The Pariah Elite: The Reform of the Judiciary

Abstract

This chapter focuses on one aspect of the campaign against the judges launched and fuelled by the party Prawo i Sprawiedliwość (Law and Justice; PiS) as part of the so-called reform of the judiciary that has been ongoing since 2017, causing a major conflict between Poland and the EU that verged on a “Polexit” in 2021, just before the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The chapter analyses Polish government’s discourse that presents the judges as a corrupted elite detached from the national community, a pariah group that excludes itself from the nation by accepting loyalty to external instances such as the European Union. Starting with an outline of the figurational approach to the rule of law, the chapter moves on to a timeline of the so-called reform of the judiciary case, and then to an analysis of group strategies of the parties to the conflict, of which the reform is both the cause and the effect. Finally, referring to Marta Bucholc’s analysis of postcolonial motives in PiS ideology, the author unravels the established-outsider dynamic set in motion by the government. The author describes the PiS’s plans to replace the judges with a new elite, free from the alleged sin of pro-European creolization and one which the governing party would deem loyal to the Polish nation. In figurational terms, this is an attempt to eliminate the established-outsider figuration in the judiciary altogether and to consolidate power in the hands of the national-conservative established.

This chapter is based on unpublished reports prepared in Polish for the research project “National habitus formation and the process of civilization in Poland after 1989: a figurational approach” (2019/34/E/HS6/00295), funded by Polish National Science Centre, parts of which were translated into German and included in the following publications: Marta Bucholc, Maciej Komornik, Spinnrad im Dauerbetrieb. Der Justizumbau in Polen, Osteuropa 8–9/2021: 5–24; Marta Bucholc, Maciej Komornik, Die PiS, das Virus und die Macht. Wahlen in Zeiten der Pandemie, Osteuropa 2020 (3–4): 37–50.