Historical social change vs. the decline of civilizations. Part 3

This will be the final part of our series of posts which are dedicated to the irrational panic among the conservatives in relation to the historical social change. In the previous commentary we have discussed the examples of ideological blindness of former and current US politicians, as well as within the Catholic Church. What all of those cases had in common is the inability, or rather unwillingness, of the particular agents to treat uncritically various aspects of their historical heritage. Here we shall continue this exposition with a shift in focus towards various discourses by European politicians.

Let’s begin with someone who is not usually considered to be a representative of the conservative brand, but who, nevertheless, comes from a country which is regarded as being very religious. Namely, the current Prime Minister of Poland, Donald Tusk. Given that historically the feudal state under the name of Poland became a kingdom in 1025, Tusk chose the year of 2025 as the occasion to proclaim “a new national doctrine - a Piast doctrine”. The Piasts were the first dynasty in Polish history, hence naturally very important for the nationalist social consciousness. Nevertheless, it is the uncritical treatment of our history that allows Donald Tusk to worship historical characters who had slaves working the land of the sovereign. And also, to worship the early Piast kingdom whose political configuration was that of aristocratic oligarchy.

Would Donald Tusk himself condone and justify slavery? Of course not. And would he be supportive of a proposition to restore aristocratic oligarchy in our modern times? Again, definitely not. On the other hand, the Piast princes themselves would be shocked and outraged if they could witness our contemporary society with all our political rights, gender equality, etc. And in their eyes Tusk himself would merely be a usurper of their divinely ordained role of political leadership. But the nationalist ideology has a particular political objective which prohibits all critical engagement with the past. Little surprise, then, that on such a patriotic occasion for the Polish nation, the wisdom of the ancestors had also to be invoked.

“The Prime Minister announced that Poland is adopting a new national doctrine inspired by the Piast dynasty's strength and courage, exemplified by the coronation of Bolesław the Brave in 1025. [...] Poland in 2025 faces vastly different challenges than those during the reign of its first crowned ruler, but it should still draw on ancestral wisdom. Bolesław the Brave, guided by the good of the homeland, managed to preserve the country's independence while building its strength through affiliation with the European community.”

And to quote Tusk more directly:

“This is the lesson of Bolesław the Brave, who knew how to combine independence and belonging when, through his decision, he fulfilled his father’s work and made Poland a sovereign kingdom. At the same time, he consciously made Poland a part of the community of values - the West, Europe.”

The following are a few examples from Polish history in relation to the values within the feudal European community which Tusk has embraced here:

“However, the legal situation of the rural population deteriorated in the period of feudal fragmentation (1138–1320), during which the Church and some noble families gained judicial immunity, which granted landowners the exclusive right to administer justice on their estates. During the reign of Casimir the Great (1333–70), the last king of the Piast dynasty, greater numbers of feudal lords were granted such judicial privileges. After the passing of the Statutes of Wiślica for the area of Lesser Poland (Małopolska) and Piotrków for Greater Poland (Wielkopolska) in 1346–7, the personal freedom of peasants became further limited because no more than two peasants could leave the village during the year without the lord’s consent. [...] In 1518, during the reign of Sigismund the Old, peasants from private estates were deprived of the right to complain about their lords to the royal courts. Thus, the nobility obtained the right of life and death over their subjects. In 1543, under the rule of Sigismund Augustus, peasants were finally assigned to the land (Lat. glebae adscriptum) and denied the right to buy their freedom from serfdom.”

All of this brings us to a particularly ironic aspect of Polish history. On the one hand, the nation is supposed to draw inspiration from the Piasts who had managed to “preserve the country's independence”. But on the other hand, it appears that as far as the majority of the feudal state’s inhabitants is concerned, it was the 18th century partitions that finally brought them greater relief:

“The dismantling of the serfdom system began in the second half of the eighteenth century with the partitions of Poland. As early as 1772–92, the Prussians undertook thorough reforms of rural relations, including the emancipation of landless peasants, peasant children and those who went to school. The incorporation of peasant land into manorial farms was also prohibited, and pańszczyzna in state domains was limited to sixty days a year .[...] In the Austrian partition between 1781 and 1789, Emperor Joseph II began the reform of rural relations by introducing so-called patents, which limited pańszczyzna to three days a week and granted peasants the right to migrate from the countryside, freely choose their profession and marry without the consent of their lord.”

Such a historical perspective would be scandalous from the traditional nationalist point of view. However, that is not because it is factually incorrect. Rather, it is due to the ideological mission of nationalism. Its sole concern is the abstract idea of a nation with its wishful ignorance of the many insurmountable conflicts within the society. The plight of the real-life individual member of this nation is irrelevant. In this sense, nationalism contains the same feature that also characterises conservatism. Namely, both of these ideologies have a political agenda which would not survive under the weight of historical facts. Hence, these - especially the unpleasant ones - are to be ignored and veiled over. Another great example of such romantic mental machinations is provided by conservative Hungarian politicians. Here is a quote from the former Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orbán, regarding the purported negative effects of migration:

“Here in Europe, populated by thousand-year-old nations that rest on cultural foundations, this is the most important dimension of migration. Over here, migration is an identity issue. The lost workforce may well be replaced – with machines or resettled people – but here in Europe a country can only function if its members profess more or less the same values on the most important issues, and stand on the same foundations. If this is not the case, then in Europe a country and a nation inevitably falls apart; this is only a question of time.”

