Dreams of Leaving and Remaining by James Meek

Author:James Meek
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

4

Leaving Work and Remaining

Somerdale 1923–2011, Skarbimierz 2010–

How to explain Poland’s swing against the European Union? How to explain the election of the Catholic fundamentalist, authoritarian, populist, Eurosceptic Law and Justice Party to rule a booming country that has benefited from more than €130 billion in EU investment in its roads, railways and schools, a country where only a few years after EU accession in 2004 hundreds of foreign factories and distribution centres opened, employing hundreds of thousands of people, a country whose citizens have taken advantage of EU freedom of movement to travel, work and study across the continent in their millions? If Britain is straining the EU by leaving, Law and Justice’s Poland is straining it by staying, attacking the EU’s contradictory institutional positions – its promotion of human rights, its secularism and multiculturalism, its belief in state welfare, its embrace of mobile capital – with contradictory positions of its own. The typical Briton is slightly poorer now than before the financial crash, almost a decade ago; that might not be the EU’s fault, but at least there’s something to find a scapegoat for. The typical Pole, by contrast, is half as rich again.

Few at the richer end of Europe would begrudge rising prosperity for the hundred million Eastern Europeans who joined the EU between 2004 and 2007, 38 million of them in Poland. Whether or not Poland’s rise is an economic miracle, it’s an economist’s miracle, in the sense that it can, and has been, used to justify most of the mainstream non-Marxist economic currents of the past century. Free traders can claim it shows how opening up a previously closed market has expanded and enriched the European economy as a whole. Neoliberals can claim that the effects of Poland’s post-communist economic shock therapy, the mass closures of state factories and the ruthless privatisation and grievous unemployment that followed, prepared the way for the free market to come to the rescue with foreign investment and a resurgence of local enterprise. Keynesians can point to the vast amounts of public money Western Europe has poured into Poland to validate their argument that everyone gains when the state takes the lead in refuelling an economy that has run out of gas.

None of these economic ideas accommodates the triumph of Law and Justice, just as they do not accommodate Brexit and Donald Trump. Such populist phenomena are linked by their backers’ ability to insist on the centrality of money-in-your-pocket economics to their cause, while at the same time promoting the primacy of romantic ideas of national and racial sovereignty in which, by definition, ideals come before money. The rise of Law and Justice and the Brexit referendum victory only make sense if economics and culture are seen as two aspects of a single field, whose fundamental substance is the collective psyche of voters; a field in which apparently unconnected economic and cultural abstractions (GDP, a lost empire) and apparently unconnected economic and cultural particularities (how much you get paid, the history

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