Pawel Bielawski is a member of the Polish nationalist organisation Niklot and sits on editorial team of the Polish neo-Nazi SZTURM magazine.1
As of August 2020, he is a PHD candidate at the Institute for the Study of Religions at the Jagiellonian University. His research interest are "Politology of religion, Neo-Paganism and National-Christian movements," according to his profile on Academia.com.2 There, he also shares some of his nationalist tracts, such as "From Traditionalism to Futurism: Guillaume Faye’s Archeofuturism," published in Athenaeum - Polskie Studia Politologiczne, 2018.3
He appeared as speaker of the 1st Paneuropa Conference in Kyiv in 2017, as protocoled on the now defunct Reconquista Europe blog4 :
Quite logically, the next speaker, Pawel Bielawski, was from Poland and dedicated his speech to the topic of new nationalism: “Eastern European New Right and New Nationalism.” He has been engaged in the intellectual exchange with Ukrainian colleagues long before the beginning of political cooperation in 2016 when he came to support the demands of the “March of the Nation” held by National Corps in front of Ukrainian Parliament along with Polish organizations “SZTURM” and “Trzecia Droga.”
As a representative of the Association for Tradition and Culture “Niklot,” Pawel Bielawski, though, started from afar: with economic issues. In a power point presentation in support of his speech, he quoted two citations by Alain de Benoist, the founder of French New Right. In the first of them, de Benoist criticizes the EU project and calls for an alternative union, probably beginning with a “little” Carolingian Europe. In the second, he admits his sympathy for the Ukrainian struggle for the national identity, albeit unequivocally claiming that if the Maidan revolution results in strengthening of the Western, American pole “on the detriment of Russia,” he will be “the first to condemn it.” It means, in Pawel’s opinion, that Western Europe always retains the possibility of “sacrificing” Eastern Europe to Russia as a presumable counterweight to the US or simply a superpower separated from Europe by a buffer zone. On the contrary, we view Intermarium as the heart of Europe opposing both kinds of globalization.
In the economic respect, continues his thought Pawel Bielawski, at present this possibility is fully realized as the centre-periphery relations between Western and Eastern Europe. The main message here as follows:
“Poor nations provide raw materials, cheap labor and market for old technologies for the highly developed countries – without which the latter ones could not afford the living standard they have now.”
In other words, rich countries are interested in perpetuation of this state of affairs. The speaker, among others, refers to Brazilian Professor Emil Sedar who observed how neoliberalism dragged “periphery” countries of Latin America into extreme poverty and exploitation which depraved the workers of the very “public identity.” Overall, Pawel Bielawski completely agrees with Jarosław Tomasiewicz that Eastern European countries should refuse from the West-like interpretation of what is left-wing and right-wing and strive both for the national and socioeconomic liberation.
Hence is the diagnosis or, more precisely, premises formulated by Pawel Bielawski:
1) the political struggle in the West of Europe is mainly cultural, whereas in Eastern Europe it is mainly economical, that is, aimed against economic imperialism;
2) the economic dependence is complemented by the cultural and ideological (West-centrism);
3) (neo)liberal capitalism is, above all, an anthropological system (homo economicus) equating money with god.
Accordingly, Pawel Bielawski suggests the following ways out for Eastern Europe:
1) primacy of the economic struggle over the cultural one (national syndicalism) understood in terms of Ernst Jünger’s new nationalism which, on the one hand, holds that the worker can overcome capitalism only by developing a sense of community (nation) that is bonded by blood, on the other, contends that the nationalist movement should grow into the labour movement turning workers into political soldiers;
2) elaborating a comprehensive Eastern European narrative and promoting an Eastern European identity at the all-European level;
3) parallelism of the economic and spiritual struggle aimed at upbringing homo religiousus in Mircea Eliade’s sense (a person that restores the pivotal role of the sacred in life).
Geopolitically, this programme is being realized by the proponents of the sovereign Intermarium. In this context, Pawel Bielawski expressed his total support for the Wage Union project launched by 8 Central and Eastern European countries in order to harmonize salaries across the European continent and prevent the qualified young labor force from emigrating into richer Western European countries. This project was discussed it more detail at the 2nd Intermarium conference (and its report).
Culturally, what we need is the creation of the Institute for the Reconstruction of Culture in Jan Stachniuk’s sense – “a think tank and intellectual center of the revolution which would lay the groundwork for the change of the dominant ideomatrix (ideological superstructure) of a society.”
Pawel Bielawski’s speech arose great fascination and interest, but also heated debates. Serious accusations towards Western European economic imperialism echoing official statements by the region’s state leaders who criticize economic policies of the core EU countries, Germany and France, partially created an impression of a splitting rather than integrating message. Others felt that the speaker promotes a false “economic worldview,” although he quoted Julius Evola’s words about the madness of measuring the culture’s progress by the degree of wealth and the level of productivity and consumption. Some were even wondering whether Wage Union promotes a kind of artificial communistic homogenization of national economies. Bjorn Sigvald, who moved from rich Switzerland to stricken by the economic crisis Ukraine at war, argued that insanely high living standards of Western Europe were the root of the Western decline, and this is what Eastern Europe least needs.
And, quite the opposite, another part of the audience came to the conclusion that at this stage many Western European nationalists, having left the economic problems in the former century, have no idea what are the main topics of public life in Eastern Europe (corruption, oligarchy, unemployment, a law quality of social services, high tariffs, etc.). Polish enthusiast of the Ukrainian-Polish reconciliation Filip Januszewski and Olena Semenyaka helped to clarify the speech’s “moral.” Filip fairly remarked that the negative economic situation makes many Polish women refuse from giving birth to many children or postpone creating a family because of hard daily work. Olena underlined that Wage Union advocated only the balancing of salaries and prices (too high as compared to wages in Eastern Europe’s case) in all European countries. Moreover, Sebastian Manificat of CPI expressed his support for the Wage Union initiative precisely because Italy also loses people due to higher salaries in France, Germany or United Kingdom, so it is not only an Eastern European “ambition.”
Besides, Olena Semenyaka reminded of the fact that many regular Ukrainians participating in the Maidan revolution were pro-EU, because they falsely imagined it an “economic paradise,” and economic weakness of Ukraine is the main reason why it falls victim of either of the globalist blocks (Western or “Russian” transnational capital), as well as pushes some Ukrainian women into the marriage with wealthy non-European men. Thus she concluded that the goal of “economic nationalism” (which is also favored in the party programme of National Corps) is not to divide Europe or make Eastern Europeans sink into the utter comfort, but to elaborate together a healthy alternative to capitalism for all Europe and the world. After all, for everyone familiar with the ideologies of the Third Way, there is no need to explain that capitalism is not only about economy, and each serious movement defending classic right-wing values should be able to suggest a proper economic model."
- 1Editorial team on the website of SZTURM, www.szturm.com.pl/index.php.
- 2Pawel Bielawski's profile on Academia.com, https://jagiellonian.academia.edu/PawelBielawski.
- 3Pawel Bielawski, [PL] Od tradycjonalizmu do futuryzmu. Archeofuturyzm Guillaume’a Faye’a, Athenaeum - Polskie Studia Politologiczne, 2018, https://www.academia.edu/37955338/_PL_Od_tradycjonalizmu_do_futuryzmu_Archeofuturyzm_Guillaume_a_Faye_a.
- 4"1st Paneuropa Conference Report," Reconquista Europe, June 15, 2017. Archived version from June 13, 2018. https://web.archive.org/web/20180613133924/http://reconquista-europe.tumblr.com/post/161847863121/1st-paneuropa-conference-report-the-1st-paneuropa.