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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35414 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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Can anybody explain the Polish perspective on the Ukraine war?

I went to Poland and it looked like what Western Europe should look like. The urban areas were clean and seemingly safe. Indeed the people living there are mostly European or Slavic.

My understanding is that most of the tsunami of African or Middle-Eastern immigrants of the 2000s would rather go to Western Europe or Scandinavia for better welfare or economic prospects.

Still, Poland used to get in trouble with the EU for not wanting to take in a certain amount of them.

Moreover, Poland has also faced reprimand from the same union for their policies toward non-heterosexuals.

Why did Poland even join the EU? Did they really need the money so badly at the time?

Now it seems that Poland is going toward ever more alignment with the EU and US.

Are they really so scared of Russia that they would drink the corn syrup and give up on whatever is left of their culture/sovereignty/demographics?

Is anybody of relevance in Poland even attempting to contradict the pro-Western turn?

  • -14

When people in Europe think about the EU, they don't think about immigration or gay marriage or whatever, or even Russia (well, these days they might, but still, it's NATO that is more relevant as an actor here). They think about trade. Behind all other stuff, EU is still primarily a trade pact, and what it represents to your average European is wealth and stability. Of course both of these are extremely important to Eastern Europeans, for reasons that probably don't need explaining. It is impossible to understand the popularity of EU without this frame; it's particularly impossible if one insists on looking at European politics through American culture-war framings.

Whatever attempts there have been from EU to get Poland to be more socially liberal have obviously been failures, thus far. (It's worth remembering that the whole spat EU has with Poland is not EU saying "you need to take in more gays and immigrants and have abortions", it's been about EU being concerned with PiS court-packing and other challenges to rule of law.)

Regarding Russia, it's also worth noting that Poland is not "going toward more alignment with EU and US", Poland is significantly more anti-Russian than EU and US and Polish politicians have many times demanded these parties to take more aggressive action against Russia and to protect Ukraine, going as far as to flirt with direct intervention in ways that EU and US have refrained from doing.

This, of course, does not just come from nowhere. Throughout the war, social media has been replete with constant Russian TV clips going around in social media on how they hate Poland, in particular, and blame Poland, in particular, for brainwashing all the Ukrainians to believe Russia is not their friend, and how Russia needs to conduct a SMO against Poland as soon as possible. And there seems to be an even longer history of anti-Polish hostility from Russia (quoting from a Google-translated Finnish blog post):

A certain Central European state has constantly taken center stage in the Kremlin's calculations as the main opponent of the country, and the policy pursued by Russia in its immediate periphery would ultimately be easy to explain through this tension alone. In Vladimir Putin's eyes, one of the countries standing in the way of Russian hegemony stands out above all others: Poland.

The essay published by the Russian president in July 2021 on the historical connection between Russians and Ukrainians has been quoted widely, and is a telling example of Putin's understanding of history. The essay is a straightforward narrative about the destinies of Eastern Europe spanning half a millennium. Few readers paid attention to how, in connection with each historical turning point he presented, Putin specifically named Poland not only as Russia's main opponent in the Ukrainian region, but also as an incomparably worse oppressor of Ukrainians than Russia.

Putin's essay tells how history took a fatal turn already when, as a result of the Polish-Lithuanian Union, Ukraine ended up in the sphere of influence of Catholic Christendom, which broke the connection of the Eastern Slavic peoples. This was followed by the revolt of the Cossack leader Bohdan Khmelnytsky; the struggle for freedom, in which the Ukrainian people sought help against Poland from their brother-in-law, the Tsar of Russia. The divisions of Poland meant for Putin the return of the "old Russian lands" to their true state unity, and in the 19th century Ukrainian cultural identity naturally developed as a "Little Russian" part of the empire; the tsarist regime's censorship measures, on the other hand, were only a reaction to the efforts of Polish nationalists in Ukraine. After the collapse of the Empire, the Poles suppressed the independence of the Western Ukrainians and used the "People's Republic of Ukraine" founded by Symon Petlyura only as an intermediary in their fight against the Bolsheviks. In the period between the world wars, the Polish-administered western regions of Ukraine were oppressed. According to Putin, the current rapprochement between Ukraine and the EU countries is still underpinned by an "old Polish and Austrian project" — a reference to the cooperation between Polish independence activists and the Habsburg dual monarchy — whose purpose was to create an artificial "anti-Russia" out of Ukraine.

Rhetorical attacks against Poland have become a regular part of Putin's arsenal since the annexation of Crimea. In December 2019 , Putin accused the government of interwar Poland of colluding with the Nazis and named Poland complicit in starting World War II . A month later, the Holocaust commemoration held in Jerusalem turned into a new stage in the historical war between Moscow and Warsaw with Putin's speech . In June 2020, the ruler of the Kremlin continued on the same topic, declaring that the wartime suffering of occupied Poland was the fault of the country's own government. In Russian foreign policy, history has been turned into a weapon, and in this respect, the front of the hybrid war had been turned towards Poland long before the asylum seeker crisis at the turn of last year on the border of Belarus. The nationalist, right-wing populist government that has been in power in Warsaw since 2015, which, like the Kremlin, has enacted its own historical laws , has been a favorite target for Putin.

