National Survival in Dependent Societies: Social Change in Canada and Poland

A.H. Mrozewski is a librarian at Laurentian University.

This book’s editors went to great pains to justify its publication.
Despite their efforts, however, even the title and subtitle do not
entirely reflect its content. First, there is little about Canada as a
whole: the two societies it scrutinizes are Poland and Quebec. The
book’s essays could very well be put under two distinct covers: one
about Quebec and the other about Poland. Second, concerning national
survival, the issues are so different for each region that many of the
comparisons and analogies are a bit stretched, to say the least. Third,
the academic depth of the entries is uneven. A few would be more
properly published as magazine articles, while others, especially those
composed jointly, are like simplified course outlines. Not all the
papers delivered at a symposium are necessarily fit to print.

Two essays stand out for different reasons. Marcel Fournier (from
Départment de sociologie, Université de Montréal), in his “Quebec
and Its Cultural Specificity, or the Construction of an Identity,”
presents an excellent image of Québécois collectivity from the end of
the nineteenth century to the present. His analysis of the role of the
social sciences (particularly sociology) and of the intellectual elite
of various schools of thought in Quebec’s awareness as a distinct
nation is most convincing.

Totally different is Vlodzimierz Wesolowski’s “Structural
Conditions for Political Change in Poland,” which is a typical piece
of outdated dialectic prose. This is not surprising as its author was
the deputy director of the Institute for Fundamental Problems of
Marxism-Leninism of the Central Commitee of the Polish Communist Party.
Wesolowski is trying to salvage what remains of a bankrupt political and
ideological system. It is rather amusing that he suggests a political
coalition between the Communist Party, the Roman Catholic Church, and
Solidarity. (According to him, this piece was “largely written during
that stormy period” of 1980 to 1981.) Not only does he underestimate
the common sense of an average Pole, but he uses such
tarnished-by-communists vocabulary as a “coalition,” “political
equality,” and “co-operation.” This is exactly the jargon used in
all countries in Central and Eastern Europe where Moscow installed
satellite regimes during or shortly after World War II.

Most of this book’s Polish contributors are careful apologists of a
bygone era. If their papers had been published 10 years ago in Poland,
no one would have been surprised. However, this book’s publication in
Canada in 1990—with the support of the Canada Council, the Ontario
Arts Council, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of
Canada—is difficult to understand.