Koneczny's Comparison of Poland and England

Why England?

  Why would a Polish historian compare Poland with England? At first glance, the two countries seem to have little in common. Yet Feliks Koneczny saw a resemblance in their political traditions: an attachment to liberty and self-government, and a society able to organize itself without waiting for instructions from the state.

  The same resemblance may help explain why the culture of the English-speaking world feels familiar to many Poles. Poles watch Hollywood films, cheer for the lone underdog, and laugh at the same jokes about red tape. Enjoying another country's culture, or even choosing to live there, does not prove that two political traditions are identical. It is, however, a good reason to look more closely at what they may share.

Koneczny and his theory of civilizations

  Feliks Koneczny (1862–1949) was a Polish historian who developed a comparative theory of civilizations. By civilization he did not mean a race, a nation, or a level of technological progress. He meant a method of organizing collective life, above all the relationship between law, ethics, society and the state.

  His categories are his own analytical framework, not labels that every historian would apply in the same way. Three of them matter here:

• Latin civilization: the state exists to serve society, public life is bound by ethical standards, and local self-government and independent social institutions have room to grow.
• Byzantine civilization: greater weight on centralized administration, uniform rules, and the authority of the state over social initiative.
• Turanian civilization: political life organized around personal allegiance to a ruler or commander, with power taking precedence over independent institutions and legal restraints.

  These are descriptions of political and social patterns, not names for all the people living in a given country. In Koneczny's account, Poland belonged chiefly to the Latin tradition. He saw Byzantine influences in parts of German, especially Prussian, political history, and Turanian influences in Russia. That was his interpretation, not a claim that every German or Russian thought or lived alike.

  The question worth exploring is therefore a narrow one. Can Poland's historical preference for civic initiative and self-government explain why Koneczny saw a parallel with England? And why might that parallel still interest readers in the English-speaking world?

About the excerpts and the translation

  The excerpts below come from two of Koneczny's works: Dzieje administracji w Polsce w zarysie (An Outline History of Administration in Poland, 1924) and Państwo i prawo w cywilizacji łacińskiej (The State and Law in Latin Civilization). The translations are my own.

  Koneczny wrote in the first half of the twentieth century, in a rhetorical and somewhat old-fashioned Polish. The translation aims for an equivalent register in modern English rather than imitating seventeenth-century forms. Numbered notes at the end explain historical references and flag claims that need qualification today.

  Three of Koneczny's terms deserve a word of warning before you read on:

• Anglo-Saxon. In continental European usage of Koneczny's time, this simply meant the English-speaking nations: Britain, the United States and the British dominions. It carries no racial meaning in his text, although in American usage today it can.
• Bureaucracy. Koneczny meant a specific model: a professional caste of state officials directing social and economic life from above, as in Prussia. He contrasted it with administration carried out by self-governing local communities. He did not claim that English-speaking countries had no officials at all.
• Liberty. In old Poland, political liberty and self-government belonged chiefly to the nobility (the szlachta), roughly 6 to 10 percent of the population. Most peasants were bound by serfdom. Koneczny's praise of Polish institutions should be read with that limit in mind.

From An Outline History of Administration in Poland

Throughout the whole period of her first independence, Poland had no civil or criminal code at all.¹ There is no cause for embarrassment: the Anglo-Saxon nations have none to this day. Neither England nor the United States possesses those heavy volumes that try to foresee every situation in which a person might find himself. Yet England and the United States have the finest courts in the world, and their justice is the swiftest, the most uncompromising and the least costly. Plainly, these virtues do not depend on codes.

The second cardinal principle of our courts was openness. That is why their faults, too, were loud, glaring and visible from afar: everything happened in public view. Abroad, one can often find similar faults, but one has to search for them, because they were kept secret. Today only historians of law know about them, while in Poland every schoolboy can hold forth on the abuses of the Lublin Tribunal and on justice done “by fair means or foul.”² Few people realize that open judicial procedure was a great achievement of Polish culture. Before the French Revolution, it was known only in England and Poland.³

The new state was to be a federation of provinces.⁴ The old division into duchies never disappeared. The duchies lived on in the Commonwealth as historical units and as administrative provinces: as voivodeships, and as smaller, separately administered units called lands. Every Polish land, however small, that had once been a separate duchy kept its distinct identity to the very end.

