Good evening, everybody. I have a great pleasure to welcome you at the second annual Kolakowski Lecture, which is our flagship,
which is the flagship of our program on mother Polish studies here at San Antonio at San Antonio's College.
And before I introduce today's speaker, Professor John Connolly from University of Berkeley,
I felt that the subject of of of the of today's lecture, which is essentially nationalism, begs for some introduction in our contemporary context.
As some of you may know, the word or the adjective National makes a great comeback in Warsaw.
These days, we have no longer public mass media, but we have national mass media.
And there was an institute for Maternity Medical magazine in Warsaw.
This time it's actually called the National Institute for Procreation.
So we have essentially the entire explosion of all these objectives in the public sphere,
referring essentially to national or supreme, let's say simply let's say, let's say nationalities.
When is this really the case? Actually, that after all these years, since 1989, nationalism is raising its head in Poland,
or perhaps as some observers from Western Mass media see it this way we have essentially creeping authoritarianism.
I really don't know about this, but the person who definitely knows more about this is today.
Speaker at this is exactly professor Professor John Connolly from the University of California, Berkeley,
who is one of the leading experts on the history of the official states theory of National Peace in Central Europe.
And. Klein, in a recent piece in U.S. History of our heart and essentially that story of central
Europe really dealing with not only the countries located in Russia and Germany,
only about one in Germany itself. John is the author of two monographs of The Captive Universe,
which was published by North Carolina Press and which was seen to be a prize from American History Association and from enemies,
rather, the revolution in Catholic teaching of the Jews, which was published by Harvard in 2012.
And this book, when again was awarded as a prize, which is the drama and camera issue prize and in the presence of his writing.
Another book is three of these Central European modern age.
He's going to talk about contemporary foreign affairs. And again, I very much hope that this is going to be a splendid lecture.
Thank you so much for accepting our invitation. Please warm welcome to your home.
Can you all hear me? Yes. Well, thank you very much for that kind introduction.
I'd also like to thank St Anthonys for the honour of being asked to give this year's Kolakowski lecture.
If I had a higher honour in my academic life, I don't know what it's been.
And special thanks to Mikko. I couldn't ski and Agnieszka could been of St Anthony's program in Polish studies.
For all they've done to make this visit both possible and enjoyable.
So this evening I'd like to look pretty closely at Polish nationalism on the background of Poland's historical context.
That's the context of East Central Europe. I wanted to try to shed some light on problems old and new of the region, but also of Poland.
What can we learn about Poland by investigating its past and comparative context?
What might we discover about Poland's current dilemma, which in popular media is often associated with irrational and extreme nationalism?
If we look at the Polish case. Among other cases, claims are often made about the supposed intensity of nationalism in Eastern Europe.
Just last week, I had a discussion with graduate students in Berkeley about European nationalism,
and when asked if they could be precise about exactly where the problem of nationalism lay,
all of them said without hesitation, that it lies somewhere in Eastern Europe.
I don't know exactly what they were thinking of.
Maybe they had read Christopher Clark's book on the outbreak of World War One, which associates that war's outbreak largely with Serbia.
Maybe they were thinking of Bosnia. But where does Poland fit into this picture?
Let me first make a clarifying remark. I call the region East Central Europe, but sometimes also just Eastern Europe as a kind of shorthand.
But what I mean is a former Soviet bloc, but the former Soviet bloc is much more than a Cold War construct.
The question of what unites East Central Europe calls to mind an anecdote from the war years,
when several Polish communists urged Stalin to make Poland part of the USSR.
Stalin was well studied in history, and he said that making Poland communist would be like trying to put a saddle on a cow.
But what Stalin said is true. I think of Eastern Europe as a whole.
The countries between historic Germany and Russia are countries where people buckle and shake at the prospect of foreign rule.
It's a place that for centuries, regiments have treated it as their zone of interest,
their own space, and which has therefore become a place that tends to reject imperialism.
I think you might say Eastern Europe, Eastern Europeans are anti-imperial peoples,
but they've also been somewhat complicit in their faith because rather than stand together, East Europeans have often quarrelled among themselves.
For example, the Habsburgs could never have put down the Hungarian Revolution of 1849 without the help of Croats, Serbs, Romanians and Saxons.
Germans. Hungarians, of course, did find an ally in Polish general Youssouf Bem,
who assembled two Polish brigades and commanded a Hungarian army that predictably that army BAMS army operated in areas
of Transylvania where they were seen not as liberators but as oppressors because the population was German and Romania,
a more united East Central Europe in the 1930s, might have stood more firmly against, more firmly against Hitler.
And what follows? I want to take the story of Polish nationalism from distant, approximate through nine episodes beginning very early.
My first episode and my first episode, I want to trace the general question of why nationalism has been such a problem in East Central Europe.
And respond to this question and here's a map to ask to to encourage you to think about it.
To respond to this question, I want to take us deep into the pre national age,
to the years following the decline of the Roman Empire, when Germanic Slavic and finally Magyar tribes entered East Central Europe.
These tribes respected no national boundaries because no national boundaries existed.
But more importantly, they had no idea of national belonging.
Therefore, they intermingled, not realising that roughly a millennium.
Later in the late 1700s,
the German philosopher Johann Gottfried herder would proclaim that a language made a nation and that each nation had a mission before God.
That a generation or two after that,
leading intellectuals in East Central Europe would preach that to live under the rule of another nation was literal slavery, and that in 1918,
an American president would pronounce an ideology of national self-determination so that each national movement in
Eastern Europe could claim that it absolutely required a national state and fund and found that claim justified.
All that was far in the unimaginable future. By the 10th century, after an initial settlement, chieftains emerged with the coming of Christianity.
These chieftains were called kings. We think what became the Polish lands, the tribe of the Poland's gained the pre-eminent position.
And here is elsewhere. A medieval state emerged.
