Joanna Kos formed her relationship with God in her mid-teens. A friend took her to a prayer group outside of school hours, and in that room in a little corner of Warsaw, the schoolgirl’s life changed forever. Faith, she told me, brought her peace and gave her confidence.
Her classmates soon noticed a change in their friend. Most people in the school identified as Catholic, but none attended mass on a regular basis. Going to the local church, however, had quickly become a part of Joanna’s weekly routine. Although everyone respected her new devotion, there was a problem, she told me when I met her at a central Warsaw café. She often felt excluded from debates around certain topics, like abortion or equal marriage.
“When friends were talking about LGBT issues I was always just sitting and listening and wanting to understand them,” she told me. “Before, when I tried to join the conversation, I wasn’t heard. Everyone was like: ‘Okay just shut up,’ a bit like: ‘You don’t know anything.’ Perhaps I didn’t, but I still wanted to understand their points of view, and I wanted to have that chance to speak too.”
Now 20, Joanna is a slight woman with mousy hair and delicate features. She moves thoughtfully, her voice quiet. “The implications were that because I was [a practising] Catholic, I didn’t know anything about the world, that I was stupid or naive.” That sense of being shunned by liberal classmates for her conservative values stayed with Joanna. When the time came to choose a place for further education, she told me she wanted to go somewhere that she wouldn’t feel “sentenced to silence”. A new institution caught her eye, the Collegium Intermarium in downtown Warsaw: the brainchild of Europe’s most controversial ultra-conservative lawyers.
Collegium Intermarium: producing a new European elite?
The doors of the privately funded college swung open in May 2021. The promise to prospective students was that the institution would uphold “classical values” and be an answer to the global “crisis of academic life”. But the group that established the academy, the Education for Values Foundation, has strong links to Ordo Iuris – an opaque legal organisation that has influenced the rolling back of women’s reproductive rights in Poland and supported anti-LGBTQ+ measures. It has also rejected the Istanbul Convention, a treaty that seeks to end violence against women, on the grounds that the convention promotes so-called “gender ideology”.
At present, the Collegium Intermarium offers just one undergraduate course, in law. Joanna is one of only 17 undergraduates currently enrolled, although the college has plans to expand into business management. Arounda hundred more students are engaged in part-time postgraduate studies, in subjects ranging from NGO management to the art of debate and “family policy in local authorities”.
In its essence, the Collegium Intermarium is an attempt to groom the next generation of ultra-conservative thinkers, lawyers and policy-makers. And the college has ambitions that reach beyond Poland: its website declares that it wants to educate the “elite of the intermarium countries”. “Intermarium” is Latin for “between the seas” and refers to a swathe of central Europe that lies between the Baltic, Black and Adriatic Seas. The ultimate goal appears to be to draw students from these ex-communist countries, which might be seen as more conservative and in opposition to the “liberal west”.
It would be easy to dismiss this budding institution as a niche project on the fringes of academic life. But to do so would be to underestimate the influence Ordo Iuris and its associates have already had on shaping Poland’s moral economy. The chairman of the college’s board, Jerzy Kwaśniewski, who is also the President of Ordo Iuris, has been explicit about this goal. He told Polish media last year that Collegium Intermarium graduates will “shape the politics, law and identity of Europe”.
The influence of Ordo Iuris
The ultra-conservative beliefs of Ordo Iuris, and by extension Collegium Intermarium, appear to be very much in line with the government’s own vision of Poland and its future. Since the Law and Justice party, or PiS, returned to power in 2015, they have introduced a series of extremely conservative policies. The party, led by Jarosław Kaczyński, has relentlessly pursued a narrative that Poland is caught in a values war with the liberal west who have destroyed the “traditional family”.
Reproductive rights are a key battleground. In 2020, abortion in Poland was effectively outlawed after the government-controlled Constitutional Tribunal ruled that the procedure was unconstitutional in cases of foetal abnormality as it amounted to a “forbidden form of discrimination”. Today, abortion is only available in cases of rape or incest, or when the mother’s life is considered to be in serious danger. At least two women have already died in Poland after being denied lifesaving care as a consequence of this ruling.
