Shadows of Poland’s past need enlightenment

Laughing at Poland’s government for its incompetence, provincialism and narrow-mindedness is to miss the point. The crusty, prickly conservatives of Law and Justice - chiefly the Káczynski twins who hold the offices of president (Lech) and prime minister (Jaros?aw) - did not come to power thinking that they would make Poland a diplomatic powerhouse, or a beacon of liberal economic reform and modernity.

Their aim is different: to purify Poland of what they see as the shameful sleaze of the past 17 years. The Uk?ad, a Polish word which could be translated either as ‘deal’ or ‘establishment’, is in their eyes a sinister combination of crooked businessmen, corrupt officials and lawless spooks who have usurped what should have been an anti-communist revolution.

That raises three questions. First, does the Uk?ad really exist? Second, is it harmful? Third, are the Káczynski’s tactics in dealing with it correct? Answering the first definitively is hard: it is not as if the Uk?ad has an office, meetings or formal membership list. What is clear is that no attempt was made in 1989 to stop such a thing developing. The ‘thick line’ that was drawn under the past allowed a seemingly peaceful formal transfer of power. Ex-spooks and ex-apparatchiks went gleefully into business and have thrived for reasons that go beyond their business acumen. A successful, even a disgraceful, career in the Polish People’s Republic has proved no bar to success in the private or public sectors. The military intelligence service, the WSI, seems to have been a law unto itself once its communist masters retreated.

So the Uk?ad is a useful metaphor. Does it matter? The trade-off is between peace and purity. Excluding the old regime’s people might have been dangerous. Giving them a stake in the new system made it stable. Yet their unfair advantages, of money and connections, rankle with honest citizens who never collaborated.

It is entirely defensible, then, to argue that Poland should be a country in which old connections matter less, and honesty and hard work matter more. The big question - and the weakest point in the Káczynskis’ approach - is how to get there.

One way is to use the criminal justice system to attack those with dubious pasts. Pilfering of state assets, insider trading, bribery in public procurement: there is plenty of material. But this route is risky: whom do you pick on and where do you start? The great danger is of a vindictive, arbitrary witch-hunt, where communist-era tactics of denunciation and punishment are used against those whose main crime is being unlucky, not wicked.

That seems to be the way that the Káczynskis are going, both with their enemies and even - surprisingly - with their friends. In recent weeks a distinguished presidential adviser was fired humiliatingly because of a single document signed under great stress during the communist era: something he had both immediately admitted to his dissident friends and repudiated. Another has been ejected from public life because he worked for the WSI as a consultant in the post-communist era. A senior diplomat has been deprived of his promised ambassadorship because his brother worked for Poland’s previous president, an ex-communist.

Fighting the totalitarian legacy with totalitarian tools is unlikely to work. The way to shake up Poland’s crony capitalism is not selectively hunting down the cronies, but making it such an open, liberal and competitive society that the old connections no longer count for much. That means more privatisation (meaning no room for manipulation) and deregulation, and welcoming all forms of outside competition. But it is hard to imagine the Káczynskis humming that tune any time soon.

• The writer is central and eastern Europe correspondent of The Economist.

Laughing at Poland’s government for its incompetence, provincialism and narrow-mindedness is to miss the point. The crusty, prickly conservatives of Law and Justice - chiefly the Káczynski twins who hold the offices of president (Lech) and prime minister (Jaros?aw) - did not come to power thinking that they would make Poland a diplomatic powerhouse, or a beacon of liberal economic reform and modernity.