Though its boundaries shifted according to the fortunes of the dynasty from this period about the 10th century,
there were also Hungarian, Croat, Serb and Bulgarian entities.
I used the word settlement, but really nothing was settled. Poland might have been quite different, including bohemian Slovakia,
if both Slav pro-British descendants had been able to hold this round this round together.
Prague might now be a provincial city in western Poland and Czech, a west Polish dialect.
The point is that there is nothing necessarily an eternal about Poland.
Over the centuries, the region became even more mixed as German and later Jewish settlers moved eastward.
Further south and east, other ethnic groups became increasingly entangled.
But then the region came to share the joint experience mentioned above of becoming the possession of imperial states.
This set it apart from the West, but also from Russia.
If in those places, nation states grew and nationalised their populations over many centuries in East Central Europe,
foreign imperial powers occupied the space. And much later, after the 1780s, it was national movements that made nations.
Most famously, in Bohemia, in the Southeast, the region fell under Ottoman.
In the centre, Hapsburg. And to the east. Muscovite rule.
The Imperial States made the region even more complex by leaving differing legal and political traditions.
They also helped make it more religiously complex. Many South Slavs over the centuries converted to Islam and tens of thousands of Serbs left
Ottoman dominated territory and settled in Hapsburg border areas and the so-called Crimea,
where they received land in return for military service.
And so Christian Bosnia became partly Muslim and Catholic, Croatia became partly Serb Orthodox.
Poland maintained independence longer than any place safe.
Montenegro, but by 1795, also succumbed to the regional pattern when it was wiped from the map and partitioned by its neighbours.
Thus, by the end of the 18th century, the political map had become much simpler, belying linguistic and religious complexity that lay underneath.
But within a generation, a challenge emerged the challenge of ethnic nationalism propagated by national
movements led by people like the brilliant Czech journalist Karl Havlicek.
Borowski Karl Havlicek.
Borowski wrote in April 1848, Whatever your speech, your nationality does not dominate, no panacea.
You are oppressed even in the freest of countries.
He quoted a lot of Czech speakers to that of black slaves in the United States of what used to Negroes,
he asked, is even the most liberal administration? So what is special about Eastern Europe?
What may differentiate it from other places is not the strength or the existence of national nationalist sentiment,
but the clash between ideas such as these espoused by Havlicek and those of well-meaning liberal statesmen like Woodrow Wilson,
who believed that each nation should govern itself within well-defined boundaries.
On the background of the history of intermixing that I've just described.
Such borders were impossible to draw. There was no way to create nation states in East Central Europe.
Second episode Let's remain for a moment in the late 18th century.
What is distinctive about Poland is that the very time the idea of ethnic nationalism
was growing among other peoples was also the time when Poland ceased to be a state.
Poland disappeared as a political as an independent political entity many centuries later than other East European states,
for example, Bulgaria or Hungary or Serbia, all of which were gone by the 15th century.
But after Poland lost statehood in 1795, the elite, the Polish gentry, remained as an intact social class.
And it was remarkable in two senses. First, it was much larger than counterparts elsewhere, comprising about 25% of the population of central Poland.
This meant that far more people identified as nationals in Poland than any other place in East Central Europe,
with one possible exception that of Serbia. And I'll have much more to say about Serbia later on.
In 1800, an estimated 1 million Polish speakers thought of themselves as Polish nationals.
The number of Czechs, Slovaks or Slovenes,
the thought of themselves in national terms at that point could have been counted in the thousands, if not many, in Hungary or Croatia.
The nationally conscious elites were much smaller than in Poland.
But now, from the late 18th century, national consciousness began to grow, beginning with Hungary and Bohemia.
And we know precisely who was responsible. Joseph, the second of Austria.
In March 1784, the Hapsburg ruler issued a mandate that German be used as the language of administration throughout his lands.
This set off a furious response in Hungary, but not because of any challenge to the Hungarian language.
Joseph did not care about Hungarian at that point. This was a dying language hardly used by the educated classes.
Rather the language Joseph wanted to do away with, and to which the Hungarian gentry felt an emotional attachment was Latin.
Joseph considered Latin to be an impediment to modern state formation because it was a dead language.
The elites in Hungary had grown attached to Latin because it permitted them to
communicate in a hugely diverse region where people spoke Hungarian but also Romanian,
Slovak, Croatian, Serb and German.
But Joseph was not a nationalist for whom German was a default option as the modern language spoken by the most people in Hungary.
Yet by mandating its use, Joseph ignited fear among the Magyar elite that they would simply become another group of German speaking nobles.
In 1790, shortly before dying. Joseph revoked this ordinance because the opposition it provoked in Hungary was endangering the security of his realm.
But by now, by 1790, the fire of modern nationalism was burning brightly among Magyar nobles.
From the 1790s, a small group of talented intellectuals led by philologist and translator Florence cousin, she modernised the Hungarian language,
and over the succeeding decades, the Hungarian elite ensured that Hungarian displaced Latin as well as German schools and administration.
This, in turn, unleashed national movements among Romanians, Slovaks, Croats and serves as Magyars did not want to be Germans.
None of them wanted to be Magyars in a slightly different manner.
Joseph's Reform helped launch a national movement in Bohemia in the Czech lands
or a small group of patriots brought the Czech language back from extinction.
The ideological force everywhere was Johann Gottfried Hadar for Czechs, Slovaks and South Slavs.
By giving them a sense of mission that each nation had a destiny before God.
But for Hungarians, by predicting that Hungarians would disappear, submerged in a sea of Slavs and lose any destiny they might have.
My third episode takes us into the early 19th century. Poland came to modern nationalism on a very different path with different timing
and a different combination of concerns and actions on the part of its patriots.
Polish patriots of the early 19th century were not as concerned about culture and language as counterparts elsewhere.
In fact, in the 1820s, the poet Adam Miscavige even remarked that the Czechs seemed obsessed with language.
