Joe Klein's European Listening Tour

Joe Klein is a staff writer for The New Yorker. He is traveling in Europe for the London Guardian, where a version of this article first appeared.

Itinerary: Warsaw, Poland

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Something's amiss here. Everyone is so delightfully pro-American. The taxi driver: "You're American! Great country!" A lawyer says, puckishly, "When we join the European Union, we'll be your Trojan Horse." A little boy waves—dramatically, in broad sweeps—Old Glory on the street. Very nice, but that's not really what's amiss.

The thing is ... well, there's no way to be delicate about it: Everyone here is white. They are not ostentatiously white the way, say, Swedes are; they are not pink and freckled like the Celts. They are just plain old white people. They are tall and handsome and have incredibly straight noses. The women are slender, with lots of cheekbone—butterflies who've emerged from the cocoon of a lumpy, potato-stuffed, peasant past. The men seem perfectly geometrical. Round heads, square shoulders, clear eyes, and still more cheekbone. They walk about easily, gaily; none of the grim, paranoid rush of Soviet times. But their blithe presence is overwhelmed by the absence of others.

Most obviously, there aren't many Africans, Arabs, or Asians. The rest of Europe seems a wonderfully Technicolor place these days—the metro in Paris, Rome, and London could almost be mistaken for the subway in New York. Heterogeneity is a tonic; it adds the energy of unexpected combinations—the woman in chador chatting with the blonde woman in jogging gear on the tube. Ah, cosmopolitanism! But alas, Poland is merely Polish, an experiment in ethnic deprivation; the unbearable whiteness of being.

Speaking of cosmopolitanism—Stalin's favorite euphemism for Jewishness—there aren't many Jews here, either. There used to be three million, but the Nazis took care of that. Forty percent of Warsaw was Jewish; the deficit now seems overpowering, they fill the empty spaces in the streets. And not just the Jews: Thousands upon thousands of Polish Catholics were killed at Auschwitz, thousands more were worked to death in Siberia; the officer class of the Polish army was slaughtered by the Nazis and the Soviets. Poland was the charnel house of the 20^th century.

The Germans are gone now, victims in the end, chased out of the northern and western sections of modern Poland, areas that used to be called Prussia, in a monumental act of ethnic cleansing just after the second World War; the Ukrainians were, similarly, ushered east. The Russians are also gone, of course, but the squalor of their system lingers on. There are wisps of Soviet kitsch all about. A massive Stalinesque wedding cake, now housing the ministry of culture (isn't that an oxymoron?), dominates the middle of town. Soviet housing mars the suburbs; Soviet thinking mars the government; hulks of Soviet state enterprises—the mines and shipyards and steel mills where Solidarity, and freedom, were born—mar the economy.

And Solidarity is gone as well. There are the remnants of a trade union that goes by that name, as we shall see, but Solidarity at full tide was a national uprising, comprising workers and intellectuals, farmers and priests and shopkeepers. It was the most seductive of political fantasies, an alliance of the oppressed against an Evil Empire (come to think of it, Solidarity debuted about the same time as the Star Wars films did, with a similar plot line).

Indeed, Solidarity is a good part of the reason why I'm here—its legacy of moral clarity in the socialist era and of political freedom and bold market reform after liberation. For years, Poland—the most populous of the former Soviet satellites, with 38 million people—has been considered a capitalist showcase, the country said to be making the easiest transition from communism to freedom, the country best prepared to join the EU Its economy grew at a rapid pace in the '90s; there was talk of a Polish Miracle. But the story has soured in the past few years.

The economy stopped growing, as market economies will sometimes do. Unemployment stands at more than 18 percent. In the parliamentary election of 2000, the center did not hold. The former Communists, who had gained power posing as social democrats, remained in control, but the center-right opposition—largely composed of Solidarity remnants—collapsed. Two rather unique populist parties suddenly materialized as significant forces. One was the League of Polish Families, a party of Catholic nationalist extremists (which received 9 percent of the vote); the other was called Self-Defense, a frightening mixture of nationalism and socialism led by a bully named Andrzej Lepper (it received 10 percent, but its strength has nearly doubled in recent public opinion polls). By contrast, Freedom Union—the party of the former Solidarity intellectuals—received only 3 percent and has disappeared from the Polish parliament, the Sejm.

And so, the Polish jitters. Pessimists abound in Warsaw and around the country. There is a war between the government and the still-strict central bank over monetary policy. Lepper is making news every day, usually involving scuffles with the police (last Thursday, he tried to stop imported grain from entering Poland by rail) or with his fellow parliamentarians (he was removed from the hall after a scuffle last Friday). It is likely that the former Communists, led now by prime minister Leszek Miller, will attempt to move left, sloppily, in an attempt to ease the pain, outflank the populists, and keep their apparatchiks prosperous.

"Poland is becoming more and more like Latin America," says Jaroslaw Kaczynski , leader of the Law and Justice party, a reformist center-right political remnant of Solidarity. "People succeed here not because they're talented, but because they know the right people. There is a Polish saying: Thousands gain, millions lose. This is an oversimplification, but we do pay an enormous corruption tax, and no one seems interested in reform. So we have an economic crisis that threatens to become a political crisis—my fear is that unless the economy improves, the populist parties will become very strong."

Versions of this scenario were being offered all over Warsaw, from the left and from the right. Part of it is chronic Slavic pessimism: That the sky hasn't yet fallen is considered a quirk of physics, possibly caused by the intercession of the Virgin Mary, a powerful figure in this extremely religious country, where 48 percent are regular churchgoers. The universality of the dread is striking. Indeed, the only optimist I could find in Warsaw was a man who has always been a dissident of one sort or another: Adam Michnik, the editor-in-chief of Gazeta Wyborcza, the legendary newspaper of the Solidarity movement, once published by mimeograph and now the most popular newspaper in Poland.

"It's still like a wonderful dream," Michnik tells me in the spanking new Gazeta offices, complete with swimming pool, workout room, dining room, towering bamboo plants, and terraces. "I'm sometimes afraid to open my eyes in the morning."

Michnik is 56 and a born troublemaker. He dresses casually—knit shirt, jeans, sandals—and laughs easily. "I think it was Truman, or maybe Churchill, who was once asked by a Russian journalist to explain the difference between the two systems. He said, 'When the doorbell rings at 6 in the morning in our country, you can be sure it's just the milkman.' Well, the doorbell rang for me more than once—ironically, it was quite often at 6 in the morning. I spent six years in prison. That's my basis of comparison. Now we have no censorship, a market economy, you can buy anything you can dream of ..."

"But people don't seem to be very happy," I point out.

He shrugs. "Poland has its problems, but these are problems that all European countries have. There is a story from prison that I sometimes tell. It's about the way we divided the good wardens from the bad ones. The good wardens would accept bribes in return for longer visits, more coffee, larger packages from home. The bad wardens were the honest ones, who wouldn't take bribes. What we have in Poland now is that the country is being run by the good wardens."

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