Posted on 09/28/2005 9:23:28 AM PDT by lizol
Looking west - with a nervous glance back at a painful history
By David Aaronovitch
In the third stage of his journey from the Adriatic to the Baltic, our correspondent sees how Poland and Lithuania are emerging from the shadows of their past and dealing with the problems they have inherited
INTO Poland, and a great agora of railway sidings filled with rusting goods trucks, and a small station pizzeria, help to announce the stop at Oswieczim. Did that building stand there at the time, and if so, could it be seen from the trucks taking people to Auschwitz-Birkenau? I realise, for the first time, that the sites of the camps were not chosen for their isolation, but for their proximity to rail lines. Round about are towns, flat farmland and occasional woods. Nothing is hidden here.
At 10pm in Cracow the leader of the centre-right Citizen’s Platform, Jan Rokita, is discussing constitutional amendments. He is expected to become Prime Minister after next week’s parliamentary elections.
He has the animation of someone who thinks that he’s winning. And what he offers Poland is, essentially, Britain. “The open model of British society and economy is very close to the Polish situation,” he says, “not the German and French model of high social protection, closed society. I think the liberal choice is the way to the real welfare state.”
The French and Germans have opted for the closed, whereas, “Polish society is the most open in Europe, the biggest supporter of the next expansion to Turkey or Ukraine — in spite of the Catholic tradition here. And I think that Angela Merkel is mistaken on the Turkish issue, influenced by internal German political reasons . . . the followers of the CDU are a bit xenophobic,” he says.
And yours aren’t? “We are not for isolationism. The more Europe will be afraid of Turkey, the more they will be afraid of the Polish plumber.”
Rokita’s view is that Western European opinion-formers had a declared and an undeclared reason for worrying about the accession to the EU of the countries of the East. The declared reason was the fear of grotesque levels of subsidy being needed for basket-case economies and agriculture. But the real reason is that they were “frit”; that they couldn’t take the competition. “French society, German society doesn’t want eagerly Polish students, Polish workers, Polish plumbers. Doesn’t want eagerly Polish agricultural products that are better, tastier and cheaper. Our political problem,” he concludes happily, “is our success.”
A lot of this rings true — we expected the newly acceding countries to act as a drag on our competitiveness, and the opposite has happened.
On to Warsaw. In a square a man in a shiny suit is lecturing passers-by about how the mayor of Warsaw is in league with the Americans and the Jews. The man in the suit is from the League of Polish Families, which last year won lots of seats in the European election and formed an alliance at Strasbourg with our very own UKIP. And, like our own UKIP, promptly took a welcome dive in the polls.
Passers-by lecture him back, and not politely.
In any case, the Mayor of Warsaw, Lech Kaczynski, is an unlikely target for accusations of a lack of patriotism. A candidate for the presidency (his twin brother is attempting to become Prime Minister), Kaczynski’s Law and Justice Party campaigns on the need for family values and to remember how awful Russia and Germany are.
Kaczynski has made the reclamation of history an important part of his mayoralty. His was the genius behind the establishment last year of the Museum of the Warsaw Uprising. One of his aides, Marcin Roszkowski, 27, is a director at the museum, and showed me round.
“We were the losers in the winner’s camp,” he tells me in the museum’s re-created 1930s café. On the victorious side, the Poles ended up occupied and subjugated “betrayed by Stalin, by Roosevelt, by Churchill”.
The 1944 uprising left 150,000 Polish dead, while the Russians stayed camped across the River Vistula. Then, to add to the injury, in the Communist era the facts of the uprising were systematically suppressed. But is this history or politics? “In Berlin the Germans were saying that they were also victims in World War Two. This was an answer to that.”
And an answer, too, to the present Socialist Party Government, with its close ties (as Roszkowski sees them) to Russia. “The new government will have a totally different view of history.”
Why? What will change is: “The attention that is placed on the Katyn case, and on energy policy in Poland, where most oil comes from Russia. We are like a colony of Russia.” He is particularly incensed by the recent German decision to build a gas pipeline from Russia to Germany via the Baltic, thus bypassing Poland.
In the Café Bristol, I meet Wawrzyniec Smoczynski (call him Lawrence), 29-year-old foreign editor of Przekroj magazine, an Eastern European intellectual with the face of a composer, who explains to me why I should take Roszkowski’s comments seriously.
Lawrence thinks that I fail to understand the unique Polish perspective. Like many Western Europeans I would rather snuggle up to the Russians. “It’s very difficult for us to accept that the policy to appease Russia is the best way of getting democratisation.”
