'Restoration" has not evoked warm feelings from conservatives in recent years. The term suggests a royalist sense of entitlement and a Tory sensibility. It reminds the literate that Henry Kissinger wrote a book praising the decidedly un-American Metternich under the title A World Restored. Kevin Phillips, seeking to delegitimize the Bush victory, called it a restoration. The usage did not outlast 9/11, but it was a shrewd thrust: Most contemporary American conservatives see themselves in the pioneering terms of the New World, breaking new ground, establishing societies based on merit, and favoring innovation generally. They equate restoration with an unproductive nostalgia.
Once we transfer this attitude to the arts, however, it seems absurdly philistine. Even in direct political terms conservatism's success in the 1980s in the U.S. and Britain was in part the rediscovery of traditions of enterprise and patriotism that had been derided only a few years before. And when it comes to the permanent things, Russell Kirk is there to remind us that tradition is their carrier even in such preeminently modern nations as the U.S.
If that is so, how much more true must it be of countries in Central and Eastern Europe that had their traditions uprooted by half a century of totalitarianism. Innovation there was almost purely destructive. To the degree that they could, Nazism and Communism made their subject nations physical and moral wastelands. Poland suffered more than most — but it managed to preserve its moral character and national traditions largely because the Catholic Church, too powerful to suppress entirely, acted as their guardian. Now Poland is free to restore its distinctive civilization in freedom — and the process of restoration is visible on every hand.
THE SURVIVAL
Cracow is one of the most beautiful of European cities. Its superb central square is the equal of the great squares of Brussels and Madrid. It is also one of the most learned of cities — hosting about a dozen universities — and an unusually devout one. It is the city of which Karol Wojtyla was archbishop; his picture is everywhere.
Cracow benefited from one good aspect of Polish Communism. In 1945 the country was literally in ruins; Communist governments restored the historic areas of some cities exactly as they had been before the conflict. Also, there was what one might call inadvertent restoration in those years — the Communist economy was so inert that there was simply less development than in the West. More of the past therefore survived in the form of bricks and mortar — especially bricks, since in the north of Poland the lack of suitable stone produced beautiful redbrick Gothic churches and town halls.
Though the buildings were restored, however, the spirit that should inhabit them was not. Communist society was extremely gloomy; even happiness had to be officially organized. But in the 15 years since Communism collapsed, social and commercial life has flourished: There are excellent restaurants, art galleries, and bookshops. A Polish tradition of hospitality and entertaining (you are never allowed to buy a meal in their town) has revived. A civilization is being restored before one's eyes.
This weekend the city is full of tourists — but tourists of a special kind. The Pope's close adviser is due to be consecrated as archbishop. Hundreds of thousands of people will attend the televised ceremony. Alas, neither Christopher DeMuth, president of the American Enterprise Institute, nor I will be among them. We arrived in Cracow (on our way to the 25th anniversary celebrations of Solidarity in Gdansk) too late to get good seats. Our consolation prize is a visit to the salt mines.
The Wieliczka salt mine outside Cracow is one of the wonders of the world. Mining there probably goes back to Neolithic times. The tourist route, though only 3 percent of the mine, takes in among other attractions a ballroom (plus chandeliers), a blue lagoon, a cathedral hollowed out of the salt, and salt statues of King Casimir the Great, the Virgin Mary, and John Paul II. Walking through the mine is an extraordinary experience — the temperature is always the same, pleasantly cool, and the air very fresh. It has been a successful tourist attraction since the 1890s. (The ballroom is available for parties.) The salt mines were for centuries the basis of Cracow's civilization. Salt was the gold of Mitteleuropa in the Middle Ages. It enabled the city to develop the ancient university and superb architecture that now make it a place of pilgrimage and tourism.
Back in Cracow, I ask a young lawyer whose practice takes him to the U.S. fairly regularly whether Poland will remain as Catholic as in the recent past, or drift into a more "normal" European post-religious mood. He thinks that John Paul was personally responsible for the high commitment of Polish Catholics. Their devotion is never likely to sink to French or Italian levels of casual apostasy, but he feels it will gradually become less fervent and less politically important as the memory of the Pope itself fades.