He thought that was very strange. Strange thing for a poet to think.
Instead, Polish patriots were concerned about rights.
Unlike other East Europeans, they had just lost a stake they considered their own.
At the Congress of Vienna in 1815, Poles got the pseudo consolation of the kingdom.
Their King Alexander, the first of Russia, promised to uphold Polish rights.
Yet in the 1820s, Poles increasingly complained of illegal behaviour and abuses by Russian officials.
They complained of censorship, of the crushing of institutions, of self-rule,
of arrests and deportations, of poles, for even recalling Polish independence.
A group of students from Vilna, for example, was punished, some sent to Siberia when one of their number chalked on a wall.
Long live the Constitution of 1791.
This constitution, the 17 9091 constitution was an instrument that might have formed the basis for the transition of Poland to a modern,
liberal democracy. This progress was stopped by the partitions.
It was in defiance of evident injustice that Polish cadets launched an uprising against Russian rule in November 1830.
The consequences were disastrous. Whatever liberties Poles possessed were now reduced.
Many of Poland's leading writers and scholars, including Muscovites I'm sorry, Moskovitz, but also Frederic Chopin,
never left Poland and founded the great so-called Great Emigration in Paris, which numbered about 10,000 people from now.
Poland was as much in their ideas, poems and music as it was on Polish soil,
where after a second uprising, the second failed uprising in 1863, even the word Poland disappeared.
Still throughout the 19th century, the cause of Polish nationalism in the partitioned lands remains simple.
As the historian Stefan Canaris wrote, nationally conscious poles were those who could not accept the loss of Polish sovereignty.
They demonstrated their nationalist attitude simply by maintaining linguistic and cultural distinctiveness.
And one could say that as political freedoms shrank, Polish nationalism also became, as it was elsewhere, largely a cultural cause.
But as the century went by, even that even the cultural cause became increasingly difficult.
And again, we see something that is unusual in Poland. Elsewhere in Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and the Czech lands.
As the century progressed, so did opportunities to build national schooling, culture and administration.
So here you see a map of historic Hungary, which was essentially independent after 1867,
permitting the Hungarian elites to do as they liked on that territory.
Here, a map of the situation after 1878, in which you can see an independent Romanian, Bulgarian Serb state as well as Greek state.
All of these entities could do what nation states were supposed to do.
I think there's one more. Yes. And you see the gradual growth of Serbia over the course of the 19th century in most of Poland.
Possibilities for promoting national schooling and culture, however, were reduced precisely as they were expanding elsewhere.
In the late 19th century. In the German Russian lands poles were forced to conspire illegally in order to simply learn their language.
So we see a very odd combination. Poles had a large class, the gentry and later the intelligentsia, with a very distinct idea of what Poland was.
But at the same time, unparalleled energies were directed against making Poland ever re-emerge.
Why? Perhaps because more than any other force, the idea of Poland disrupted the European order.
Okay, well, maybe there was one other equally disruptive, disruptive force,
and that was the greater Serbian idea represented by the growing Serb state.
There are a number of similarities, I think, between Poland and Serbia.
As in Poland, the national movement in Serbia attempted to form the nation not only through culture, but through armed insurrections.
And then from the 79 is more or less the same time as in Poland.
And like the Polish, the Serb cause was thought especially disruptive because Serbs lived in several states, all of which would lose if Serbia won.
This is a fact at the foundation of World War One.
Another thing that was similar was that very many Serbs had a sense of their national identity, yet not because they belonged to a gentry.
The Serb gentry had been destroyed by the Ottomans.
What Serbs had was a Serb Orthodox Church, but perhaps more importantly, they had poems about the undying virtues of heroes from their past,
poems that were sung from generation to generation over hundreds of years, and told them that Ottoman rule was temporary.
These poems, by the way, were not written down until the 19th century.
This is the so-called Kosovo cycle, when you can see a singer with his counsellor in the late in the 19th century, very many Poles as well as Serbs,
took for granted against all reason,
evident reason of the time that foreign occupation would end because it was an offence to basic norms of decency and civilisation.
By contrast, Hungarian, Croatian or Czech elites had become subjects of the Habsburgs legally and arguably voluntarily,
and that tended to mitigate the demands raised by these elites.
Historian historians have said that both Serbs and Poles needed heritage in the ideas of
the German idealism less than other peoples to tell them first who they were and second,
what role they had to play in history. Poles and Serbs knew who they were, and they knew what their task was.
It was to recreate Serb and Polish sovereignty.
Fourth episode There's something even more distinct and important and in some ways interesting about the Polish case.
A basic question had to be answered after 1795.
Who was responsible for Poland's woes? Poles found explanations not so much in Saint Petersburg or Vienna or Berlin.
The evils of residing there were obvious. They found them instead.
In Poland itself. Among Poles, Poland had disappeared because Poles had betrayed it.
Infamous, in particular, was the target of each confederation.
Polish magnates who rejected the Constitution of May 1791 and cooperated cooperated with Russia in dismembering Poland.
Several conspirators, including the Bishop of Vilna, were captured in 1794, publicly hanged.
So in a sense, Poles always had each other to blame for misfortune, as Poland's fortunes declined in the 19th century.
The need for explanation and the search for the guilty in one's own camp intensified.
Where, for example, the uprisings of 1830 and 1863 not foolhardy undertakings in the eyes of critics.
Those launching the uprisings were not simply failed revolutionaries, but traitors.
They had created the situation in which the Polish language faced extinction.
Proponents of so-called organic work said that if one if one really wanted to serve Poland, one had to do practical things on its behalf.
For example, in education and science or business, and in some form, cooperation with the partitioning power was unavoidable.
When we look elsewhere in Eastern Europe, the blame for national calamity was placed on the shoulders of some non-national for Czechs or Hungarians.
That was the German and South Slav areas. It was the Turk for Slovaks, Croats and Transylvanian Romanians.