Unfortunately Lawrence is also underwhelmed by his own politicians. He will be voting “none of the above”. And that feels ominous.
One final day’s train journey takes me northeast to the industrial town of Bialystok and then due north, through stands of silver birches into Lithuania, the country that my father’s parents left a century ago.
Beside the tracks are small farms with a horse, a pig, six or seven geese and an elderly man and woman doing the chores. In the cities, however, everything is changing. On the north bank of the Neris river in the capital, Vilnius, there are new buildings going up everywhere. Lithuania is a success story. Economically, at any rate.
Politically it’s another matter. I travel by bus to the second city, Kaunas, to meet Leonidas Donskis, Dean of the Political Science and Diplomacy School at the Vytautas Magnus University of Kaunas, a smiling, bright man and presenter of a non-confrontational current affairs programme. He shudders when I mention the pipeline and energy policy. “The whole country’s political life,” he tells me, “has revolved around this question.”
It went something like this. A few years back there was a split between President Adamkus and his Prime Minister, Rolandas Paksas, on the issue of whether the Mazeikiu Nafta state oil refinery should be sold to the American Williams corporation. The Russians also wanted the refinery, and this contest led to Paksas standing for the presidency on a populist anti-American ticket, backed by Russian money and PR companies. Paksas narrowly won the election and Yukos got the refinery.
“The Russians,” says Donskis, “backed Paksas.” Unfortunately for them their man was subsequently accused of corruption, impeached and dismissed from office. Last year Adamkus was re-elected. Donskis remains disgusted and marks a relationship that has been visible on other parts of this journey. “There is a fusion of the media world, politics and business and this fusion is a big problem. It is a shamelessly obvious feature of public life.
“Lithuania,” he continues, “escaped this time. But there is no normal political life. The nouveau riche can simply rule our political system.”
Every time this class fails, it reinvents itself through populism. And though the economy is dynamic and foreign policy — the work of young technocrats — is respected abroad, he believes that what he calls the “degeneration” of political life will catch up with the economy eventually and drag it down. Donskis reposes his confidence in the young and in civil society more than in conventional politics which, he characterises as appealing to the worries of the old. Maybe in five to ten years, he muses, the students whose laughter we can hear coming from a nearby lecture theatre will be able to influence politics in a less corrupt, more open, more progressive direction.
So, I ask him, is there any other Eastern or Central European country that he would take as a model? “Slovenia is a wonderful country. It combines the Balkan/Slavonic tradition with Western political culture. I like Slovenia.”
Which, of course, is where we started.
POLAND
Capital Warsaw
Population 38.6 million, minorities 2%
Language Polish
Resources Manufactured goods, machinery, forestry, coal and agriculture
GDP per capita (est 2004) $11,210 (£6,197) 46% of EU average
A centenarian’s view Poland — a 1,000-year-old state that once had an empire — was partitioned between Prussia, Austria and Russia in 1795. It re-emerged in 1916 and a republic was declared in 1918. Wars were fought with Ukraine, Soviet Russia and Lithuania to define borders. A 1926 coup formed the basis of governments until 1939, when Germany invaded. Partitioned under the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, after the war it became part of the Soviet bloc. The rise of Solidarity provoked martial law, then liberalisation that ended in election victory in 1989 as the Iron Curtain collapsed.
LITHUANIA
Capital Vilnius
Population 3.4 million, ethnic Lithuanian 80%, minorities include Russians 7%, Poles 7%
Language Lithuanian
Resources Processed foods, petroleum products, textiles, agriculture, forestry, fishing
GDP per capita (est 2004) $11,390 (£6,296) 46% of EU average
A centenarian’s view Independence from Czarist rule declared in 1918. The country was soon at war with Poland, which took Vilnius. A series of authoritarian nationalist governments followed, Vilnius was recovered with the partition of Poland in 1939. A year later Lithuania was invaded by and annexed to the USSR. Germany invaded in 1941 and Lithuania’s large Jewish community was virtually exterminated. The Communists returned in 1944 and Independence declared in 1990.
How Poland deals with her Holocaust History is the model of how other Western nations will deal with abortion, its condemnation and eventual ban, and our Reconciliation with God, victimized mothers, and all of mankind.
Many were murdered in the concentration camps, but many many Poles suffered and died to save innocent lives. No other nation lost as many gentle heroes from such a horrific genocide.
ping
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.