5. FROM CATASTROPHE TO REVIVAL

The elites involved in the above mentioned initiatives were virtually exterminated during World War II by Hitler’s and Stalin’s combined efforts. The latter established a new geopolitical position for Poland and new political elites ready to accept this change. The essence of the post-war Soviet imperial vision of a Poland cut down to size was expressed in the shortest way by Maxim Litvinov, Deputy Foreign Minister, already in 1943. During the conference of Allied foreign ministers in Washington, he simply stated that “Poles will have to learn to live in their ethnic borders as a small nation. They will have to forget that they had been a great power once. They were a haughty nation with neither skills nor power to realize their excessive nationalism”.^[1]
Thus, Poland was finally cut off from the rest of her heritage with the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The bloody cleansing of the Poles from what eventually became a western part of the Soviet Ukraine and the forced “evacuation” of national minorities, Polish from the new Soviet side and Ukrainians from the diminished Polish realm, stressed the tragic end of the “civilizing mission in the east, an idea as essential to Polish national identity as the frontier was to the American or the empire was to the British”.^[2]
The new Communist elites tried to imbue the decapitated Polish society with a new identity. The People’s Republic of Poland was to play the role of the Soviet-Russian empire’s western outpost (just like in the times of Tsar Alexander I) with absolutely no independence in international affairs. Poland was moved as westward as possible to antagonize her permanently with Germany (and – further – with the West which stood behind Germans), as well as to make her virtually a hostage of Soviet geopolitical patronage. All previous traditions of the Commonwealth, such as its parliamentary institutions, its republican supra-ethnic political ideal, and especially its heritage of a union between Poles and the nations of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was condemned as elements of a shameful and anarchic past. Another public enemy in the Communist educational and propaganda system was the Romantic tradition of Polish anti-imperial insurrections and conspiracies as well as the spirit of a political and cultural Polish mission oriented eastward.^[3]
Communists could use different allies and different points of ideological reference in changing the historical Polish identity. One of them, most frequently recalled in this context, was formed by choosing specific elements of Roman Dmowski’s nationalist ideology. It was his vision of Poland resembling the medieval Piast state, ethnically united and strategically oriented against Germany. It was his geopolitical stress on the necessity for choosing Russia against Germany as the most vital support for the existence of the Polish state. It was also his stress on realism in politics, his trenchant critique of Romantic fantasies and the Polish “mission” that led Poland to unwise and counterproductive insurrections against Russia. This reasoning was developed further in Communist times by certain politically active Catholics tolerated by the state. Some of them, grouped in PAX, an organization that developed the nationalistic elements of Dmowski’s vision. Another group of Catholic intelligentsia, centered around the weekly “Tygodnik Powszechny” and two monthlies “Znak” in Krakow and “Więź” (in Warsaw) led politically by Stanisław Stomma and Tadeusz Mazowiecki that attached their program to the tenet of political realism or neo-positivism, as they called it. It was first expressed in the pamphlet “The History of Stupidity in Poland” by Aleksander Bocheński (he was personally connected to PAX). His vitriolic attack against all Polish dreams of independent existence as a kind of “third force” between Russia and Germany, against all delusions of Polish grandeur, against everything messianic, against all traces of Romanticism in Polish political thought, against all “heroic” ambitions to influence the world or at least Eastern European history was followed in the political statements of Stomma, Mazowiecki or Andrzej Micewski. They declared the necessity to teach Poles to live in their ethnic boundaries as a small nation, with no particular ambitions, neither imperial nor anti-imperial, but living quietly under the shield of their powerful protector. They were not as geopolitically pro-Russian as Dmowski or the PAX group as they were determined to imbue the Polish public with a conviction that Poland was too weak to live without external patronage. It was difficult, however, to persuade most of the Polish public that the Soviet state could be an appropriate patron for a Catholic nation.^[4]