It was the Hungarian. Now to my fifth episode, I said above that Polish national ideas in the early 19th century tended to be political,
aimed at the civic community of Polish nationals who had held and would hold rights in a Polish state.
But in the late 19th century, that changed.
Poland, in a sense, caught up in this rather nasty time of social Darwinism and what Karl Gorski called politics and a new key Polish elites,
like all others in the region, saved the Hungarian who. Had their own state attempted to build a modern nation in the absence of state institutions.
Yet Polish patriots faced one more unusual challenge because many of them were landowners.
Most desperately poor. Polish speaking peasants view them as aliens, almost like an ethnically foreign group.
Sometimes, in fact, they use the word pole to indicate members of the gentry.
Elsewhere, the landowner or boss was often of a foreign nationality, for example, in the Czech lands.
It was a German and the Czech movement built Czech identity as anti-German.
In Bosnia, the landowner was Muslim. In Slovenia, Germany in 1800, not only Prague and Bruno, but also Budapest.
Bratislava and Zagreb were German speaking cities.
But by mid-century, that situation was rapidly changing.
And for example, Prague by 1900 was largely a Czech speaking place.
The German was an enemy against whom the self was clearly defined and who was then displaced.
From culture. From business. From politics. From all traces in one's own language.
In central Poland, however, not only the countryside, but also also the cities tended to be culturally Polish.
So against whom? With a modern ethnic Polish nation, deformed, who lived in the midst of Poles,
who might fulfil the function of convincing Polish peasants that they were the same nation has Polish townspeople and gentry.
In my view, that other was the Jew.
Where Poland stands out against neighbours was not in a growing antipathy toward Jews that was universal in East Central Europe.
What was unusual was not even the sense that the Jew was in a similar bill like no other people.
Here, the Christian world was clear about the Jews essential otherness.
Jews would remain a separate and curse people to the end of time, according to the anti Judaic teachings of that period.
What was unusual in Poland was that all of these dimensions the religious, the economic, cultural, professional and racial,
could come together in a context where the number of Jews was huge and where
they could be portrayed as an alien and once as an alien nation one's midst.
There was no other national movement where opprobrium was focussed to the same degree on the Jew in order to fashion the national self.
Sixth episode is Independence 1918.
I'm sorry. One more business and one more, please.
Thank you. If West Europe. Britain, for example, tends to mourn the dead of World War One.
East Europe celebrates the war as having enabled independence.
But historians also register the fact that everywhere with, with one exception,
return to the independent republics, the democracies of 1918 soon became undemocratic and authoritarian.
And historians describe this sad fact in part to the circumstance that these national states were, in fact, not national.
Each new nation state was like a miniature Hapsburg empire with large ethnic minorities.
In Poland, only about two thirds of the population were ethnic Poles.
In 1926, Marshal Pilsudski put an end to Polish democracy because he feared that Poland had become ungovernable.
Ungovernable in part because of the multiplicity of parties in Parliament, many of which were ethnic.
Yet Czechoslovakia was even more ethnically complex, yet maintained itself as a democracy until 1938.
The difference, in my view, lay not in stronger democratic traditions.
Among the Czechs, the Poles also had strong democratic traditions.
Rather, it lay in the fact that the Czech political elite was much more coherent than the Polish.
This is, by the way, a fact that Margaret Macmillan alludes to in her book on 1919.
Throughout the interwar years, five Czech parties from left to right, from Social Democrats through agrarian to the national Democrats,
formed a coalition and always had a simple majority against the Germans.
It was the so-called Patkar group of five parties.
So they held a majority against Germans, Slovaks, Hungarians and Communists, who traditionally got about 10% in each election.
Had it not been for the deep divide in Polish nationalism between the camps of Yousaf, Pilsudski and Rome and not Demovsky,
Polish elites could also have numerically dominated the parliament and thus their state.
I should note that in the interwar years, Croat, Serb and Hungarian elites were often much more cohesive than the Polish counterpart.
So what was that? What was that divide in Polish nationalism about? Both Pilsudski and Demovsky were ardent nationalists.
We read that one was left the other right. One more civic, one more at the other, more ethnic, one more jagiellonian, the other more pious.
Yet neither was Democratic. Neither was democratic.
But it was the more moderate Pilsudski who staged a coup against democracy in order to head off a possible dictatorship of the right.
Yet having seized power, as Hendrik Burzynski wrote, Crack a great crack.
A historian Pilsudski did nothing to moderate Poland's nationality problems.
And though the differences between their followers were not great,
the two camps accused each other not simply of poor political choices, but of being bad poles, being traitors.
I think the extraordinary standard, by the way, for being a good pole,
maybe the impossible standard of being a good pole were a legacy of the partition
of time when every act undertaken for Poland seemed at the same time necessary,
yet insufficient, and in the end became arguably counterproductive.
Kosinski angrily broke off his last personal meeting with Demovsky in 1920.
After Demovsky asked a simple question How can we go to Paris, to the peacemakers in Paris, and demand eastern Galicia and the eastern Cressy,
and at the same time support the desires of Ukrainians for an independent Ukraine that will contain those precise territories?
Perhaps what bothered national Democrats and Dexia under Demovsky about the Nazi Pilsudski
camp was its failure to describe in straightforward language what it was actually doing,
which was in fact not very different from what the national Democrats would have done.
I realise it's a provocative argument, but I'll move on to episode six.
Fascism 1930s was Poland fascist, and if not, why not?
Though in the 1930s Pilsudski the military strongman was often compared to Mussolini's rule, in fact was not fascist.
He had no great fascist movement.
There was no movement from below supporting him of that sort.
He possessed no cohesive ideology, no systematic racism or chauvinism, no program of aggression, no idea of a total state.
Poland did produce a tiny fascist movement whose main constituency was students.
And there's an excellent book on the subject by our own Nikolai.
