Poland, once again, Produces More History than it can Consume Locally

If you have consonants to spare, prepare to use them now. This is about Poland. a country that so often produces more history than it can consume locally. A new and fascinating crisis is erupting on the eastern fringes of the German Empire, sorry, European Union. As the Ukraine crisis, provoked by US-backed EU expansionism, sinks into torpor and stalemate, Poland is now pushing at the boundaries of ���limited sovereignty���.

 

So let us begin with a quick rummage through the Cupboard of the Yesterdays:

Now, ���limited sovereignty��� was formulated 100 years ago by Richard von Kuehlmann, the Kaiser���s Foreign Secretary. He was trying to put a landmine under the Russian Empire in Poland, the Baltic states an Ukraine. In the middle of the 1914-18 war,  Berlin invented a pseudo ���Kingdom of Poland��� to try to win over Poles who lived under direct Russian tyranny.  Then came the collapse of Imperial Russia (brought about by the Bolshevik putsch in Petrograd, financed by German gold and prepared by the German agent Ulyanov,  codenamed ���Lenin���, smuggled into Russia under the supervision of the German general staff).

Germany���s intervention, and its decision to hire Lenin, was not idealistic and din't even pretend to be ( as its equivalent would nowadays) . The Bolshevik putsch followed the February revolution, a genuine political convulsion from below, which had overthrown the Romanovs and would have led to a constituent assembly, elected by what is almost certainly still the most free and democratic poll ever to have taken place in Russia. The Bolshevik coup destroyed the first non-autocratic government Russia had ever had, as that government wished to continue the war against Germany. 

 

The German-backed Bolsheviks and their armed Red Guards then surrounded and dispersed the constituent assembly, postponing Russian constitutional democracy for at least 70 years. The resulting Russian military and moral collapse led to the peace treaties of Brest Litovsk (now on the border of Poland and Belarus, see http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/07/where-east-really-meets-west-and-you-can-stay-in-the-hotel-bug.html ).

And these created the new, wholly German-dominated state of Ukraine. That was limited sovereignty, if ever there was such a thing. How all this would have worked out we shall never know, since Germany���s defeat in the West (by no means foreordained) cancelled the Brest-Litovsk Treaties.

Soviet Russia eventually grabbed back Ukraine by force. Poland became a French client state, and the Versailles jig-saw - supposedly a barrier against a revived Germany - replaced the former empires of the region with new states based on national self-determination. But it was complicated by the presence of awkward, unenthusiastic national minorities within their borders. As always, such minorities came in very handy when aggression needed to be justified.

Few recall the bitter months between the Munich agreement and the outbreak of World War Two, when both Poland and Hungary opportunistically took bites out of the corpse of Czechoslovakia. Poland���s seizure of Zaolzie (with tanks, not cavalry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaolzie#/media/File:Polish_Army_capturing_Zaolzie_in_1938.PNG)

is especially forgotten (as is the anti-Semitism that was rife in that country at the time) because it upsets the ���plucky little Poland��� myth, part of the general myth  in which World War Two has been transformed into a simple struggle between good and evil, by ignoring large quantities of actual history.

I make no apologies for this history lesson. These things, along with the bodily westward shifting of Poland to satisfy Stalin in 1945, the Soviet massacre of Polish officers at Katyn (subject of an official lie maintained in Poland and the Soviet bloc until the fall of Communism) , the very violent and cruel mass expulsion of ethnic Germans from the region after 1945 (http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2012/11/orderly-and-humane.html )

are not forgotten in these regions and still influence thought and speech.

So bear them in mind when you study Poland���s new government, described in tones of maidenly horror by Europe���s liberal, pro-EU media,( and in tones of absolute loathing by Ryszard, a Polish acquaintance who works in a coffee shop near my London office and who is utterly horrified by what has overtaken his home country).