It is clear that the struggle for domination of Eastern Europe is defined in the Kremlin as a struggle primarily against Poland. Among the new EU and NATO countries after the collapse of communism, Poland is in a class of its own; For ten years, Poland's economic growth has exceeded all expectations , the recovery of the country's economy from the corona crisis has been fast , the country's armed forces are the fifth largest in the European Union , and from the beginning Poland has pursued an active neighborhood policy specifically in the direction of Ukraine, also using the means of economic cooperation.

Poland's eastern policy has a long history. The "Eastern Borderlands", Kresy Wschodnie , were once part of Polish nationalist nostalgia; the regions from the Black Sea to the Baltic Sea appeared as a lost, beautiful Arcadia, the scene of the great days of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The background of Poland's current neighborhood policy is more recent, and its starting point was the views expressed in the Kultura magazine by two émigré journalists during the Cold War, Jerzy Giedroyc and Juliusz Mieroszewski . "The Giedroyc-Mieroszewski Doctrine"required Poland's unreserved support for the independence of Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania, rejection of the big brother and great power attitude, agreement on historical pain points, and the joining of all countries to United Europe. After the collapse of the Communist Bloc, the Polish government practically adapted its Eastern policy to the Kultura magazine and tried to pave Ukraine's way to Western institutions. Although today's Poland has become more authoritarian and anti-EU than before , the country's commitment to Ukraine has not wavered.

Poland's neighborhood policy has been yet another "geopolitical" threat factor for the Russians, and as such a particularly painful one. It is no surprise that in the eyes of Vladimir Putin, Poland's rise to a new regional power factor and active politics in the neighboring regions are defined in the light of five hundred years of history. In this interpretation, the Warsaw elite is once again expanding its sphere of interest at the expense of Russia; Poles are at the forefront of challenging Russian supremacy in Ukraine; Poland actually threatens to question once again the entire Russian national birth myth dating back to the days of Kievan Rus; and at the same time, Poland, specifically Poland, is bringing Western weapons close to Russia's heartlands, whether it's NATO's missile shield or arms deliveries to the Ukrainian army.

It is also clear to Putin that, of all his opponents, Poland is the one that won't give up, and Poland is the only one of the EU countries that is ready to defend Ukraine, even on its own . Moscow's foreign policy has achieved results in a few countries of the former Eastern Bloc, above all in Hungary, but on the Polish side the contradictions are completely irreconcilable for historical reasons. Russia's goals in Ukraine therefore require action in relation to Poland and the isolation of Poland from its allies, in which case Russia could take the measure of its opponent alone — according to Pushkin, "only among the Slavs". Until now, the government in Warsaw has messed up its relationship with the EU itself — although one can ask how much the Union has benefited Poland against Russia, especially considering Germany's energy policy needs, in the end — but as a NATO country, Poland's shares are on a good course.

While I agree that the EU framed itself as a trade-focused entity, things have shifted since then, as georgioz explained.

Didn't the EU just enact trade sanctions against Russia with a great negative impact on the cost of energy for its members?

I don't know what the current energy situation is like in Poland, but this demonstrates that being part of that trade-group is not always helping the Polish economy.

While Putin's views of history come with their own bias/inconsistencies/falsehoods perhaps, but at least his vision takes into account history.

What is the EU's views of history?

'Before there were empires and it was bad because they were European and Christian, but now there is no more empire -disregard that we are deeply aligned with the American empire and forcing rules on our 'member' states and giving a hard time to members trying to leave- so things are gonna be great now! Wealth, diversity and gayness for everybody!'

Didn't the EU just enact trade sanctions against Russia with a great negative impact on the cost of energy for its members?

Yes.

I don't know what the current energy situation is like in Poland, but this demonstrates that being part of that trade-group is not always helping the Polish economy.

The Poles are the nation most in favor of sanctions, and would love for them to be stricter. Arguing that it's bad for Poland when the Poles (with broad popular support) disagree with you is peak tier ivory tower thinking.

While Putin's views of history come with their own bias/inconsistencies/falsehoods perhaps, but at least his vision takes into account history.

This is a meaningless sentence.

What is the EU's views of history?

Putin is one man, and the EU is one of the most disjointed and inconsistent autonomous political entities in the world. If it has a version of history, it isn't the stupid caricature you're talking about. Instead, it'd look like the following:

'Before, Europe routinely tore itself to shreds, from the dark ages all the way to 1945. Today, we recognise this was a terrible thing, full of death and pain and destruction; we never want to go back to that, and we will be better off for unifying under the blue flag with golden stars, whatever that ends up looking like.'

So far, the EU has managed to do this. Between Yugoslavia, Armenia, Georgia, and now Ukraine, I'd argue that the unprecedented peace of the past seventy years inside the EU has been a resounding success, and no amount of wrongheaded bitching about immigrants or gays from ornery foreign rightists is going to convince me that such a peace as we have isn't worth it.

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