Not everyone shares this view, I will discover; but it is not uncommon.
CONSERVATIVE RESURGENCE
Radek Sikorski, National Review's sometime roving correspondent and deputy foreign minister in a previous Polish government, drives Chris and me to his home in Chobielin. Fifteen years ago he bought it as a ruin. His book The Polish House describes how he and his parents gradually restored it as a traditional Polish country home, enormously elegant yet very comfortable. As we drive there, he comments on the sad state of the roads: "Building infrastructure of this kind should be lesson number one for a centrally planned Communist economy, but they neglected these necessary projects in favor of their ideological plans."
Those plans included new housing estates without churches for the workers. I was reminded of the remark made to me by a Hungarian taxi driver who, as we sped past a vast Stalinist tower block in Budapest, said: "I sometimes think that the entire world Communist movement was just a front for the cement industry." Incidentally, the workers insisted on having churches anyway. One bishop made himself hated by the Communist regime by leading his congregations to dig the foundations of new churches at forbidden sites in the dead of night, presenting the regime with new religious facts in the morning.
Radek is a candidate for the Polish senate in upcoming elections, in which the parties of the Right are heavily favored. The main focus of curiosity is on which of the two main conservative groups (the pro-business Citizens' Platform and the socially conservative Law and Justice party) will score higher, since their ranking will determine the share of cabinet posts — and thus determine whether the new government is more "liberal" or more "conservative" in its social policies and attitudes.
The Right's dominance is the result of a series of scandals in the present government. Underneath the usual election issues — 18 percent unemployment is the biggest — these scandals have provoked a subterranean anxiety about Polish democracy. Many people fear that power is exercised outside the formal political channels by shadowy networks linking the new rich, former intelligence networks, and the Russian intelligence services. They especially fear that these networks influence policy on energy — for which Poland relies heavily on Russia. And they sense that Polish politics will not be fully democratic until these networks and the scandals they foster have been purged from Polish life.
WHERE COMMUNISM CRUMBLED
Worthies — Walesa, Havel, and many others — have assembled in Gdansk for the 25th anniversary of the recognition of Solidarity as the first free trade union in the Communist world. They all want to pay tribute to the Poles who began the unraveling of Communism that helped liberate their own nations.
Gdansk is more than an exercise in nostalgia. Radek Sikorski, for the New Atlantic Initiative, has arranged a conference on the day before the official celebrations. It is attended not only by veterans of the anti-Communist struggle but also by young people from today's freedom movements in the Middle East, Asia, and elsewhere. These new dissidents report that their regions are moving toward more open and liberal societies — and that official U.S. government support is a big help. An especially significant moment occurs when a young Vietnamese woman asks whether the U.S. government would continue to press for democracy if it hoped to gain some benefit — bases, for instance — from an authoritarian government. The most senior U.S. official present, a senior figure on the National Security Council, gives a very honest reply. The U.S. government, he says, would sometimes appear inconsistent because it had many interests in world politics and, inevitably, these were often in conflict. When that happens, the freedom dissidents should hold America to its promises: It might push Washington to reach the right decision.
Later that evening, over dinner, the same official asks me where all the Western Europeans are. They above all should be listening to the testimony of these people struggling to be free. And he is right. Central and Eastern Europeans are present in large numbers; so are Americans; and there is a respectable number from Asia, Africa, and even Cuba. Except for a handful of government guests for the official celebration, however, the Western Europeans are conspicuous by their absence. A spiritual exhaustion seems to be gripping them. Since they feel they would have to do something about these evils if they knew about them, they decide that the best course is to avoid any such painful knowledge.
The British ambassador to Poland, an old friend from a National Review cruise, tells me that the two governments are to publish the record of Polish-British intelligence cooperation in World War II. Given that this cooperation included the stealing of the Germans' Enigma code-machine, it is no exaggeration to claim that the war might have been lost without it.