Kunitz ski, which traces the movement, in fact, through the entire 20th century and is a great study in Polish history.
But there were other countries in the region, especially Romania and Hungary, that produced sizeable fascist parties.
Why was Polish fascism small and weak?
The Yale historian Pyotr Vantage wrote that fascism went against a long tradition of Polish ideals of freedom, individualism and toleration.
And it seems that he's right to a sense, because if you read even Poland's right wing press of that period,
you find, generally speaking, a rejection of totalitarianism as being incompatible with Polish political traditions.
Those traditions going back to the 17th to the 18th century were undeniable.
Totalitarianism was associated furthermore with Poland's national enemies, Germany and Russia.
But the Nazi regime did nothing to stop the increasingly virulent anti-Semitism in its own ranks.
Pilsudski died in 1935, and his successors aped fascist models, much like counterparts elsewhere in Eastern Europe, by the way, for example,
of strict discipline within a so-called within a pseudo fascist organisation called the Camp of National Unity,
and by calling the head of the state the leader of the nation.
But Poland settled into into a kind of political muddle in the late 1930s with two political camps centre, right and centre left.
Neither, by any means homogeneous, moving closer to each other, but never reconciling after 1935.
However, in the changed international situation of 1939, Polish politics rose decisively out of this muddle.
More accurately, Polish society rose to become the first to say no to Hitler.
The first society in the first stage anywhere to say no to Hitler.
Poland may have seemed quasi fascist to some outsiders, but it was definitely anti-Nazi.
So let's move now to episode seven, which is World War Two. Here's the typical sequence we have of the events leading to World War Two.
Hitler occupies the Rhineland, and the West fails to protest.
Hitler occupies Austria and the West watches passively.
Hitler seizes the Sudetenland, and the West not only fails to protest, but gives his blessing.
And then Hitler attacks Poland, and the West finally responds.
The last act it was attack on Poland was, in fact, a bit more complicated, in fact.
And by the way, Timothy Snyder in his recent book has an excellent description of this entire episode.
Poland had a choice whether to be a Nazi ally or a Nazi target of attack.
Late in 1938, after finishing up Czechoslovakia, the Nazi regime courted Poland for an Anti-bolshevik alliance.
The main price required was Danzig Gdansk, a city that was a free city that Poland did not even possess.
The Germans also asked for an extraterritorial highway through the so-called Polish corridor, linking the western areas of Germany with East Prussia.
Note that every other East European state said yes to a Nazi offer of alliance saved Czechoslovakia, which was not courted.
So why was Poland different? I think its obstinacy has to do with the absolute value Poles came to attach to sovereignty,
a value that once again goes back to the late loss of statehood in 1795, even territory that Poland did not fully control.
Danzig dance was not negotiable. There was, however, another case in Eastern Europe that was somewhat similar to Poland.
It's not a state of that period, but it's a region. I'm thinking, Can you guess what I'm thinking of Serbia once again.
In March 1941, a group of Air Force Serb Air Force officers in Belgrade staged a coup against the Regent Prince Paul,
who had who had been in charge of the Yugoslav government since 1934.
The coup was a protest against the pact that Prince Paul had just signed in Vienna with the Nazis,
with the Nazi government, which in some senses would appear to an unbiased observer,
perhaps as a very favourable act for Yugoslavia, because it didn't mandate Yugoslavia to do much of anything,
didn't permit German troops to go through Yugoslav territory. All that it pledged was that Yugoslavia would not act aggressively toward Germany.
Yet this simple signature on this document was enough to cause these Air Force
officers to rise up and to be greeted as heroes throughout throughout Serbia.
In a brief period in March 1941. So I think here too, we see in Serbia, as in Poland,
that even slight challenges to sovereignty were considered to be absolutely unacceptable and in both cases for deep historical reasons.
As you know, in both places, partisan armies emerged.
In one sense, they were very similar in both places. The army over the home army was very inclusive.
A very interesting case in the background of a preview of previous episodes of Polish history.
But also Tito's partisans were very inclusive.
I would say that perhaps they were the only bottom up anti nationalist movement in the history of East Central Europe.
They were anti nationalist, anti genocidal. The difference between the partisans and the home army is also evident.
Tito's units were single. They were communist. Poland's home army was non communist, even anti-communist.
What is similar in the two cases after the war is that they posed the strongest challenge challenges to Stalin's rule in East Central Europe.
Which brings us to episode eight Communism.
I think within the Soviet bloc outside of Yugoslavia, one can see again that Poland played a very unusual role.
It was perhaps the most anti-communist place in the region because nowhere else
did Soviet style communism seem more out of tune with national traditions.
And I get this from work by the late historian Christina kersten,
who studied the underground press in 1945 and found it preaching such messages as Soviet power would imperil the soul of the nation.
The Essence of Polish Mass. And we also read in the underground press of 1945 a very clear judgement.
Those who supported a government set up by Poland's enemy was not was was not only not a good poll, he was not a poll at all.
Still, as you know, millions of people who were undoubtedly Polish supported and indeed built Poland under communism.
Millions joined the Communist Party. And even those Polish communists who cared, not at least about Poland as a nation.
And Norman DAVIES actually describes very well in his volume two of God's playground, the great embarrassment felt by Polish Communists.
Often, even those who cared little about Poland as a nation had no choice but to portray what they were doing at every stage,
as in keeping with the interests of Poland.
Otherwise, they knew they would occupy spaces in national memory that were associated with what type of visa.
So at the height of Stalinism,
the Polish regime was printing classics of Polish literature in the hundreds of thousands Polish literature and philosophy,
and encouraging the loving, indeed demanding the loving rebuilding true to historical detail of destroyed cities, including their Catholic churches.
The Polish Stalinist regime supported archaeological studies proving the supposedly ancient Polish ownership of Poland's Western territories,
and while using a language that was more like Roman Demovsky than that of Rosa Luxemburg.
