Poland, Land of Diversity
If I could abolish just one cliché, it would be this one: “Polish society is nearly homogeneous.”
Just pick up any article about Poland from any source on any topic, and you are likely to find this claim. For example, click here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here….OK, you get the point.
Sometimes you will even see the claim that Poland and the other countries of East-Central Europe have no “tradition of diversity.” That’s so obviously incorrect that it hardly merits rebuttal. Prior to the mass murders and ethnic cleansings of the mid-20th century, there were few places on earth with more heterogeneity than here. But that’s not want I want to write about today.
Nor do I want to remind you about the Kashubians, the Łemkos, the Tatars, the Silesians, the Górals, or the remaining communities of Lithuanians, Belarussians, or Ukrainians that one can find along Poland’s eastern border. The small but vibrant Polish Jewish community reminds us that the Holocaust did not entirely wipe out that legacy, but that’s not my topic for today, either. I’m currently living next door to Warsaw’s Holy Trinity Lutheran Church—but I’m not going to talk about that, or the local Vietnamese community, or the growing expat groups that have settled in Poland’s larger cities.
All those categories are indeed small, and they don’t detract from the fact that 98% of the residents of this country (according to the most recent census) claim Polish as their native language, and 88% claim Roman Catholicism as their religion. A mere 1.8% of the population was born in another country. The Polish census does not include a category that would match the American concept of “race,” but one would have to search very hard to find anyone who does not have the pale skin color typical of northern Europe.
So yeah—Poland is a homogeneous place. As long as the only markers of diversity you care about are language, religion, and skin color.
Our understanding of diversity has been hobbled by the tendency to take the fault-lines of difference from one time or place, and superimpose them to different times and places. In the 1930s, the boundary lines in Poland were drawn around religion and language, and since those lines can’t be found any more, we call the country homogeneous. In America we have to grapple with the enduring legacy of racial classifications and oppression, so if we turn our attention to Poland, we see a stark uniformity.
But diversity and homogeneity are themselves ideological constructions, and it is vital that we take a critical eye to the claim that Poland is a land without significant internal cultural fissures, prejudices, or stereotypes.
When skin-color, religion, or language cannot serve as markers of difference, that doesn’t mean that difference itself disappears. Instead, the vectors of cultural diversity migrate to other categories, ones that we may not be primed to notice. For example, even though nearly everyone is Roman Catholic in Poland, the actual patterns of devotional practices and theological beliefs are almost as divergent here as they are in the denominational grab-bag of the United States. Rates of attendance at religious service are about the same, and the role of “faith” in public life is comparable. In survey questions regarding matters of religious doctrine, Poles show an enormous range of beliefs—an issue that the clergy here has always complained about. According to a recent survey, only 18% believe that the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church provide an adequate guide to moral behavior, and 57% reject part or all of the Church’s moral teachings. Only 14% think that Catholicism should provide the foundation of the “values and norms taught in the public schools,” and only another 11% think that a more general Christianity should serve this purpose. A more detailed survey conducted in 2015 revealed that 56% believe in hell, but a mere 4% (!!) believe that only Christians can be “saved” (with another 8% reserving salvation for all “religious people.”) A startling 30% believe in reincarnation! In the US, those diverse beliefs are expressed by switching from one religion to another. Here in Poland, all these various convictions remain bundled under a notional Catholicism. That singular label matters, of course, but it shouldn’t lead us to assume that Poland is a land of actual religious uniformity.
Even more culturally and socially important is a vector of difference that is hard for outsiders to see. For centuries, nearly all the labor in northeastern Europe was performed by bonded serfs. “Pańszczyzna” (mandatory work for a master) was ended here at about the same time slavery was abolished in the United States, and both systems left an intractable cultural legacy. The descendants of the nobility and the peasantry are all called “Poles,” and they can’t be distinguished by any biological identifiers, but that doesn’t mean that the divide is irrelevant. The nobility constituted around 10% of the population in pre-partition Poland, but they monopolized property ownership and completely dominated culture and politics. The Stalinists tried to change this by adopting a program of hiring and university admission akin to American “affirmative action,” but that didn’t change the overall picture much. Only briefly in the early 1950s did the scions of the nobility constituted fewer than half of the university students. The history of Poland as it is conventionally taught is really the history of the nobility, with the peasantry erased to an even greater degree than African-Americans are erased from US history. Today the vast majority of Poles live in towns and cities, and the traditional peasantry is long gone, but the cultural gap remains very, very deeply entrenched. To be sure, the lack of phenotype differences makes the lines more permeable than racial divisions in the United States, but that doesn’t mean that the lines don’t exist.
A picture of homogeneity requires that we ignore certain differences and prioritize others. It leads us to imagine that a highly-educated Warsaw businessman from a “good family” who goes to church on Christmas and Easter is part of the same national community as a devout smallholder from Podlasie with a primary education. Meanwhile, we are taught to see a nearly unscalable wall between that peasant and his Belorussian-speaking, Eastern Orthodox neighbor. I’m not dismissing the latter divide, but it is absurd to imagine that the absence of religious, linguistic, or ethnic barriers has led to homogeneity. At most, it has only made the heterogeneity a little bit harder to see.