Let’s Agree to Disagree: Maciej Kisilowski on How to Save Democracy From Deplorables on All Sides

**Andrew Keen** (0:00)
Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen On America, the daily interview show about the United States. Hello, everybody, we're on the road today in Vienna, Austria, at the Central European University in conversation with an old friend. Maciej Kisilowski is an expert on Poland and a man who we've had on the show many times to talk about Central Europe, what it tells us about the future and dangers of both democracy and illiberalism. Maciej, lovely to see you again.

**Maciej Kisilowski** (0:59)
Fantastic to be here.

**Andrew Keen** (1:01)
Maciej, many people think of Central Europe, Vienna, Budapest as the past, but I know you think of it more in futuristic terms, a kind of canary in the coal mine telling us not just about the future of politics in Central Europe but in the United States and Western Europe.

**Maciej Kisilowski** (1:20)
Of course. My country, Poland, elected what I would call radical or revolutionary conservative government in 21 years ago for the first time in 2005 Hungary elected a similar type of government in 2010 Guess what happened a few years later? That same model of politics explicitly patterned after the Polish and the Hungarian examples came to the United States with Donald Trump.
First in a muted form in his first term when there was a lot of old-style Republican establishment kind of taming him around the edges. And now in a much more untamed version in his second stint in power. So in many ways this region where we are is a bit of a leading indicator of broader trends that are happening in 21st century democracy and politics.

**Andrew Keen** (2:20)
Why is it a leading indicator? Is it because the economic forces of globalization, the great recession of the first part of the century had an immediate impact? Is it because of political legacy? Is it because of the closeness of Russia? What is it about Poland, Hungary, that makes it so interesting in terms of figuring out what's our next political chapter?

**Maciej Kisilowski** (2:53)
I think the first lesson is to give a giant pause to everybody who takes the materialist, implicitly neo-Marxist explanations of voters' behavior, that they always emerge or are rooted in economic factors. Why is this a cautionary tale? Because Poland and Hungary are completely opposite economic stories. Hungary has been one of the most prosperous countries in the Soviet Bloc, the so-called happiest barrack of the Soviet Bloc, and in post-1989 times actually fared quite poorly economically. Poland was one of the poorer countries of the Bloc and fared exceptionally well in one generation. Polish per capita GDP grew six and a half times, that's 650%. It's truly unbelievable progress.
Inequality, interestingly enough, has not skyrocketed as in other high-growth countries like Brazil. Polish Gini coefficient is below that of France, so it's a relatively equal country, thanks to in large part the European Union that supports Polish agriculture, Polish farmers, through very generous direct subsidies. So this story and these two countries that couldn't be more different economically and yet end up being very similar politically shows you that there must be something else than economic explanation, that the reason why we have radical conservatism in the 21st century, at least in large part, is not because of what we can call figuratively empty stomach.

**Andrew Keen** (4:44)
How much does it have to do with nationalism? Of course, Polish and Hungarian nationalisms are very powerful, very controversial.
One of the founding intellectual fathers of the Central European University, in fact, there was a room dedicated to him at your old Budapest campus, was Ernest Gelner, the great Czech anthropologist whose career was very much based on arguing that nationalism was a form of consciousness. What's the role of nationalism both in Hungary and Poland and in this fight between democracy and illiberal authoritarianism?

**Maciej Kisilowski** (5:25)
I mean, here we are actually hitting the absolute crucial point, because it's not only nationalism, it's more broadly identity. This part of the world is very rich in identities. Show me another part of the world when 100 million people, less than a third of the US population lives in 18 countries with separate histories, like real rich societies with separate identities, histories, cultures.
Identity is very important in this region, but identity is becoming more and more important all around the world, including in the US, including in France, all established democracies.
Central European leading indicator, as I call it, is particularly because this challenge of globalization, that the globalization on open society pose to the traditional notions of identity, not only the national identity or ethno-national identity, we should say, but also male identity as patriarchy, religious identities, that challenge was very much accelerated in Central Europe. Yes, we were separated from this slow progress towards open society that happened in post-World War, Western Europe and the United States, Western world more broadly, and in 1999 we needed to catch up with it at a faster speed. And that's why the reaction to this is similar in kind to the reaction that we are now seeing in the West, but was much more fierce because the process was much faster. There wasn't such a gradual process of decolonization, women's rights, the racial justice, LGBT rights that happened over decades, economic rights that happened over decades in the West. Here it was compressed into a short period of pre-accession conditionality, very much driven by the EU accession. And that's why it created such a fierce and fast reaction. But that reaction, I want to emphasize, is in my view, not in it, it's not of a different kind than the reaction you have in the West. This is the same process. This is the same rebellion, traditionalist reactionary rebellion, to open society that you see in the West. It's just a microcosm in which that happened in a much faster pace and a much broader scale. The institutions were also weaker. So of course, you know, the revolution had an easier job because the walls guarding the liberal, democratic castle were not as strong as in the West. But the reason why the revolutionaries are attacking the walls is fundamentally the same in my view.