The outward symbol of this was the survival of all the court offices of the old duchies, now attached to the voivodeships and lands. Stripped of any practical function, these offices became honorary titles. They survived because nobody abolished them, and nobody abolished them because they harmed no one, while they carried historical memories and tied people to the traditions of their own region.

Even later, every county had its officers of the royal court: the pantler, the cup-bearer, the master of the horse, and others.⁵ When the King, on his travels, stopped at the border of a county, they greeted him and took up their “service,” which they performed until he rode on to the border of the next.

All of this dated from the time of the provincial division — from before 1295, and mostly from before 1340 — and it was preserved, with full ceremony, until 1795.⁶ The local assemblies of the nobility, the dietines, elected these “dignitaries” even though the posts carried no power.⁷ A nobleman competed to become a “carver” or a “steward,” because it was an honor and came with the right to a formal title of distinction.

Does the reader smile? It is, admittedly, a little amusing. But in England it is exactly the same! There, too, nothing that harmed nobody was ever abolished. To this day there are ancient titles and ceremonial offices. Scientists famous throughout the world for their discoveries turn out to be… Archers of His Majesty. They appear at public ceremonies in the dress of fifteenth-century archers, and nobody finds this ridiculous.⁸ The immense social strength of English society, the strength that produced such political power, draws its life from national tradition. In England tradition is sacred. So it once was in Poland, and that is why this symbolism of regional distinctness survived.

From The State and Law in Latin Civilization

Prussian administration had more of a police character.⁹ From this came the doctrine of the state's omnipotence, and supervision by state officials over every area of economic and social life. The Anglo-Saxon nations, by contrast, manage entirely without bureaucracy. It is to this, together with their high level of civilization, that they owe their position as masters of the world.¹⁰
The precise measure of how social and state affairs are joined is the degree of self-government. It can be observed exactly in the institutions of every European state, from Russia to England. Tellingly, the same measure can be applied to civil liberty. Liberty is self-government!

Here lies the second similarity between Polish and English history: neither nation ever knew bureaucracy. England with a bureaucratic administration is unimaginable. In Poland, bureaucracy was imposed only by the partitioning powers.¹¹ The restored Polish state will not find itself; it will wander in the wilderness until it cuts this parasitic growth out of its body. If we cannot summon the will to return to a self-governing state, independence itself will remain permanently at risk, because a bureaucratic Poland will never achieve proper social and political development.

It is a naive error to imagine that history anywhere follows a continuous line, even if not a straight one, in a fixed direction. In fact the line is often not only broken but can change course altogether. Breaks in direction happen in almost every society; the history of Russia, for example, consists of constant changes of direction, some of them radical. Few societies show a clear continuity in their history, not only of cause and effect but also of purpose. Among European nations, the histories of England and Poland stand out most in this respect: both are remarkably evolutionary.

We Poles must aim at a strong state, and at a society stronger than the state. So we must design for ourselves a state without bureaucracy. If we find no model for this anywhere on the Continent, that should not discourage us. In the past we showed considerable creativity in statecraft, so why should we not try now to devise a state of our own kind? We set a good example in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, to some extent in the seventeenth, and in the Constitution of the Third of May.¹² Perhaps today, too, we will create something worth imitating, with experience protecting us from the mistakes of the past. Polish creativity in statehood would at the same time be European work: the work of an active, sovereign member of Western civilization.

If now, after the second upheaval of all Europe since the Napoleonic Wars,¹³ we again fail to arrive at a new form of the state, the general culture of public life will decline across our whole civilization, with the single exception of the Anglo-Saxon peoples.¹⁴ A form belonging to another civilization, even an Oriental one, may then triumph on the European continent. For the “modern” state — the Rechtsstaat of German legal theory — is falling apart and cannot be sustained. What will take its place? Socialism, which in practice becomes the destroyer of civilization?

What the parallel shows, and where it ends

  Koneczny's comparison rests on four concrete claims. Both countries, in his account, relied on judge-made and customary law rather than comprehensive codes. Both held trials in public. Both preserved old institutions instead of sweeping them away. And both had strong traditions of local self-government that he contrasted with rule by a centralized bureaucracy. From these he drew his central thesis: liberty is self-government.

