Territorial Defense Force and US Soldiers distribute food in Monki, Poland. Photo: Anna Churco.

Okategoriserade In Poland, COVID-19 exposes progressing societal militarization

As Poland lifts restrictions and comes out of the lockdown ensued by COVID-19, much has been said on what the pandemic has revealed about our economy, public institutions, gender relations, and state of democratic checks and balances. What has been less discussed, yet not gone unnoticed, is the way this security crisis has revealed ongoing processes of societal militarization, and the shift of society-military relations towards closer ties and interactions. Just like the war in Ukraine and the Refugee Crisis, Covid-19 has further normalized bringing the Polish society into defense through militarized channels. However, a closer look reveals the potential for shifting this process into more civilian-based forms.

Published on balticworlds.com on May 31, 2020

 

As Poland lifts restrictions and comes out of the lockdown ensued by COVID-19, much has been said on what the pandemic has revealed about our economy, public institutions, gender relations, and state of democratic checks and balances. What has been less discussed, yet not gone unnoticed, is the way this security crisis has revealed ongoing processes of societal militarization, and the shift of society-military relations towards closer ties and interactions. Just like the war in Ukraine and the Refugee Crisis, Covid-19 has further normalized bringing the Polish society into defense through militarized channels. However, a closer look reveals the potential for shifting this process into more civilian-based forms.

The military makes a comeback

As the lockdown unraveled, the disoriented Polish public swiftly learned from the media that the country is “at war with an invisible aggressor”, one that requires the Minister of Health to act like a “Commander in Chief” and puts the medical staff on the “front lines”. This military rhetoric was soon multiplied by media reports on the spike in Russian and Chinese “information warfare” against the European Union over COVID-19. Far from being purely discursive, this warlike response to the pandemic has also involved a wide deployment of close to ten thousand military personnel across the country. Already in March, the newly-founded Territorial Defense Forces (TDF) were mobilized for the first Polish comprehensive anti-crisis military operation after 1989. Run under the name “Resilient Spring”, this operation framed Territorial Defense Forces’s goal as that of supporting individual and collective ‘resilience’ in the society. In what followed, soldiers took up such varied tasks as transport and logistics, border control, healthcare and elderly care, psychological help, and even internal security. They have been delivering medical supplies to hospitals, measuring the temperature of passengers on planes, performing virus tests on people, taking care of patients in nursing homes, running a psychological helpline, patrolling public spaces, as well as checking whether those quarantined remain home. Today, this turn to the military as an all-purpose panacea happens at a time when civilian state institutions are gravely minimized by decades of neoliberal governance which shifted the center of gravity from the state to the market, and from the society to the individual. Against this background, the military seems to promise decision makers an effectiveness that few other depleted institutions can afford.

Society under arms?

This omnipresence of the military in the public sphere is a new development in Poland. Following from post-Cold War “peace dividend” under Pax Europaea, the country has recorded wide-scale structural demilitarization, with military budgets cut, conscription being suspended, male citizenship detached from soldiering, and the professionalized army drifting further away from the increasingly pacifistic society. Today, this demilitarizing trend is visibly weakening, as more citizens voluntarily engage in the realm of defense. Accompanying the pandemic-related activities of the Armed Forces were various pro-defense and paramilitary civil society organizations – associations gathering volunteers interested in military trainings – who mobilized grassroots to disinfect public spaces, deliver shopping to elderly veterans, donate blood, sew masks, as well as run information campaigns on social media. This paramilitary civil society has been noticeably growing in numbers, visibility and political relevance since the 2008 suspension of draft, its agenda strengthened by each consecutive security crisis: the Ukraine war, the influx of refugees, and Covid-19. In recent years, the illiberal right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) government has undertaken comprehensive steps to bring citizens back into defense through a variety of programs such as military classes in public schools, Academic Legion programs in public universities, MOD grants for opening up shooting ranges, financial support for pro-defense associations, as well as the formation of the aforementioned Territorial Defense Forces in 2017. What all of these developments have in common is their reliance on the citizen-soldier blueprint whereby citizens voluntarily engage in part-time military service while remaining firmly rooted in civilian life and professional employment. The COVID-19 pandemic saw a growing number of Poles enchanted by this societal militarism. According to the Ministry of Defense, Territorial Defense Forces recorded an increased number of volunteers following the outbreak of the pandemic, and the southwestern city of Opole alone reported a 100% increase in gun permit applications filed to the police. Public opinion on society-military relations is shifting towards closer ties, too. In a recent survey commissioned by the MOD, 83% of those polled believed that the military should control quarantined citizens, 82% supported the military patrolling the streets, and only 20% took issue with the statement that seeing soldiers on the streets makes them feel more secure (with 47% agreeing with it).