It held back from a complete assault on private farms, the church and the universities.
In the 1960s, Polish communists, nationals, even nationals, and even crossed the border to xenophobia, driving tens of thousands of Jews from Poland.
But of course, by expelling Jews, the government had also expelled the last supposed alien against whom Polish national identity could be contrasted,
thus causing the narrative of national treason for virtually any shortcoming to
focus on ethnic poles with an intensity that was unprecedented for the time being.
Scrutiny focussed on the communist regime then only was the title of a famous
set of interviews with Polish Stalinist that appeared in the early 1980s.
These Polish Stalinists were never Polish enough in Poland.
Fewer people joined the Communist Communist Organisation than elsewhere, and more Poles entered the opposition than elsewhere.
The crowning success was the United Front called Solidarity, the trade union Solidarity,
which seemed to bridge the deep divides within Polish society, bringing together virtually all strata.
We all know that work as intellectuals join solidarity.
But what always sticks out for me? Timothy Garton Ash, his marvellous 1983 history of solidarity Polish revolutions is rural solidarity to which
it devotes a whole chapter showing how the movement solidarity conquered even the villages.
It was, it was indeed Polish national organisation.
But no sooner had Solidarity achieved victory in 1989 than solidarity came apart in the so-called battle at the top.
Splitting the movement to competing groups. Rifts were evident, especially in interpreting how much damage had been done by communism.
In other words, almost as soon as communism fell, people began disagreeing about what did it meant,
who was responsible, what should be done with them especially?
Remarkable, in my view, having looked at other societies in Eastern Europe.
It was the idea that on the Post write that Poland was pervaded by networks of conspirators who had
controlled intellectual and supposedly controlled intellectual and cultural life in people's Poland.
In fact, Polish, intellectual and cultural life and people's Poland in communist Poland was much more independent,
much more connected to trends outside Poland than elsewhere.
And the secret police was much weaker. A first jolt of the power of such beliefs came in the spring of 1992,
when we were surprised to learn that the new government of Yan Olszewski was going to publish documents showing wide,
split, widespread collaboration, including of the then president, Lech Walesa,
the official in charge, a founding member of the Committee to Defend Workers in 1976.
Core was Anthony much Ravitch. It's the best picture I could find.
She may never let go. And this response was to essentially relieve Olszewski of his duties and form a new government.
So this brings me to the final episode, episode nine To the Present.
Anthony Mitrovic is now Poland's Minister of Defence in the present.
Nothing is as fundamental for choosing which side to take for or against law and justice.
Peace. As one's attitude toward the communist past and the supposed existence of a deal that
was made in the late days of Polish communism to control post-communist Poland.
And of course, more recently of the crash of the President's aeroplane near Smolensk.
For Law and Justice, an article of faith that this crash was caused by a KGB run.
Russia. To disagree is to side with the destroyers of the nation.
To be a traitor. Pressured to let ski.
Parliamentary caucus, head of law and justice. He's the man on the left.
Started well, he didn't start. But I first got to know he referred to Lansky's work in history in Krakow and a book that
appeared I think it was in 1991 entitled Dictator Trading the Dictatorship of Treason.
It was a it's a story of the year 1947 and all of Kurlansky subsequent works as a historian.
And it's he still is officially an historian or about the secret police and he has several he makes two basic points.
The communist regime was not simply a regime imposed upon Poland, but rather like target visa.
It reflects internal treason Poles against Poles and his is book.
In 1947, he argued Polish careerists, rascals and profiteers had been willing to support the government imported from abroad.
The second thing is that this this obsession with files, what is this about?
And I think it reveals an underlying attitude. And the attitude is that things are never what they seem.
The people in charge, the people's Poland may have seemed Poles, but they were not to let us ski.
In a recent interview, for example, calls for Czech Yaroslavsky, a Soviet general in Polish uniform.
But let's be had an interesting method of himself being uncompromising.
He in 1970s, was a pretty well known figure in Poland's hippie scene.
Went by the name of chess and according to and I can't verify this stories in the Polish media, it is Talansky who taught Korda.
She's on the far left here, very popular rock and roll singer from the group Manon of the 1980s.
The Virtues of Marijuana. So whether or not this is true, I can't verify that I passed on what I've been reading these days,
the word target, which appears in the Polish press all the time, and it's not difficult to find it.
I found it used by a very serious historian from Tottenham named Wojciech Polak,
in reference to the fact that certain opposition politicians associated with the Civic Platform platform
got Tosca agree that the European Union's concerns about Polish politics right now are just Vasek.
Polak said the following target visa was absolute treason, absolute evil, making appeals to bodies that are not favourably inclined toward us.
The European Union is inappropriate behaviour.
European structures are under significant influence of Germany and Germany has strictly defined and egotistical interests when it comes to Poland.
The behaviour of the civic platform is not a second cargo visa,
but its lack of national solidarity is a sin toward the state and a mortal sin at that mortal sin.
This is a phrase from Catholic theology.
But please note for average Roman Catholics,
there is nothing worse than a moral sin because there is no punishment worth worse than eternal torment in [INAUDIBLE].
So it seems that Professor Polak could work himself into such a passionate rage.
The target visa seemed worse than more mortal sin and the traitors presumably deserving a penalty worse
than eternal damnation for people on the right even to speak to Germans is a sign of a deep failing.
There was recently an editor, an interview captured on YouTube that I looked at featuring the Polish, the editor of Polish, Newsweek, Thomas Leese,
who suddenly he was at a demonstration and found himself confronted by a reporter from a TV station known as Republica,
which I'm guessing is associated with law and justice.
And the question posed by this reporter was, Why did you decide to defend our values in the German media?
And you should watch this this video, it's beautiful. This practically explodes with Polish flags flying all about him.
Said that this hysteria that has been stirred up by law and justice about German media was in fact a throwback to the days of what is welcome.