Actually it was the Catholic identity of the Polish masses, and the use made of this identity by the Polish Church hierarchy, that helped to regain the spirit of independence and the sense of mission ascribed to Poland. It is worth recalling that Catholicism was treated both in Bismarck’s Germany and by Russian officials as the core of the Polish identity during the partitions, the essence of Polish intransigence in fighting against the domination of both the Russian or German empires. When Poland was cut off from her former eastern Kresy (eastern marchlands) with their predominantly Eastern Orthodox, Uniate, and Jewish populations after World War II, the link between the Polish nation and Catholicism was strengthened. Despite the efforts of some groups of Catholic intellectuals who were ready to collaborate with the Communist regime, the Catholic Church became the most powerful stronghold of all the traditions of Sarmatian and Romantic culture and past grandeur that the new system sought to extirpate. The old traditions of Poland as the antemurale Christianitatis, the bulwark of Christianity (against the Turks and Schizmatics [i.e. the Russians]) were easily transmuted to fit the new situation wherein Polish Catholics formed the largest and best organized Church community within the Soviet system. First, the Church became the bulwark of the Polish traditional identity against the new Communist power and against its new educational system. Then the old dreams of a Polish mission to open the European East to Catholic influences could be revived. Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński, who led his Church in this fight for survival and after 1956 for victory, ended his 33 years rule over Polish Catholics with this symbolic words, uttered in his last will and testament and presented to Polish bishops a few days before his death in May 1981, “The East is opened to the Polish Church, it is to be conquered, all [of it]”.^[5] “The East” meant the old Commonwealth in Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania, and beyond it to Russia as well as other states of the Soviet bloc East Central Europe, especially those with distinct Catholic traditions such as Czechoslovakia or Hungary. “The conquest” meant the break up of the communist system with the force of a spiritual revolution led or at least inspired by the Polish example.
These hopes did not seem so extravagant when they were expressed by the dying cardinal. There was already a Pole on the throne of St. Peter in Rome. There had been the great 10-million people strong Solidarity movement in Poland that seemed to embody both the Sarmatian republican dream of Polish though and Romantic insurrectionist-messianic ideals. Karol Wojtyła, John Paul II, is justly considered to be a strong proponent of the latter, Romantic vision, where being Polish means to have a mission. The essence of this mission, as ascribed to Poland by the new Pope, was revealed fully during his first visit to his native country in 1979. In Gniezno, the cradle of Polish statehood and Christianity in Poland, he presented a program of spiritual liberation of all Slavic nations and their restoration to Christianity. The Pope believed that the peaceful insurrection he inspired with his words spoken to millions of Poles would lead finally to the collapse of the “evil Empire”.
Poland was portrayed in those days as a spiritual superpower with the ability to influence all of Eastern Europe and most of Soviet bloc countries, and with the power to counter effectively more than three decades of the communist ideology. This impression was strengthened by the Solidarity movement that led to the gravest crisis in the whole Communist system in Eastern Europe since its formation. The missionary zeal, so evident in those heady days of 1980-1981, was best documented in the Appeal of Solidarity’s first congress, addressed to “the working peoples of Eastern Europe” (Posłanie do ludzi pracy w Europie Wschodniej). The appeal was to follow the Polish free trade unions’ example in fighting for human and civic rights; it was an open declaration of war against not only the communist rulers of Poland, but to the Soviet system as a whole, to the Soviet empire’s ideological domination over its subjected nations. The Soviet authorities treated this Polish example as a mortal threat and serious rival, based on Polish historical traditions in Eastern Europe and on its Catholic religious identity. They were temporarily able crush their rival, as the martial law imposed in December 1981 proved. However, the seeds of unrest were sown, the “Polish core” had played its anti-imperial role for the region once again. Or, at least, some Poles believed so.^[6]

6. AN EPILOGUE OR JUST THE NEXT CHAPTER?

Ten years after martial law was introduced in Poland, the Soviet Union was officially dissolved. The empire seemed ruined. A temporary power vacuum and the Big Brother malaise could then inspire a renaissance of other historical imperialisms. From Hungarian efforts to extend their political community to all Hungarians living in neighboring states, lands that belonged to the former Crown of Saint Stephen, through “Russian bombast on behalf of Russian-speakers in the ‘near-abroad’ frightened neighbors”. Quarrels with Ukraine over Crimea and the armed occupation of Moldova up to the bloody struggle for the retention of Russian control over Chechnya, along with the war for a Serbian mini-empire on the remains of what had been Yugoslavia showed that history is able to take her revenge.