  That thesis will sound familiar to American readers. In Democracy in America (1835–1840), Alexis de Tocqueville argued that New England town meetings taught citizens how to practice liberty. Koneczny arrived at a similar idea through Polish and English history.

  The parallel has limits, too. Polish self-government was largely the self-government of the nobility, and historians still debate how far the Commonwealth's decentralization contributed to its weakness and eventual partition. The English-speaking countries, for their part, built large professional civil services in the twentieth century.

  Koneczny's argument is therefore best read not as a description of how things are today. It is a claim about where the strength of a free society lies: in institutions that society builds for itself, rather than in instructions issued by the state. That is a claim Poles, Americans, Britons and Australians can test against their own history.

Notes

• 1. Codes. Koneczny contrasts common law with continental codification such as the French Civil Code (1804) or the German BGB (1900). The claim fits England, which has never codified its criminal law. It does not fit the United States: most states have penal codes (for example, the California Penal Code), Louisiana and California have civil codes, and federal statutes are compiled in the U.S. Code. Nor was the Commonwealth wholly without codification: the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which formed part of it from 1569, had the Lithuanian Statutes (1529, 1566, 1588), covering civil and criminal law. A draft civil and criminal code by Andrzej Zamoyski was rejected by the Sejm in 1780.
• 2. The Lublin Tribunal (Crown Tribunal), established in 1578, was the highest appeal court for the nobility of the Polish Crown. It later became notorious for partisanship and corruption. The Polish idiom prawem i lewem (“by the right and the left”) means “by fair means or foul”; it plays on prawo, which means both “right” and “law.”
• 3. Public trials. Much of continental Europe followed inquisitorial procedure, with written and often secret proceedings. Still, the claim that only England and Poland knew public trials before 1789 is Koneczny's generalization, and historians would qualify it.
• 4. The new state. Between 1138 and 1320 Poland was divided into separate duchies ruled by different branches of the Piast dynasty. It was reunified as a kingdom with the coronation of Władysław I the Elbow-High in 1320. A voivodeship (województwo) was a province headed by a voivode; a land (ziemia) was a smaller historic district.
• 5. Court offices. In Polish: pantler (stolnik), cup-bearer (podczaszy), master of the horse (koniuszy), carver (krajczy). By early modern times these were honorary titles held by local nobles.
• 6. Dates. In 1295 Przemysł II was crowned king, the first coronation since the division of the realm. In 1795 the Third Partition erased Poland from the map; Koneczny's “first independence” means the period up to that year. Poland regained independence in 1918.
• 7. Dietines (sejmiki) were local assemblies of the nobility in each land. They elected deputies to the national Sejm and handled local affairs. The title in question was a formal Polish honorific, roughly equivalent to “Right Honourable.”
• 8. The archers. Koneczny is almost certainly referring to the Royal Company of Archers, founded in 1676. It serves as the Sovereign's Bodyguard in Scotland, not England. Its present uniform is not a fifteenth-century costume. His broader point holds across the United Kingdom, however: the Yeomen of the Guard, founded in 1485, still parade in Tudor-style dress.
• 9. Police character. In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German usage, Polizei meant the state's regulation of internal social and economic life in general, not just law enforcement. Hence the term Polizeistaat.
• 10. No bureaucracy; masters of the world. Koneczny wrote in the first half of the twentieth century, when the British Empire was at or near its greatest extent and the United States was rising. Today Britain, the United States and Australia all have large professional civil services. His contrast concerns structure: in England, for example, much of county government was carried out until 1888 by unpaid justices of the peace, not salaried officials.
• 11. Partitions. Prussia, Russia and Austria divided Poland among themselves in 1772, 1793 and 1795. The Polish state was restored in 1918.
• 12. The Constitution of the Third of May (1791) is often described as Europe's first modern written national constitution and the world's second, after the U.S. Constitution.
• 13. The second upheaval is most likely the First World War (1914–1918), the first being the Napoleonic Wars. Rechtsstaat (“state under the rule of law”) is a concept of nineteenth-century German legal theory.
• 14. Anglo-Saxon peoples. Polish plemię anglosaskie, literally “the Anglo-Saxon tribe” or “stock”; see the note on terms above. By an “Oriental” form, Koneczny most likely meant the Bolshevik model in Soviet Russia, which he classified as Turanian.

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