Outside my hotel, a small group of Ukrainians sings the national anthem and waves the blue and white flag whenever Ukraine's president, Viktor Yushchenko, appears. He walks over and talks to them. A diplomat watching the scene tells me the rumor that Yushchenko survived the poisoning attack because he is a keen beekeeper and, over the years, he had been stung so many times that he built up an immunity to the poison used.
The Poles generally give Yushchenko a warm welcome. They see him as an ally against a Russia using its energy supplies as a means of political pressure on its former satellites. And the latest news was that Russia and Germany had signed a deal to run a natural-gas pipeline through the Baltic rather than through Poland. "In other words," said a former Polish intelligence officer, "they want to be able to cut off energy to us without cutting it off to the Germans." This deal between Putin and Schroeder had aroused all the old fears that Poles have about Russo-German cooperation. It gave a sharp sense of topicality to the Solidarity celebrations. History never ends — and we should be prepared for future surprises.
EARLY WARNINGS
In Cracow again, I have lunch with the director of the Center for Political Studies. This was founded in 1992 as a think tank devoted to political philosophy and international relations. Among its scholarly projects has been an examination of early Polish critical studies of Communism, going back to the early 19th century. These have been collected in a remarkable volume: Polish Anti-Communism and Its Intellectual Traditions: An Anthology. Given that some of the authors in this volume were writing before a single socialist regime existed anywhere, their prescience is astounding. They predict the evils of socialism and analyze their causes from every angle. One of the most startling, indeed eerie, contributions comes from Count Zygmunt Krasinski, a poet and novelist who lived mainly in France and Italy at a time when Poland was divided between Russia and Germany.
In "Poland Facing the Storm," he foresees the 20th century in the following Dostoevskyan terms: "There will be many who will doubt God, many who will doubt their own immortality, many who will doubt their nation and country, many who will doubt love, many who will doubt the harmony of human fate, many who will despair of virtue . . . and he who submits to the seduction of this brief fainting of the eternal conscience, will perpetrate crimes and violence, having proved to himself logically or mystically that the era of crime has come and that evil has changed places with good . . . Moreover, not only individuals, but also whole collections of individual spirits, entire cities and nations will go that way . . . Muscovy waits for Western civilization to disintegrate, it waits until Europe is weakened by civil strife, social fratricide, until the entire world, worn out by an immense loss of blood and an equally great dwindling of righteousness . . . until the world, as I say, calls it forth and surrenders to it . . . And then Muscovy, convinced that nothing will resist her, that all the prophecies of Peter the Great have been fulfilled, will start to plunder, in such a hideous and inhuman way that it will thrust Europe into ultimate despair. Only then will human thoughts begin to revert to the decent, to the virtuous, to the moderate, to the good. People will look all over the world for a good man — not self-righteous but righteous, not a false, cruel, ignoble liar and sycophant — who could be their savior. Yet even more desperately will they look for a nation that has retained its humanity amid the turmoil and insanity. Moreover, such a nation will become the consolation of Europe and humankind simply by having remained decent, by having preserved the germ of sacredness and divinity on the earth."
He means Poland, of course. And it is difficult to resist the thought that he was forecasting Solidarity, John Paul II, and the role of the Polish Catholic Church since 1945. Reading this over a glass of vodka in a pavement café surrounded by camera-laden tourists, I found I could make the prophecy disappear with the usual modern rationalizations — vague enough to describe innumerable events, the product of shrewd observation and a good grasp of history, lucky coincidences, etc., etc. If I were a Pole, however, especially one who had lived through the 50 years from 1939 to 1989, I don't think I would be able to reason it away so easily. The feeling would surely grip me, even against my will, that Krasinski had forecast Poland's providential role in modern history. I would see also that the prophecy is of a Poland restored — restored to full nationhood and liberty after almost 200 years of semi-life. How many Poles could fully rid themselves of this oddly substantial superstition? Not many, I think; which persuades me that Poles and Catholicism are in a lifelong marriage, one that will last even after the memory of John Paul the Great fades — even if, like most things Polish, the marriage is likely to be a stormy one.