But where was Polish imperialism during this “favorable” time? Fears of its very real revival in the borders of the former Commonwealth, and now the post-Soviet, eastern European realm ran high, especially in the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, and in Western Ukraine in Lviv and in the Belarusian capital, Minsk. In the middle of the 1990s, these fears came completely to nothing. Already in 1994, Poland had treaties with all of her eastern neighbors, renounced all claims concerning the special status of Poles (which was especially a sensitive case in Lithuania), and all possible territorial demands. “At the end of the twentieth century, the Polish political mainstream has finally broken with both Józef Piłsudski’s Jagiellonian view of Poland as a great power and a multinational Commonwealth engaged in a struggle between Germany and Russia and Roman Dmowski’s notion that the frontiers of Poland were a reflection of its military prowess. Poland has finally resigned itself to the status of a medium-sized country that wants to extend its ties to Western Europe for cultural and economic reasons while accepting the fact that these ties must be conditioned by Warsaw’s relations with Moscow.”^[7]
This turn in the attitudes of Polish elites was quite unexpected for many critical commentators of Polish imperial traditions as allegedly represented by both Piłsudski and Dmowski. It was ascribed to the triumph of a wise political program that had been formulated by the émigré Jerzy Giedroyc (born in Minsk) and Juliusz Mieroszewski (born in Krakow), his closest political collaborator in Kultura (a monthly edited in Paris for more than fifty years before). That program is usually interpreted as supporting the independence of Lithuanian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian nation-states with no territorial claims and with no reference to their historical ties to Poland as well as with no hostile intentions towards the Russian nation. The only enemy in this program was to be a kind of “nationalist imperialism”, be it Russian or Polish that incited a quarrel over Lithuanian, Belarusian and/or Ukrainian territories.
It is possible, however, to connect the lasting influence of Kultura’s program to more general considerations. In the world introduced to “the end of history”, as it seemed in the early 1990s, old territorial quarrels and claims should lose their previous meaning. The political focus on territory is considered anachronistic and is largely replaced by an economy-driven tendency to move closer to the centers of information, finance, and prosperity. As Ola Tunander observes, there is a trend in much of Central and Eastern Europe toward greater centralization and the actual severance of ties with the more backward peripheries.^[8] He enumerates in this context the examples of the Czechs’ “velvet divorce” with Slovakia, the German willingness to acknowledge their loss of Silesia, Pomerania and East Prussia as well as Russian consent to dissolve the Soviet Union in order to rid themselves of their Asiatic peripheries. Though he forgot to mention Poland, her relatively easy farewell to the former Commonwealth’s seems to fit the pattern, too. Like almost every other country under the spell of “the end of history”, Poland, or rather her inhabitants, preferred to be closer to the Western center of the only remaining civilization (just as this was the case during the Enlightenment) and to join the European Union as quickly as possible rather than retaining nostalgic dreams of historical grandeur.
It was not Giedroyc-Mieroszewski’s ideas, but rather a revival of arguments used by the old Krakow school of historians and Catholic “neopositivistic realists”, both fighting with the same enemy of the Polish Romantic tradition for a new, spiritually and materially smaller Poland that proved to have lasting power in Polish political opinion during the 1990s. They repeated the old wisdom of the Enlightenment reformers that it might be necessary to amputate not only the eastern peripheries from the imagined reach of “Polish civilization”, but to amputate some essential traits from Polish self-perception, too. According to their vision, only after such changes could Poland be able to apply for a modest place on the outskirts of this Western European “city on the hill”.