I myself do not much like this government. Its main strength flows from the fact that it has an absolute parliamentary majority, with which it is seeking to impose its will on the courts and the state broadcaster. The things about it which I quite like (a combination of social conservatism and resistance to mass immigration, with social democratic welfare measures and a real concern for the unemployed) are cancelled out by its unreliability on the key issues of law and liberty.

The best critical articles about it come from my old friend Tim Garton Ash, who (despite being a bit liberal) knows more about Poland than almost any English person. Tim was fairly relaxed to start with

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/26/poland-election-survived-worse-orbanisation

But is more worried now

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/07/polish-democracy-destroyed-constitution-media-poland

The EU, having been burned by intervening in Austrian politics some years ago, and has had similar difficulties with the Orban government in (much smaller) Hungary,  is probably itching to put pressure on this wayward member. But the EU is also constrained by the fact that it is nowadays rather obviously dominated by Germany, a country which is debarred by history from intervening too openly in Polish internal affairs. Martin Schulz, the German President of the European ���Parliament��� , probably hasn���t helped get Poland to conform by describing events in Warsaw as having ���the characteristics of a coup d���etat���:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/poland/12051752/EU-parliament-head-refuses-to-apologise-over-coup-comment-after-Polish-PM-request.html

Maybe a French politician could have got away with this. But a German? Such interventions only strengthen the Law and Justice Party, and allow it to preen itself as a patriotic force. You���d think Germans would realise this, but they don���t always seem to.

Germany���s EU Commissioner Guenther Oettinger has said there is a ���a lot to be said for activating the mechanism of the rule of law and putting Warsaw under supervision���. Supervision! So much for EU members being truly independent states (which of course they are not, but which, under ���limited sovereignty��� they must be allowed to pretend to be).

I don't ,as I say, much like Law and Justice. 

But then again, I did not much like its forerunner, which was pathetically pro-EU, though it wisely kept out of the Euro) and accepted huge quantities of EU money while its own native industries shrivelled and a low-wage economy more or less forced huge numbers of young men and women to find work abroad to support their families. It also imposed the EU���s secular, politically correct ideas on a Poland where many people are still conservative Roman Catholics.

What Tim Garton Ash notices about the Law and Justice government (and what I find most fascinating about it) is this. It is a new combination, deeply dangerous to the modern consensus. It is Corbynite on the welfare state, but conservative on culture and migration:

���PiS [the Law and Justice Party���s rather unfortunate acronym in Polish] represents a large part of Polish society: patriotic, Catholic, conservative inhabitants of small towns and villages, especially in the poorer east and south-east of the country; people who don���t feel they have benefited from the transition to market democracy. It promises a strong state to protect them from the cold winds of economic and social liberalism. It is rightwing in culture, religion, sexual morality (no abortion or in vitro fertilisation), xenophobia (no Muslim refugees please, we���re Polish) and nationalism, but almost leftwing in its economic and social promises to the poor and left-behind���.

I am puzzled that no such combination has yet arisen in Britain, and can only explain it by the Labrador-like devotion of British social conservatives to a Blairite Tory Party which repeatedly kicks them in the ribs with its well-polished brogues, laughing as it does so. I have tried to challenge this barmy, servile devotion, but found it impenetrable.

The other thing is this. The EU has coddled Poland (with aid which will total  100 billion Euros by 2020) and not pressed it too hard to join the Euro. It has seen it as a star member, compliant, and an example which Ukraine might one day follow. And now, after a long period when it seemed to be on a smooth flight-path to ever-closer union, Poland���s national sentiments, previously buried under layers of Euromoney,  have reawoken, partly thanks to harsh economic conditions and partly because a nation which has only recently re-established itself feels particularly threatened by Angela Merkel���s relaxed policy onwards Muslim migrants.

These are fundamental problems, not easily resolved either by negotiation or by pressure. Europe���s bitter, difficult history has come back once again to poke the idealists in the eye. The debts of 1914 have not yet been paid in full, and the damage it did is not yet repaired. Watch with interest.