Volker, the communist leader until 1971, when everything coming out of Germany, out of Bonn was just qualified as anti Polish and irredentist.
The beauty of the discourse of treason in Poland is that it is always at least two sided.
In fact, I think it's a multi edge if there is such a thing, a multi-age sword.
So what Leese had done was disqualified. His interlocutor as in essence, being a servant of the regime behind Vladislav Gomulka, namely the USSR.
But others on the centre left have done the same thing.
In 2013, President Komorowski compared the supposedly backward looking politics of piece of, of, of law and justice.
The policies policies of the target visa conspirators because they also had been backward looking patriots.
The target visa conspirators, you may not know, actually call themselves patriots.
Both of these groups, in his view, were misguided patriots. And Donald Tusk has likewise likened peace to the heirs of Tarkov itself.
Still, I think arguably what's coming from the right is more shocking than what you hear from the left.
Angela merkel has been compared to the Koch media, not only to Kersten, Catherine the great,
one of the people behind target twitter at the time of the pull of the partitions, but without of Hitler and Nazi occupation of Poland.
So this is a close up. And now compared to this this slide.
I want to share with you an anecdote from the mid 1990.
I was doing research in Krakow and I met an archivist who was very proud.
It seemed to exemplify traditional conservative values, and I think in some ways typifies the attitude behind peace.
Unlike other archivists I can recall, he always wore a tie, and somehow it always seemed to me that his tie was tied very tight.
He seemed very uncomfortable somehow. Okay, well, that's subjective impression.
This archivist and I had a very dispute about an interesting figure in the crack crack milieu.
The literary historian causing me a vicar for some vicar is a towering expert who was a towering expert in modern Polish literature.
For others who typifies treason,
somebody who made a career of being too willing to compromise the post-war school stamp leave it and not as one should be near negligent.
By the way, I wondered, where else is there a special word that makes it a virtue to be uncompromising?
Neil G.A., the archivist, made a point of telling me that his own mentor and imposed the word for mentor's missed master.
It's almost a term of reverence which we sadly lack.
At the University of California, Berkeley was the historian Vaslav [INAUDIBLE], a man who supposedly never made a compromise,
spent years in Stalinist prison, and because of his unwillingness to compromise, was elevated to professorship only on his deathbed.
I think in the late 1980s, one day I happened to come across a document in my research showing that when Kofi Medica I a traitor,
died in 1975, the funeral mass was celebrated by none other than Krakow's Cardinal Karol Wojtyla.
The archivist was speechless. This didn't fit into the idea of communism, of people's Poland,
under communism being a place where there was a struggle between uncompromising good and traitorous evil.
A few days later, he thought about it clearly,
and he came to me explaining that the funeral mass meant nothing because Christian charity required a priest to say a funeral mass.
And I wondered, did the cardinal really take care of Attila, really preside over the funeral of every professor?
There are lots of professors in Krakow.
In fact, Beutler knew Vicar very well in 1938 for Tiller had attended Vicars lectures.
Vicar was a a docent at that time, and during the Nazi occupation of Waterloo, and Vicar collaborated,
cooperated in the underground university and crackled because the Nazis had closed all Polish higher education.
So the future Saint John Paul,
the second knew very well the difficult games someone like Vicar played in order to keep crackles philology at a high standard.
And I think one can say that it did maintain good standards in an article of a couple of years ago at a mission he compared vicar.
Maybe you can show another slide here is that during the war remission, he compared vicar to a practitioner of organic work and said that in 1945,
upon emerging from anti-Nazi underground conspiracy,
they had never even had a moment to think about whether he would embrace or reject the new regime.
He simply continued his work without interruption. Historians in Poland, as is the case the world over, have to write letters of recommendation.
And during my research on a book on universities that McRoy mentioned, I read lots of letters of recommendation in professors personnel files,
and I grew accustomed to reading letters of true world class scholars, for example.
Stefan on which or because of was vicar praising the work of scholars whom I knew were not world class and I knew that they knew were not world class.
So the former were in the party I'm sorry, the former were not in the party.
The latter were clearly these letters were done with the sense of the need to compromise.
In my book, I cite some of the first class scholars, however,
who bemoan the damage done to scholarship in People's Poland precisely because of such practices of compromise.
Among my favourites are to Arthur Putney, Cambridge and Uranus loving Scott because you that is the last slide but didn't make it to back to back.
So the Nikkei which was a columnist who taught for years in Torun I came to know because he was purged from the university in the early 1950s,
but managed to land in a spot where he could make a career he wrote later on.
So in the late early 1990s that Poland's Communists wanted to rebuild and create something supposedly perfect,
but in their blind self-absorption, they liquidated and destroyed everything in their midst.
Reforming. They got rid of people often the best, the most gifted, the most self-sacrificing, wanting to.
Educated in a progressive and revolutionary spirit,
they created ideal hothouse conditions for the training of conformists, opportunists and careerists.
Uranus suave ska, who was taught theatre, Tetralogy and Lublin had cool and encountered Czeslaw Milosz to the to Stockholm.
Nobel Prize celebrations in 1980 wrote The injuries caused by this purge of the humanities in 1950 have proved lasting,
and in certain areas, the wounds have yet to heal.
One Actually, several generations have suffered great harm by being denied lectures and contact with outstanding personalities.
And I could I could go on. There are other scholars who bemoan the influence of People's Poland.
At the same time, if you go to Wikipedia, Wikipedia, you can go to the websites of Slovenes, Girlhood and UK,
which vicar and many others, and find dozens of publications and dozens of doctoral students.
Our library in Berkeley is full of the works of all of these people.
So I conclude ambivalently that the damage done by these compromises is beyond measure.
But also I think the creativity, the value of what was made possible is also beyond measure and where the balance lies.
I can't say. So now I'd like to make some concluding remarks.