Blurred battle lines, fuzzy civilian spaces

What is revealed by both the tendency to narrate the pandemic in military terms, and the wide deployment of soldiers to tackle it, is our unpreparedness to adequately understand, and respond to, non-conventional security challenges such as disinformation, cyberattacks, pandemics, mass migrations and climate change. As Poland and the broader region face these novel security threats, political leaders and the media struggle to conceptualize them outside the lens of war, and beyond the confines of military competence. Assigning the army the task of fighting a pandemic, relying on soldiers to strengthen social resilience, and bringing more citizens into defense through state-run militarized programs can rightfully be viewed as processes of militarization. At the same time, this militarization is of an ambiguous, dual nature, in that it both increases the permeation of the military into civilian realms, and civilianizes the army itself, its tasks and methods increasingly distanced from conventional military repertoire. After all, are Polish Territorial Defense Forces soldiers performing care work in nursing homes and delivering psychological help to the public militarizing care and mental health facilities, or are they civilianizing the very nature of territorial defense?

This ambiguous, civic-martial nature of the new Polish societal militarism is also what I found on the ground while conducting field work with the paramilitary sector several years ago. In fact, what initially surprised me was that many people who joined the paramilitary movement seemed to be moved less by its militarized culture and trainings, and more by its ability to increase security through more civilian means, building ties of cooperation, serving local communities, and engaging in their non-violent protection. Preparation for the use of violence was certainly not what spoke best to Robert, a young man who at the time of my visit taught new members a theoretical class about NATO armies. A self-declared pacifist, he was adamant that he would never become a soldier or engage in political violence, yet still saw a rightful place for himself in the paramilitary movement. What can we make of that?

The forgotten project of civilian defense

Robert’s case reminds us that bringing society into the realm of security does not need to take militarized forms, as it has so far occurred in 21^st century Poland. Instead, it can proceed along the nonviolent, civilianized lines of what is often called ‘civilian-based defense’ or ‘civil resistance’. As argued by one of its proponents, Maciej Bartkowski, nonviolent civilian defense offers a serious alternative to military defense in that it strengthens social cohesion and self-organization, is better fit to addressing hybrid security challenges, and is much more likely to bring about a democratic outcome. Despite its major advantages, civilian defense has been left to the wayside in Poland. An alarming report published by the Supreme Audit Office in 2012 argued that “in Poland, civil defense exists only on paper”, with the majority of controlled counties neglecting their obligation to train citizens for crisis situations, let alone devising more advanced plans of civil society engagement in the broadly understood security realm. Since taking office, the Law and Justice party has mostly concentrated its efforts on MOD-led programs increasing military preparedness in the society and bolstering the number of future army recruits. In this context, citizens willing to engage in security have so far been tunneled into militarized practices and institutions. However, it is more than possible that this societal militarization would have not reached such levels if citizens were offered alternative, civilian channels of participation in the security realm. Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, the concept of civilian defense is slowly returning to public debate in Poland, and the National Security Bureau is beginning to work on a civil defense bill. Dusting off the forgotten project of civilian-based defense is crucial if we want to avoid further militarization of the civil society.

 

Weronika Grzebalska