uneasy yoking of excessively specific purposes to exceedingly general ones: on the one hand, the purging of the army and polity of certain undesired personnel; on the other hand, the regeneration of moral excellence in the service of the state. Though he would attempt to make a virtue of his and the new regime’s freedom from ideological preconceptions, to the distress of his recent supporters on the Left, Piłsudski and Poland were to pay a heavy price for this absence of a clear, long-run, middle-range political program in the sanacja.
The strategy alluded to in the preceding paragraph, that of fashioning an allegedly nonpolitical, or rather suprapolitical, phalanx to assist the regime in supposedly elevating state interests above partisan ones, was Piłsudski’s organizational anticipation of new parliamentary elections. Having committed himself after the coup to a major effort at exercising his power through legal, constitutional channels, Piłsudski had thereby accepted an obligation to put that power to an electoral test sometime after the expiration of the legislature’s mandate in November, 1927. This challenge, in turn, made it necessary to weld his diversified following into a cohesive and disciplined camp in preparation for these elections. This camp, however, could not be like the other political parties. For one thing, no serious social and ideological agreement was possible among the post-coup Piłsudskists, who represented a great variety of political views. Hence, a vague, general program was essential for the new organization. On the one hand, this vagueness was a condition imposed by diversity. On the other, it could be turned into a lure to induce defections from the traditional parties. Yet another factor rendering a typical political party unfeasible was that Piłsudski’s own political views, which were seconded and lent some theoretical refinement by Bartel’s concept of proper administration of government, were by now passionately antipartisan and statist. His own political machine therefore had to be a kind of state-party, capable both of expressing his sanacja notions and of subsuming within itself the widest possible spectrum of old and new, genuine and self-styled Piłsudskists.
The party that came into being was given the awkward but candid name of the Nonpartisan Bloc for Cooperation with the Government, generally referred to by its Polish initials as the BBWR (Bezpartyjny Blok Współpracy z Rządem). The core of the BBWR consisted of Piłsudski’s ex-Legionary paladins, who were intellectually reinforced and “modernized” by the sponsors and practitioners of the new cult of technocracy. To this inner core were assimilated converts from all the earlier political orientations in Poland—conservative, Socialist, peasantist, centrist, Catholic, even from the ethnic minorities—regardless of whether they came out of conviction, prudence, opportunism, anxiety, or resignation. This great variety of the BBWR’s membership could be accommodated on only one common political ground: the appeal of strong executive government after a decade of confused parliamentary instability. Its apologists desperately tried to surround this perfectly obvious and quite respectable, if somewhat prosaic, fact with an aura of ideological profundity and historical necessity. They claimed, in the fashion of the day, that the BBWR represented the positive answer of national solidarity to the Marxist challenge of class conflict, that it signified the healthy rejection by resurrected Poland of the fatal prepartition tradition that had elevated opposition per se into a virtue, and that it symbolized the victory of responsibility over demagoguery, of service to the state over the spirit of party. The fact was that in political practice the mission of the BBWR was simply to support Piłsudski. Precisely because this was its only intended function, and because its ideological poverty was otherwise so drastic and its ability to express social claims so deficient, the BBWR was able to split but not to replace the political parties, to win the adherence of office-seekers but not to attract the youth, to channel policy problems into the inner councils of the regime but not to articulate, refine, or adjudicate them in the course of its inevitably hollow and formal internal discussions.
At the apex of the regime, whither these problems were directed for solution, a statist-managerial theory of government held sway. Both the technocratically inclined supporters of Bartel and the inner core of Piłsudskist colonel-praetorians were convinced that Poland’s problems were not solvable by ordering the interests and claims of the various sectors of her civil society through political parties competing in the public and parliamentary arenas. In their view, the immaturity of Polish society for such a performance had been too glaringly exposed during the first few years of her recovered independence. No, Poland’s primary need was to emancipate the state from, and to elevate it above, civil society and to grant the state apparatus, rather than any part of the society, priority of claim and jurisdiction. Poland was to be purged, cleansed, and modernized through state direction, not political competition. She was to be administered, rather than governed. Interest of state, not of class or party, would alone determine the government’s political, social, and economic policies.
Alas, this cult of the state was both intellectually and politically dubious. In practice, it was useless because it had no program and no direction. The concept of “interest of state” was, under certain circumstances, an adequate guide to foreign policy, but it was not sufficiently refined to be serviceable for the resolution of serious domestic socioeconomic policy problems. It might spotlight obvious national goals, such as industrialization, but could not indicate cost-free paths to their realization. Hard political choices still had to be made. Decision-making was simply transferred from the faction-ridden legislature to the inner councils of the regime. While one might acknowledge that the men who ultimately made the regime’s policy decisions in these inner councils believed themselves to be ideologically neutral, while one could credit them with being motivated by a high sense of public service and duty to the state, while one could concede that the BBWR as an organization was probably too docile to impinge significantly on their evaluation of policy imperatives, it was futile to pretend that they were not making political choices among political options, that they were simply applying a manifest “interest of state.”
Though the BBWR could win elections and thus enable Piłsudski to retain legal control of the state apparatus, it proved in a deeper sense a political failure due to Piłsudski’s political misanthropy. On the morrow of the 1926 coup, he could have exploited the collective national catharsis to rally the Polish people around himself, activate them politically, elicit rededication, demand sacrifices, and accomplish much. But, distrusting the spontaneity of the masses, he chose to do the opposite. He imposed political passivity on the nation and reserved the responsibility of governing to himself, to the technocratic elite recruited by Bartel, and to his own immediate coterie of “colonels.” The function of the BBWR was to insulate the regime from antagonistic social and ideological pulls and pressures, not to draw the nation into political activism. Though a number of “new” recruits were accepted and were promoted quite high up in the sanacja hierarchy, the regime managed tragically to isolate itself. Piłsudski and his entourage succeeded in asserting their monopoly over the state apparatus and its power structure, but they lost control and leadership over Polish society to the allegedly corrosive political parties.
The achievements of his regime, which were undeniable despite their immolation in the 1939 catastrophe, were a series of structural and diplomatic reclamations achieved within and by the state apparatus. Among them were: the postcoup constitutional amendments that strengthened the executive; the revival of military morale; the professionalization of the civil bureaucracy; the reintegration of all preponderantly Polish-populated areas, including the once disaffected western regions, into one political system; the balancing of budgets; and the raising of Poland’s international prestige and self-confidence. But no fundamental social problem was solved or even seriously tackled in Piłsudski’s lifetime.
Given his reluctance to take the nation into genuine confidence and political partnership, Piłsudski might have done better to establish an explicit dictatorship on the morrow of the coup rather than lead the country through a demoralizing pseudo-parliamentary charade. This dictatorship need not have been “leftist” to achieve some positive “revolutionary” corrections. However, such a solution was precluded both by Piłsudski’s own scruples, fears, and hopes, and by a general national craving to demonstrate that the reborn Poland was, despite the coup, sufficiently mature to emulate successfully the Western model of constitutional parliamentary government. Hence, the coup fell between two stools.