But there was no end of history. Or at least not everyone has been persuaded to believe in it. Things began to change again in the mid-nineties. This new stage might be named after a famous essay turned into a book. It became the time of “The Clash of Civilizations”. After the war in the Balkans had escalated with the NATO bombardment of Serbian positions in Bosnia and after Russia dropped her pro-Western course for older traditions, those of Zhirinowski and Primakov, Poland seemed once again to be somewhere on the civilizational faultline. With Polish efforts to join the NATO and with Russia’s persistent, sometimes hysterical opposition, Russian fears of a Polish-led revival of the old Commonwealth idea again seemed plausible. Zbigniew Brzeziński and John Paul II were supposedly leading a conspiracy to which the new Polish president, Alexander Kwasniewski, was inducted. These fears percolated even through to the so-called serious press (see, for example, Kommersant and Delovye Ljudi, March- April 1997)^[9] to say nothing of the more vulgar Russian media. Though there were no such intentions from the Polish side, the change of the political and, so to speak, ideological context influenced a renaissance of some “imperial...”, sometimes more mission-endowed ambitions. “I would like Poland to be a regional power (mocarstwo), which doesn’t mean any megalomania [on our part]. It is just a confirmation of the real position of Poland now. Even our foreign guests speak about Poland as a regional power”, stated then Polish Foreign Minister, Bronisław Geremek, in February 1999. This “regional power” was to introduce many initiatives to influence the situation in the areas of the former Commonwealth, especially in Ukraine in order to help establish more ties with western political and economic structures and to prevent their re-integration within the Russian sphere of domination as well as in Belarus to assist opposition forces in disposing of Lukashenka. The Chechen rebellion also found strong support in Poland. Two metaphors – Poland, as an architect of an anti-imperial (read: anti-Russian imperial) “democratic cordon”; Poland as an “advocate” of the post-Soviet, Eastern European states in Western structures – have been actively discussed in the late 1990s in the Polish media and political circles.^[10]
They didn’t go unopposed. The low keyed vision of Poland as a small and humble petitioner supplicant of the European Union still has a great many supporters. They still treat thoughts on a bolder role for the Polish state in Eastern Europe as trouble-making and vain bombast. In their political perspective, the only Polish foreign policy goal was to conform to all EU requirements. Among these requirements, the most important in this context is the one connected to the Schengen agreement, which demands that Poland build a tightly controlled eastern border with Ukraine, Belarus, and the Kaliningrad exclave of Russia. The only thing that mattered for the opponents of any active Polish policy in Eastern Europe was that Poland be on the superior, western side of the new divides. That would mean one more Polish withdrawal from the East and a new partition of the areas of the former Commonwealth.
Such reasoning was in turn criticized by supporters of the idea of keeping the Commonwealth’s strategic and cultural legacy alive. They were probably best voiced by Jan Kieniewicz, an eminent historian from Warsaw. According to his interpretation Poland has had a civilization role to build European structures in Eastern Europe between the Baltics and the Black Sea. For him, the Commonwealth was rather a model of Europe in the East than an ethnic Polish state. But with the strategic defeat of the Commonwealth in its rivalry with Russia, all things “European” began to be eradicated from the region. Russia put on European clothes taken from the body of Poland and started to be treated as a synonym for the whole of Eastern Europe. Poland, in turn, began to be treated as the East as something inferior, something to be ashamed of, and decided to identify herself completely with the West and leave all of her former eastern interests to her fortunate rival Russia. Poland again must face this fateful question again. Does Poland, asks Professor Kieniewicz, want to accept its place and the role on the periphery? To be just a Western European gatekeeper in the East? Or should Poland become a new European integrator in the East and open the entirety of the former Commonwealth again to Europe?^[11]
Another professor, Zbigniew Brzeziński, adds a different, more practical and geopolitically influenced dimension to this vision. In his many articles published in the late 1990’s and even more forcefully in some of his private statements, Brzeziński draws a picture in which Poland could become the regional leader of a new Central Europe, covering the former Jagiellonian empire, the Vishegrad group (a forum for the integration of Poland and her southern neighbors, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary) and the former Commonwealth countries (from Ukraine to the Baltic States). Only Russia would remain in Eastern Europe. In Brzeziński’s concept, Poland would draw the strength for her role as a regional power from her key geographical position, her historical traditions, and, especially, from her current strong ties with the USA. Poland would be again something akin to the Duchy of Warsaw as imagined by Staszic and Kołłątaj two centuries earlier, an Eastern European outpost of the Western empire, this time lead by the United States.^[12]
