Inspired by Robert Putnam’s study of social capital in Italy (Making Democracy Work, 1994), Kenneth Jowitt’s political-cultural theorization of communist legacies (New World Disorder, 1992), and Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis” about the American West (The Frontier in American History, 1953), Tomek Grabowski has given us an account of Poland’s contemporary political development that will challenge and stimulate students of Poland and postcommunism alike. At the outset, it is important to note how much of a conundrum Poland has been since 1989. On the one hand, it played a pivotal role in the collapse of communism and quickly emerged as a leader in economic and political liberalization in the 1990s. More recently, however, it became an exemplar of democratic backsliding under the leadership of a party with roots in the Solidarity past. Tomek Grabowski’s explanation for the Janus-like face of postcommunist Poland—democratic and illiberal, western-facing and tribally nationalistic—is that there are “two Polands” (6): one built around an individualist political culture and located in the “Western territories” that were transferred from Germany after World War II and one, constituting the historic core of the state, which has retained the values of a corporatist and traditional political culture.

The chief elements of Grabowski’s argument are as follows. Following WWII, the annexation of former German territories by Poland and the expulsion of the vast majority of its ethnic-German inhabitants created a kind of frontier society in the western territories. As in the American West in Turner’s telling, it was a space largely beyond the reach of the state, unstructured by traditional social hierarchies, and offering its settlers a combination of boundless opportunity and danger. It was an environment that attracted and awarded the risk-taking, the self-reliant, and the selfish. In time, Grabowski argues, a critical mass of these settlers came to develop a morally-grounded, cooperative, and achievement-oriented ethos: call it individualism, “a system of beliefs centered on one’s inner worth and in one’s capacity for judgment” (1). According to Grabowski, the critical institutions in transforming narrow self-interest and opportunism into individualism were, surprisingly, the Communist Party and then the Catholic Church. He argues that the western territories developed uniquely un-authoritarian, un-corporatist versions of these institutions, at least initially.

Grabowski’s great strength is his sensitivity to historical contingency, and even irony. (He labels the building of the Catholic Church in the western territories a “quasi-Reformation.”) Methodologically, he combines a political scientist’s attention to the comparative method—leveraging internal comparisons to test alternative explanations and the “observable implications” of his theory—with a historian’s mastery of the case and the varieties of evidence that may be wrung from it. To advance his argument, Grabowski draws on a host of local-level electoral and demographic indicators, long-form interviews with political and economic elites that he conducted in Wrocław and Łódż, archival materials from the Polish Catholic church, and a multitude of memoirs of ordinary Poles living in the western territories. For a student of contemporary Polish history, this book will be an invaluable guide to the endless variety of evidence that it is possible to gather.

One tension is that the evidentiary standards for his two audiences, political scientists and historians, are hard to reconcile. For some political scientists, Grabowski’s research design will seem too loose to draw strong inferences from. For some historians, his characterizations of political-cultural differences between the western territories and the rest of Poland may seem too sweeping. Contentious for both audiences: the proposition that political culture can change as rapidly as Grabowski argues it did in western Poland, shifting from corporatist traditionalism to individualism between 1945 and the 1970s. By comparison, Putnam traces political-cultural differences between northern and southern Italy back to the eleventh century. As another point of reference, a current wave of scholarship identified with the anthropologist Joseph Henrich has, like Grabowski, become interested in explaining the origins of individualism and comparing political cultures globally (see The WEIRDEST People in the World, 2020). Unlike Grabowski, the methodology is very much large-N, utilizing opinion surveys and survey experiments spanning scores of countries. Strikingly, this research argues that individualism in western Europe developed in a centuries-long process that was driven, unintentionally, by Church law preventing marriage between cousins. More striking than the different causal mechanisms is the time necessary to produce political-cultural change. The real miracle of Grabowski’s western territories is perhaps not that individualism emerged, but that it could have emerged in a couple of decades, not centuries.