Quality | 2009.08.06
Cameron may have helped the Polish right, but he has not served Britain | Timothy Garton Ash
A dubious rightwinger now heads conservatives in Europe. What on earth does the Tory leader think that he\'s doing?
The farce of David Cameron\'s Latvian legion becomes more ridiculous by the day. Last month, I deplored the fact that Cameron has led his members of the European parliament out of the mainstream, influential European People\'s Party (EPP) grouping into a much smaller new faction, now christened the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR).
The shadow Europe minister, Mark Francois, wrote an indignant letter to the Guardian, lecturing me on central European politics. Since I have been studying central European politics for 30 years, whereas Francois is a British politician and public affairs consultant, the phrase "don\'t teach your grandmother to suck eggs" came to mind. Sure enough, his claims were either misleading or flat wrong.
For example, Francois claimed that the bulk of the new group\'s members "will come from among the largest parties in their respective countries". Here are the facts. The EPP represents the largest parties in no less than 13 of the European Union\'s 27 member states, measured by their vote in the last European election. The Conservatives\' new grouping contains only one other party that can make that claim: the Civic Democratic party in the Czech Republic. Their new Polish partner, the Law and Justice party, is only the second largest party in Poland, well behind the Civic Platform – which is in the EPP. Otherwise, they have only solitary MEPs from five other countries: Holland, Belgium, Finland, Hungary and Latvia.
Since Francois wrote his letter, the farce has unfolded through another couple of acts. When Edward McMillan-Scott, a veteran Conservative MEP, learned that the new grouping was supposed to back the candidacy for vice-president of the parliament of Michal Kaminski , of the Law and Justice party faction, he – as his website reports – "did some web research which showed Kaminski had an extremist past as a member of [Poland\'s] National Revival". Despite a telephone appeal from Cameron, McMillan-Scott stood against Kaminski as an independent candidate for vice-president, and defeated him in a vote of the whole parliament.
The Poles were furious. Apparently, as a result of an angry phone call to Cameron from one of the Kaczynski twins (Jaroslaw, leader of the Law and Justice party, or Lech, the current president of Poland), the British Conservative Timothy Kirkhope then stood aside as leader of the ECR group, and the 37-year old Kaminski was elected in his place.
On his blog, the Conservative Eurosceptic MEP Daniel Hannan praises his friend Kaminski ("We each have two little girls of similar ages. We\'re both conservatives: Eurosceptics, free-marketeers and Atlanticists") and calls him "the closest thing to a British Tory outside the Carlton Club". In commentaries from the left, by contrast, Kaminski is associated with some of the views of the far right. As often happens when Poland is discussed in the west, the charge of antisemitism is never far away.
Sometimes, as in the case of the president Lech Kaczynski, these charges have been made quite unjustly. Judgment must be individual and careful. Born in 1972, Kaminski was, as a teenager in the last years of communist Poland, a member of what is now a revolting extremist party, National Rebirth of Poland. I don\'t know about you, but I\'m not prepared to disqualify a politician simply for stupid things he did as a teenager.
More serious is what Kaminski has said and done as an adult. In the 1990s, he was a dynamic and ambitious young activist in a rightwing, nationalist, xenophobic party, the Christian National Union. In 1999, he visited Britain to present what is described as a gorget embossed with an image of the Virgin Mary to General Augusto Pinochet. "This was the most important meeting of my whole life. Gen Pinochet was clearly moved and extremely happy with our visit," Kaminski told the BBC\'s Polish service. In a short video clip from July 2000, he describes homosexuals as pedaly , a slang term roughly translatable as "queers" or "poofters".
In 2001, he became involved in one of Poland\'s greatest post-1989 historical controversies, about the murder in July 1941 of almost all the Jewish inhabitants of the Polish village of Jedwabne – a murder committed by Polish villagers. As the local MP, he denounced the post-communist president Aleksander Kwasniewski for his readiness to apologise in Poland\'s name for this crime.
An interview with Kaminski appeared in a nasty rightwing weekly, Our Poland. In it, while acknowledging "the tragedy of the Holocaust", he is reported as saying the murder was committed by a handful of outcasts ("no decent person would be involved in burning Jews"), and that he will apologise if someone "from the Jewish side" apologises for what "the Jews" did during the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland from 1939 to 1941. (According to the Observer, Kaminski denies having given the interview, but the editor of Our Poland says he did.)
I do not allege that Kaminski himself is antisemitic. However, I believe few historians would hesitate to characterise as antisemitic other parts of Our Poland, which I have just been reading here in the library of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. A cartoon, for example, shows Poland as a leaf being eaten by what look like locusts, one of which has the star of David on its wings.
So in Kaminski\'s not so distant past there was some bad stuff, and a very worrying context. In recent years, he has become more sophisticated and careful in what he says, not least as he has got about in Europe. He was instrumental in orchestrating the slick, modern media strategy that brought the Kaczynski brothers to power. He came to the European parliament with the first wave of Polish MEPs in 2004, and apparently liked what he found in Brussels and Strasbourg. It seems he only reluctantly returned to Warsaw in 2007, to be President Kaczynski\'s chief spin doctor: the Andy Coulson of the Polish right. Analysts see him as one of the more promising modernisers in his party.
So what do we have here? A rabid rightwinger? A conservative moderniser? A good candidate for the Carlton Club? God alone knows what Kaminski really believed then or what he really believes now – except that he sure as hell believes in Kaminski. His old boss in the Christian National Union has described him as "flexible in his views, very sociable, with a sybaritic approach. He likes good food and wine." Give him another five years as the head of a grouping in the European parliament and he\'ll be outwardly little different from those thoroughly modern Italian post-fascists, or post-post-fascists, who are part of the mix in Silvio Berlusconi\'s People of Liberty coalition, which (this too must be acknowledged) is represented in the EPP. So in the long run, Cameron may unintentionally have made a small contribution to modernising the Polish right. And one day he, like General Pinochet, may receive a Madonna gorget from the hands of a now thoroughly modern Kaminski.
But, in all this, what service has the Conservative leader done to his own party? Or to Britain? What kind of European Union does he hope to achieve through such farcical manoeuvres? And what if he can\'t achieve it? Will he then ask the British people if Britain should leave the EU? I think we should be told.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]opean-parliament-conservatives