First, the attitudes one sees in the archivist I mentioned and in law and justice about communism have a direct attitude I'm sorry,
a direct bearing of attitudes toward democracy.
The man that I got to know with a tight time lived in a fantasy world of supposedly clean space that was also political space.
Space where one in engage in politics.
He had never made any compromise, so he and others in the post-communist period have drawn illiberal lessons from the communist period.
This is not in keeping with the demands of open society.
Second, I think we can still say that we owe much to this mindset about the evils of compromise.
If it were not for this fiction that Poles must be uncompromising, we would have had much more facts of compromise, probably much less.
What's the word worthy?
Cultural and intellectual life in people's Poland, if it were not for the painful sense of injury felt by parts of who could not care which Uranus,
Slaviansk and many, many others, the injury would have been far greater.
So the age old concern about treason and compromise has had its undoubted usefulness.
The logic of Polish anti-communism was this that the force and sensitivity assuring that communism would be weakly rooted in Polish society,
also assured that even the relatively limited involvement,
let's say, of Polish academia with communism is viewed in retrospect very harshly,
much more harshly than in places where the complicity was much more widespread.
And maybe that is a key to where Poland is right now.
Third point still, I think for an outsider, the accusations levelled in Poland are beyond belief or beyond belief in the Czech lands and in Hungary.
There may have been those who did not like Foxglove Havel or George Conrad, but who calls these two and other leading dissidents traitors.
That, however, is the sad fate of people like on a mission, like the ones Czeslaw Milosz,
even John Novak was referred to currently as having been a traitor.
Fourth point. Every society I think we can agree has its divides.
But the Polish one, the Polish divide seems especially deep.
The unwillingness of the two sides on either of the two sides to accord each other basic respect reminds me of the impossible politics of the 1930s,
for example, in Austria, where there was absolutely no compromise between the Christian Socialists and the Social Democrats.
In an essay he wrote a few years after taking refuge at All Souls from the People's Republic of Berkeley,
Lucia Kolakowski warned against expecting that any society united even during the Nazi occupation.
He wrote in this essay it's called Pravda Polska from 1973, Poles were not fully united.
I think Kolakowski point was to encourage sobriety among those who, like him.
Contemplate this contemplated the sad state of the Polish nation in the early years of the Eduard Direct regime and were interested in debating,
debating at great length the age old question of who exactly was responsible for Poland's woes.
Kolakowski was very far, infinitely far, I would say, from making a nation any nation into a deal.
He, in fact, wrote that no nation, no nation needs to exist.
Every nation is a product of chance ship father.
But he also wrote that every human being, indeed humanity itself, is in some sense a product of chance.
Therefore, like human beings, nations have a value, a value worth defending if needed, with one's life.
The greatest threat to a nation, he wrote, is to lose a sense of responsibilities for the nation,
to lose a sense of responsibility for its own fate, and to accept the mythology that it has no freedom.
Every nation has the freedom to live in dignity, he wrote.
So who was responsible for Poland's sad state in 1973?
To answer that, Kolakowski went back to where the late 18th century in 1790.
He didn't use the word terrible visa. I think maybe he would have said that using the word target v2 was a gross simplification and misleading.
But he did write the following The Causes of Poland's Fall.
Where does Paddick actually lay in Polish institutions created by our nation?
In other words, Poles were at some point responsible for Poland's misfortune.
A very difficult thing to say, by the way, in the 1970s. If the nation is a collective that exists through time.
It has. Poles have no choice, he argued, but own up to its own heritage.
In this context, Kolakowski spoke of sin, but he didn't.
Well, unlike Professor Polak, he didn't speak about mortal sin.
Rather, he spoke.
He knew a lot about sin, by the way, because he studied religion more profoundly, probably, than any other thinker that I can imagine.
He spoke about original sin, the past Poles shared an original sin for which they were jointly responsible.
Responsible because the past had created debts that the present had to the future.
Point five And I think maybe my next last point in this essay,
Lesley Kolakowski did not pursue precisely what Poland had lost through its original sin.
But I would say that what it lost from a broader perspective was not simply independence.
Clearly, in that period, he was writing about the tragedy of Poland not losing independence.
I would argue that the loss of a Polish state in 1795 was a catastrophe,
also in a broader sense for European and world history, because within 1791 constitution,
Poland had become a democracy, an imperfect and developing democracy, but a democracy nevertheless in the midst of autocracies and monarchies.
And it was a democracy 60 years before the rest of the region rose up unsuccessfully for freedom in 1848.
Yet the Poland created by that constitution in 1791 was also a civic nation with citizenship based on rights.
And this decades before the spread, the absolute spread of ethnic nationalism throughout the region.
And who knows what mischief might have been avoided in and outside Poland had this state survived.
So final point, I think you don't have to be Polish to feel sympathy for those students that I described
in Vilna of the 1820s who wrote on Chalk that they want to back their constitution.
Whatever one's views of Polish nationalism, there's a kind of pain and poignancy to the loss of Polish statehood in 1795 that can be felt by anyone.
Historians have a certain responsibility not to overuse the word taro.
It's not to suggest the problem then or now is simple treason by evil people.
I mentioned to you that the talk about the Confederates called the. Ourselves Patriots.
In fact, one of them, Paradox of History, is thought of now as being a leading Polish liberal thinker.
Historians should be careful to to invoke this word and then learn to repeat
it endlessly in order to ban all thought of compromise now or in the past,
the past that they recreate, I think, incorrectly. I think if we can speak of treason in our day, perhaps we can speak of treason.
I thought of treason of the class, treason of certain historians. Central tragedy, in my view of 1795.
The tragedy I think that should be emphasised now was the loss of democracy, the loss of rule by law,
the loss of a state guaranteeing separation of power, the loss of popular sovereignty.
And I think all other lessons about this period have to follow from that basic concern.
So that's my final word. Thank you very much for your time.