The European Union must stand up to Polish nationalism

Since coming to power in Poland in 2015, the nationalist Law and Justice party has enacted one outrageous measure after another, placing the nation’s courts under political control, trying to do the same with the news media, purging the civil service and, most recently, criminalizing any suggestion of Polish complicity in the Holocaust. Behind these moves runs a concerted and dangerous rewriting of history to create a narrative of heroic Polish victimhood — under the Nazis and Communists, of course, but also as a maligned defender of traditional values against a degenerate and controlling European Union.

There is more than a little irony in the way Poland has turned on the European Union. Billions in the union’s funds have been used to build Poland’s highways and roads, sewage systems, kindergartens and other facilities. Poland’s exports, largely to other member countries, have boomed, and young Poles travel and work all across Europe. The countryside, where support for Law and Justice is particularly strong, has been among the biggest recipients of the union’s largess. Biting the hand that feeds it is a gentle way of putting it.

Nonetheless, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the real power behind Law and Justice, has built his populist appeal on resisting what he describes as the European Union’s effort to dictate cosmopolitan cultural terms (and immigrant quotas). To portray the bloc’s policies as oppressive is ludicrous, but as Steven Erlanger and Marc Santora of The

Times recently wrote, Law and Justice has thrived on contrasting a “conservative, Catholic Poland and its family values with a godless, freethinking, gender-bending Western Europe.”

There has always been a dollop of victimhood in the Polish national narrative, largely for sound reasons, given Poland’s history of partitions. But for Mr. Kaczynski – as for some other populist leaders in Eastern and Central Europe, most notably Hungary – the purpose of rewriting history in this way is to gain power.

The Holocaust law is meant to enforce the image of Poles solely as martyrs, never collaborators; when the president signed the laws bringing the courts under political power, the current defense minister, Mariusz Blaszczak, proclaimed it the official end of Communism in Poland. And throughout the narrative, Law and Justice, under Mr. Kaczynski and his late twin brother, a President Lech Kaczynski, is seen as the bastion of real Polish democracy.

In fact, what the Polish government is doing is eroding democracy, and Europe must do what it can to defend its founding principles of “democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights.” The union has already taken the unprecedented step of warning Warsaw that it could lose its voting rights in the organization if it carries on.

It may not be easy for the European Union to follow through on that threat, since Hungary, for one, has vowed to veto any such sanction. But it cannot back down. If Hungary does cast a veto, the bloc could divert some of the aid that flows to Poland, and diplomats from other members could minimize contacts with Warsaw. Mr. Kaczynski will no doubt scream “diktat,” but it will come with a price.