John Paul II, for his part, has sought to again introduce certain “messianic” concepts into Polish self-perception, outlining another active role for Poland in the east of the continent in a specifically religious context. During his sixth visit in Poland, the Pope presided over a great gathering in Gniezno in June 1997 to commemorate the meeting between the first Polish king and the Holy Roman Emperor in 1000 A.D. and the entrance of Poland into Europe. The Pope was greeted by the presidents of seven Central European states: Germany, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Lithuania, Ukraine and Poland. Poles, according to the Pope’s speech, should take serious their duty of forming a central point of a truly united Europe that would comprise all western as well as all eastern (mostly Slavic) European nations. As he would stress on many other occasions, Poland, with her strong Catholic identity, should influence both the West and the East of Europe. This vision of a specific Polish moral, religious apostolic mission bore strong resemblance to the Polish Romantic model of Polish “moral imperialism” directed equally against the despotic East and the materialistic West. This, so to speak, Gniezno model of Polish all-European engagement is still stressed by the Church as it is confirmed in the idea of organizing another great political and religious event in Gneizno the day after Poland enters the EU on May 2, 2004 that would gather all European episcopates and most of the current heads of state from Central Europe.^[13]
Discussions of an active role for Poland were given a fresh boost and a new dimension due to the new geopolitical situation. After “the end of history” and “the clash of civilizations” phases, a new paradigm was introduced with the United States’ open declaration of the “unipolar moment”. The backlash that this ambition provoked in Europe could be named “the Revenge of History”. Poland, with her desire to become an EU member and with her simultaneously pro-American foreign policy began to be viewed again on a fault-line. This time not the one between the Eastern Orthodoxy and the Western civilization that runs somewhere through the eastern border of the former Commonwealth, but on a new fault line that, though geographically lying somewhere in the Atlantic between Washington and Paris, was also introduced into the Eastern and Central Europe. This new fault line was evident in the declarations of both Donald Rumsfeld (on “the Old and New Europe”) and Jacques Chirac (castigating the leaders of “the New Europe” for their pro-American commitments).
Poland is now faced with a new question. If she wants to retain her position or her self-perception as a regional power with the ability to influence large parts of Eastern and Central Europe, she might be pushed to make a choice between treating either the US or the EU (with its Franco-German core) as the source of her regional position and mission. The West is divided and Poland, feeling herself the exponent of Western values, standards and structures in the region, is tempted to decide for herself. Where is “the true” West, the most promising model of development, the most important source of power, a part of which might be delegated to Warsaw?
There is no better symbol for the Polish choice, than a Polish general commanding a zone of occupied Iraq with its command center in the ancient city of Babylon. The Polish veto against changes in the Nice Treaty, where France and Germany intended to introduce together with a constitution for the EU, is perceived by the majority of Polish public opinion as another chapter in the old history of Poland’s anti-imperial stance in international politics. Poland promises to be – and is accused of being – a spoiler of new empires in the making. This time many see a Franco-German Europe as a candidate for “the evil Empire”. It might be treated as more burdensome for the countries of the region because it is geographically closer to them than the distant United States, who is also ready to affirm its distant ally’s ambitions and to use them effectively.
Just as President George W. Bush did during his visit in Krakow last year (May 31, 2003), his remarks addressed to the People of Poland from the Wawel Royal Castle touched on all the points that were elaborated in this paper as the most fundamental elements for Polish oscillation between an anti-imperialism and a unique mission-driven imperial tradition. “From this castle, Polish kings ruled for centuries in a tradition of tolerance. Below this hill, lies the market square where Kosciuszko swore loyalty to the first democratic constitution of Europe. And at Wawel Cathedral in 1978, a Polish Cardinal began his journey to a conclave in Rome and entered history as Pope John Paul II – one of the greatest moral leaders of our time”.^[14] The first statement echoes the traditions of the Commonwealth. The second both the anti-imperial role of Polish insurrections in the eastern part of the continent and the privileged position that Polish political culture can at times take vis-a-vis Western Europe as well. The third one stresses a moral (religious) dimension of the Polish “mission”.
Poles still like listening to this melody. It is not so easy to put to rest five centuries of history and traditions that make Poland susceptible to Promethean dreams found difficult to digest by Poland’s neighboring empires, and... prone to be manipulated by distant powers. Poland is still caught between the two powerful centers of Russia’s Third Rome and the European-German Holy Roman Empire. Eternally too weak to make a stable empire-in-between and too strong (too proud or too self-confident) to accept the position of a small, dependent state. Eternally posed between the European East and West, between its own self-perception as only a “normal” nation and as an entire and unique (Sarmatian and Romantic) civilization, between the role of a historical victim and that of an aggressor, between the weak and the powerful. Poland is still here.^[15]