The case was brought to the Constitutional Tribunal by 119 conservative parliamentarians. But for years, Ordo Iuris had been seeding the ground for the roll-back of women’s reproductive rights. In 2016 they drafted a law that proposed a near total ban on abortion. The legislation kickstarted the iconic “Black Protests”, where women and men took to the streets to defend human rights. Although parliamentarians ultimately rejected the bill, Ordo Iuris used its strong connections with PiS to keep the issue of abortion on the national agenda.
Ordo Iuris has also influenced the rolling back of LGBTQ+ rights across Poland. It developed a “pro-family” document, the “Local Government Charter of Family Rights”, to defend the “values confirmed” in the Polish Constitution. According to the charter, these include the “protection of marriage, being a union of a man and a woman” and the right to protect children against “demoralisation”. The charter has now been adopted by 39 local authorities. Ordo Iuris denies that the charter is discriminatory, as it does not mention LGBTQ+ people specifically. But activists have described local authorities who have adopted the charter as “LGBTQ-free zones” where their values and rights are not respected.
Some of the new legislation also appears to be in tension with European law. In January, Poland’s lower house, the Sejm, passed a bill influenced by Ordo Iuris that would make it harder for the children of LGBTQ+ people to obtain a Polish passport, a move that runs counter to the European Court of Justice’s December ruling that requires all member states to issue “an identity card or a passport to a child who is a national of that member state and whose parents are two persons of the same sex”.
In contrast to many other European countries, a significant proportion of young people in Poland appear to support this shift to cultural conservativism. While there has been a steep decline in religious practice among younger generations, the pivotal 2015 election saw a shift to the right, with two thirds of voters between 18 and 29 voting for right-wing parties. Since then, ultra-conservatives in the country have been keen to capitalise on this trend and make young people central to their long-term ambitions.
Family, religion and the "European tradition"
Sitting in his Warsaw apartment, twirling a cigarette gently between his fingers, Filip Ludwin seems to find it comical that some people think the Collegium Intermarium’s intentions are nefarious. The dean of the law faculty, Ludwin is keen to distance the institution from Ordo Iuris. “We are interested in conducting broad research in all fields of [social] science,” he told me, peering over his rectangular glasses. “It means we are open to all [social] scientific issues. Ordo Iuris is mainly interested in social issues that are connected with a concrete vision of society, and they advocate for that vision . . . the two institutions are partially similar but it’s important to underline the differences between them.”
Like most of Poland’s ultra-conservatives, Ludwin is well-groomed and polite. He thinks before he speaks, avoids religious arguments and has a talent for dancing around answers to difficult questions. He dislikes the term “ultra-conservative” and feels the aims of the Collegium Intermarium have been widely misunderstood. “From our point of view, lawyers are not only professionals, but they should also have a deep humanistic and classical background too . . . We don’t omit practical aspects of [legal] studies, but a part of what we would like to present to our students is a broad humanistic, historical and philosophical background.”
Yet the institution’s dedication to “creating an academic community deeply rooted in European tradition and culture” appears to be motivated by ultra-conservative thought.
Neil Datta, the Secretary of the European Parliamentary Forum for Sexual and Reproductive Rights, has tirelessly been calling attention to Ordo Iuris and its affiliates for years. From his office in Brussels he has done ground-breaking work on Europe’s ultra-conservative network and the money supporting it. “Ordo Iuris is a revamped expression of the much older network of ‘Tradition, Family, Property’, or TFP, and if you go into the history of TFP what you will find is several decades of trying to create institutions to educate children and young people, so this is the latest iteration of the same tendency,” he says. “What strikes me about the Collegium Intermarium, and what makes it stand out, is that Ordo Iuris is a much stronger organisation than previous TFP organisations in other countries, so there is more potential for it to take off.”
TFP is a global Catholic organisation accused of operating like a cult. In 1995 and 1999, for example, it was on the French National Assembly list of cult-like movements. Founded in Brazil by Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira in 1960, the movement has deeply conservative views on abortion and equal marriage. It’s also highly critical of relatively liberal pontiffs such as Pope Francis.
