie-Skłodowska say little to strangers, Lewandowski as our tribesman will always be the guarantor of our value, because he is known and respected by the whole world.
For sixty years I have been following with interest big sports events: the Olympics, the world championships. Over time, they became one great spectacle of national flags and a concert of national anthems. For athletes, even flags hoisted on the mast are no longer enough. They wrap themselves in them not only on the track, in the hall, but also on the podium. On television, watching competitions in which our representatives do not take part no longer makes sense, they are rarely shown. With the choice of a tennis match of great tennis players at the Olympics, but not ours, and the kayak elimination run with our competitors who have poor chances, it is clear that our national television will show us the boring and depressing kayak race instead.
We see the competition of individuals through the prism of the medal table classification.
Because what we need is collective recognition. We want so much others to respect us.
Let me put it simply: as a great lover of sport and physical culture, I would prefer that national quotas for participation in individual sports be abolished at the Olympics, I would prefer to build Olympic teams in a club rather than a national spirit (because, as one example, club football is much more attractive), I would prefer an athlete to be the winner not his flag. Unfortunately, this is not the case in today’s world.
I would also prefer the Eurovision Song Contest to promote quality and good taste, not national sympathies. Because it turns out that although everyone in Europe listens to British music on a daily basis, participation in the Eurovision finals for the British (French, Italian or German) songs must be guaranteed administratively. Because Eurovision has long ceased to be a festival of song, it is a festival of national pride.
I am a firm believer in tribalism, provided it is not appropriated by my state. And especially I do not want it to claim the right to decide who is a better Pole and who is a worse one.
The paradox remains a paradox: the nation-state is becoming more and more obsolete, and sometimes even an obstacle in solving the problems of the world, and at the same time national tribal identification is our basic need.
The greatest challenge in building supranational world governance structures is poor identification with the European and global identity.
There is no hope that the nation-state will work to promote a supranational identity in us. The nation-state, especially in its authoritarian version, will not want to loosen its control over the citizen, also in relation to his interface with the outside world, by his own choice.
The paradox (another one to be noted here) is that a citizen who looks at the actions of the state apparatus in internal affairs with such distrust and sometimes anxiety, still entrusts the state with a monopoly on conducting foreign policy. Of course, there are acts of social protest, activism in various forms, to subject the foreign policy of the state to stricter civic control. Polish policy towards Ukraine was defined in February 2022 by a mass reflex of ordinary Poles’ solidarity. The then government had basically no choice but to follow the voice of the Poles bravely. Which wasn’t so obvious before the Russian invasion. Different voices regarding Poland’s policy towards Ukraine could be heard in the corridors of the PiS administrators of Poland. Even assuming that Sikorski went too far in his speculations about the government’s intentions in the first days of the war. The fact that it took Morawiecki so long to make his first visit to Kiev and he barely made it there three weeks before the war was no coincidence.
The PiS government did not think to ask Poles whether they wanted a confrontational policy towards the European Union. The government didn’t ask them when it was stirring up anti-German hysteria. It demanded reparations on behalf of the nation and the state. It did not think to ask the descendants of the victims, people whose closest family members were murdered by the Germans, whose lives might have turned out completely differently if it had not been for the Germans, people who could not inherit the property destroyed or taken from their families by the Germans, even if it was only about horse and wagon. In any case, the PiS government did not ask me, and yet, on behalf of people like me, it built its claims. And he did not ask the Poles what he would do with the money if the Germans agreed to pay anything.
The arrogance of the state towards the citizen in foreign policy may therefore still be at a high level.
The political elites, which in the old way treat the state as an element of control over the citizen and disciplining his behavior, understandably resist the emergence of a supranational identity. PiS was furious when open European borders allowed Polish citizens to use the freedom to travel to get out of its control, even in matters such as same-sex marriages or abortions. The activity of supranational institutions was painful to PiS when these institutions stood up for the Polish citizen against the politicized judiciary.
European and global identity makes sense if it develops in addition to, and not instead of, national identity. And we already know from the everyday experience of Western European countries that the consciousness of an individual has become so capacious that it can accommodate several dimensions of identity. Mass migrations have resulted in the emergence of millions of people, even in tribal, homo-ethnic countries, who have several identities which harmoniously coexist. They can be Turkish and German, Algerian and French, Moroccan and Belgian at the same time. Without repressing one identity by another, without schizophrenic personality suffering.
So everybody can be a good Pole and a good European, a good European and a good citizen of the world. Everybody can. But is it worth it?