Once again, even without any immigration, the social values of a nation or of a civilization constantly evolve due to the laws of historical social change. Yet, people like Viktor Orbán can not reconcile themselves with this basic fact. They simply want the historical processes to stop at the feet of their generation. And they are likewise forced by their conservative political agenda to ignore the social changes that have taken place so far. In the case of Orbán, Hungarian society is assumed to have maintained constant social norms throughout its entire history. Here he quotes the Hungarian constitution:

“Our Fundamental Law shall be the basis of our legal order; it shall be an alliance among Hungarians of the past, present and future.”

Would such an alliance be possible, however, if we were to resurrect the ancestors of our modern Hungarians? How would their ancestral wisdom react to our contemporary social norms and beliefs? Here are some facts regarding the Hungarian Árpád-era past:

“Just as a woman’s access to property depended on her marital status, so too did her access to power. Many women had very little control over their own lives in any manner because they were slaves. Slavery existed in Hungary on a much greater scale than it did elsewhere in contemporary Europe, and secular lords frequently used slaves to work their property. The sources used the classical terms of servus and ancilla for the male and female slaves respectively.”

And how would Viktor Orbán himself evaluate the 1670 regulation in Moson County, whereby the “peasants who failed to yield the road to a nobleman could be beaten by the offended nobleman, and the authorities were instructed not to act on complaints from the peasants”? Obviously, nobody in Hungary today would accept such social inequality. But when one is a conservative nationalist, one becomes blind to such uncomfortable historical aspects. And it is only because of this ideological blindness that it is possible to reconcile the championing of the “Christian heritage” of a nation with the glorification of its pre-Christian past. Below is a brief description of the latter, which was a relatively short historical period following the arrival of the Magyars on European soil:

“For the next half-century the Magyars were the scourge of Europe, which they raided far and wide, striking terror into the hearts of their victims with the suddenness of their descents - for their little, lithe horses outdistanced any news of their coming - the ferocity of their attacks, their outlandish and, to Western eyes, hideous appearance, their blood-curdling battle-yells. Historians have counted thirty-three expeditions between 898 and 955, some of them to places as far afield as Bremen, Cambrai, Orléans, Nimes, Otranto and Constantinople, and there must have been innumerable smaller enterprises of which no record has survived. Most of these raids were simple profit-making expeditions, in which cities and churches were ransacked and gold and treasure carried off, with captives for domestic use, re-export or re-sale in return for ransom.”

These passages about terrorizing and ransacking the rest of Europe are particularly ironic in the light of how contemporary migrants are portrayed by Hungarian and other conservative nationalists - as threatening, invasion-like hordes. But if one takes pride in being a bastion defending Christian Europe against barbarism today, consistency would also demand condemning one’s ancestors’ barbaric raids against other Christian peoples in the past. Yet, consistency is hardly nationalism’s priority. Here the task is to defend your tribe - always and everywhere, no matter what. As Donald Trump himself has stated in relation to American history, “we are not going to apologize for America. We are going to stand up for America.” And who, after all, would expect someone like Viktor Orbán to apologize for Hungary?

To finish off, other European countries offer similar case studies of conservative anxieties surrounding civilizational or national survival. Slovakia’s Christian Democratic movement, for instance, has “spun an apocalyptic narrative according to which acceptance of same-sex marriage was the harbinger of civilizational demise. The Christian Democrats cited European, as opposed to national, rates related to births, marriage, abortion, and divorce to sound the alarm.” Once again, the warning was unequivocal: “every civilization that turned away from its own values ceased to exist.”. And indeed, the old European civilization is about to cease to exist. Unfortunately, the old generations can not do anything about it. At the same time, however, a new European civilization is already taking shape, one in which women are no longer treated as expendable reproductive instruments and children are recognized as individuals with personalities, needs, and futures of their own, rather than reduced to units in demographic calculations.

Moreover, the Slovak politician Marián Kvasnička once “implored his colleagues to resist the organizations that were hard at work ‘to destroy and totally annihilate deeply-rooted European traditions’.” Yet many such traditions had disappeared long before he was born. Would he also mourn the abolition of slavery, the decline of feudalism, the end of the Inquisition’s tribunals, or the disappearance of dynastic inbreeding among European royalty? Probably not. In the same way that subsequent generations came to accept the disappearance of these once-established institutions and practices, future generations will also see nothing extraordinary about same-sex couples or other forms of cohabitation. The pagan European civilization has died, and so has the feudal one. But on none of these historical occasions has the social progress of humanity halted. And neither will it today. The old world is once again dying its natural death. But the new one will be just fine.

Sources:
1. https://www.gov.pl/web/primeminister/polands-new-national-doctrine-independence-and-belonging-based-on-strength?utm_source
2. https://www.persee.fr/doc/ahess_0395-2649_1982_num_37_1_282829?pageId=T1_165&utm_source
3. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/contemporary-european-history/article/peasants-and-the-politics-of-history-memories-of-serfdom-in-debates-on-land-reform-in-early-interwar-poland/448EC862921EBD6959C49A0E5B7FEB6E?utm_source
4. https://2015-2022.miniszterelnok.hu/prime-minister-viktor-orbans-address-at-the-4th-budapest-demographic-summit/?utm_source
5. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0304418110000126?utm_source
6. https://mek.oszk.hu/00900/00940/html/doc/c300678.htm?utm_source
7. https://mek.oszk.hu/02000/02086/02086.htm?utm_source
8. https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-tame-continent-america-945121
9. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10758216.2022.2050927?utm_source#d1e102

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