Ordo Iuris says it has no connection to TFP. However, connections stretch back to 2001, when the Father Piotr Skarga Association – a Catholic organisation that says it was “inspired” by TFP – founded the Father Piotr Skarga Foundation, which in turn created Ordo Iuris in 2013. Curiously, the Father Piotr Skarga Association, TFP and Ordo Iuris all use the same gold lion logo.
Datta also points out that the Collegium Intermarium does not have to be particularly big to have a significant impact on European society. “When you look at the College of Europe in Belgium, it’s known for producing future elites [who] then go into the European institutions. Their graduating class is around 200 to 300 even though it was established in the 1950s,” he says. “It looks like the ambition of the Collegium Intermarium is to create such an elite institution.”
Teaching the next generation of ultra-conservatives
In the United States, the Patrick Henry College is another institution with aims to produce an elite. Situated in Purcellville, Virginia, “God’s Harvard”, as it has been nicknamed, was the alma mater of several of Donald Trump’s administration, including the former White House Director of Strategic Communications Alyssa Farah. It attracted a range of conservative teaching staff, including Dr Stephen Baskerville, who worked at the college as professor of government until 2019.
Baskerville, known for his book A Gentleman’s Guide to Manners, Sex, and Ruling the World, is a controversial figure, accused of making homophobic statements during his tenure at Patrick Henry College, and criticised for appearing alongside white supremacist activist Richard Spencer in 2013. Despite the conservative and Christian leanings of Patrick Henry College, Baskerville says he felt that his opinions were being stifled in the United States. Around this time, Ordo Iuris called to offer the 64-year-old a job as the head of state studies at the Collegium Intermarium.
It was perfect timing, he told me. He had spoken at numerous conferences organised by Ordo Iuris and agreed with their worldview. “I felt like [in] the fields which I was publishing in, and the fields that I was teaching in, there were increasing demands to include political ideologies in the substance of what I was doing,” he said. “This was necessary for career advancement or simple survival. It was very clear that people who did not subscribe to certain political ideologies were pushed to the margins.”
I asked him whether political ideologies were evident at Collegium Intermarium, where he has been teaching Joanna and her classmates for the last year. He answered that it was hard to say what the views of his students are, as he doesn’t “see the classroom as a place to express personal opinions”. The irony is that while the representatives for the Collegium Intermarium are quick to wax lyrical about academic freedom and open debate, all of its teaching staff appear to share the same ultra-conservative views. Many are ardent supporters of PiS.
Ordo Iuris, meanwhile, has close links to the government. The group’s former president and co-founder Aleksander Stępkowski is currently the spokesperson for the Polish Supreme Court. Poland’s Minister of Culture Piotr Glinski and Minister of Education Przemyslaw Czarnek both attended the Collegium Intermarium’s launch event in 2021.
Most of the ultra-conservatives I spoke to in Poland were keen to paint themselves as advocates of free speech and the victims of a liberal purge. Their voices weren’t heard, they said. The doors to global corridors of power were closed to them. Their anger at this state of affairs was palpable despite their polite exteriors. They apparently saw themselves not as dangerous ideological crusaders, but as human rights defenders and the guardians of Europe’s traditions.
It was a more developed version of how Joanna Kos felt in high school when she was excluded from lunchtime conversations because of her Catholic beliefs.
“There is a conservative revolution happening in Poland, especially among young people,” says Milosz Hodun from the progressive NGO Liberal International, who is concerned about the college and the future impact of its alumni. “A lot of this is about educating the next generation of voters and giving them the skills to compete with the elites of other EU member states.”
Not a day has gone by since her first class in October that Joanna has regretted her decision to enroll in the Collegium Intermarium. Her classmates are interesting and kind, she tells me. The teaching staff are accommodating, and she feels free to voice her opinions.
So will Joanna, with her law degree, go on to become a member of the new ultra-conservative elite in Poland, a new army of lawyers able to influence the direction of Europe? The future is uncertain, although she has already considered joining Ordo Iuris after she graduates. “Maybe I will, maybe I won’t,” she says.
This piece is from the New Humanist summer 2022 edition. Subscribe here.
