The Piłsudski-Bartel style of government from 1926 to 1930 was not only intrinsically interesting, but also anticipated Gaullism. Bartel would argue and sincerely believe that his regime was by no means an aloof bureaucratic one and that the nation’s social and political interests were adequately represented in it, in consultative roles. Cooperation among the “objective” technocratic experts in the government, the “independent” theoretical experts from the universities, and the “subjective” but informed and politically articulate interest groups was Bartel’s idea of good government. He also acknowledged the ultimate veto power of the political forces in the form of the parliamentary censure vote. Let, however, the “subjective” political forces and parties claim direct policymaking and executive power, and Bartel would become indignant. The ministers were chosen for their technical expertise and as such enjoyed Bartel’s and Piłsudski’s confidence. Simultaneously, the “colonels” served as Piłsudski’s personal eyes and ears throughout the state apparatus. Though not yet the ministers that they were to become in the 1930s, they were put in second-ranking yet crucial posts of the government departments and public agencies to supervise them politically for Piłsudski. In both its bartlowanie and its “colonel” incarnations, the Piłsudski regime claimed to embody a sanacja (regenerative purge) against the debilitating former partyjnictwo (partisan corruption and chaos).
While sincere, this commitment to sanacja was more of a general stance, even a frame of mind, than a specific program. Sanacja, in fact, came to imply a buttressing of the Piłsudski executive in relation to the multiparty legislature, a superordination of the Piłsudskist state over the allegedly politically immature society, purging that state’s apparatus of its incompetent and/or inconvenient personnel, and the cultivation of a mystique of Piłsudski as the nation’s heroic father, wise guide, and benevolent protector. Formally, sanacja implied three things. First, it suggested immunization of the army from political influences; this meant in practice the transformation of the army into Piłsudski’s own instrument and a reflection of himself. Second, it suggested the healthy cleansing and professionalization of the state apparatus; this came to mean its infusion with a technocratic-managerial (and again antipolitical) stance. Third, there was the laudable but vague admonition, expressed by Piłsudski himself during the first night of his coup, that “there must not be too much injustice in the state toward those who labor for others, there must not be too much wickedness, lest the state perish”; this eventually came to mean the strategy of seeking to form an allegedly nonpolitical phalanx of all classes and parties supposedly prepared to elevate general state interests above particular partisan and social ones. (Piłsudski’s traditional National Democratic enemies were presumed to be unequal to this test.) Piłsudski’s resumption of power thus took the form of an 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