(Cambridge Concise Histories) Jerzy Lukowski, Hubert Zawadzki - A Concise History of Poland-Cambridge University Press (2006)

Here historians enter very treacherous waters. To say that there are two Polands is not so much a necessary simplification as a gross distortion. Indeed, virtually anything that can be said about ‘Poland’ by one observer can be plausibly demonstrated to be false by another. Its territories in their length and breadth have been the abode not only of the Slavonic people who call themselves ‘Poles’ but also of (among others) Germans, Jews, Armenians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Tatars - and these, in turn, have often intermarried, absorbed each other’s cultures and faiths, become one another. As late as the 1850s, one in five marriages in the city of Poznan (or, as it was known to its then Prussian rulers, Posen) was between Poles and Germans. Across wide stretches of territory, for much of their history, the degree of intermarriage between Poles and LithuaniansAJkrainians/Belarusians was at least as high. It remains reflected today in the frequent incidence in the Polish population of surnames of diverse linguistic-ethnic origins (a comparable diversity can, of course, be found among Poland’s neighbours). In the great and bloody ethnic untanglings that have blighted the twentieth century, these people were often forced to choose their ‘ethnic identity’, whatever this concept (scientifically bizarre but conventionally indispensable) is understood to mean.

For much of its history, Poland was very much a border region of more or less peacefully co-existing peoples and cultures. From the late Middle Ages onwards, its elites evolved a remarkable consensual political culture, without which the Polish state would probably have fallen apart under the strains of accommodating its differences. These divergences and the less than satisfactory mechanisms of consensus brought the Polish state close to disintegration during the seventeenth century and, we can see with hindsight, contributed massively to its destruction by the end of the eighteenth. While there is much to criticize in that failed political and constitutional experiment, it is worth pointing out that the governance of multi-ethnic political entities in our own times has left at least as much to be desired. The ruling elites’ consensual commitments translated into a strong attachment to ‘liberty’, which, in turn, helped those who considered themselves to be Poles to survive the nineteenth century, yet also helped to bring about the catastrophically unsuccessful insurrections of i 830-1 and 1863-4.

By the late nineteenth century, amid universally burgeoning nationalisms, the old notion of the Pole as a nobleman who could readily accommodate more than one ‘ethnic’ identity showed itself to be unsustainable romantic nostalgia. Some within the diverse ethnic groups living on territories which once formed part of the Polish state would indignantly deny that they ever shared a common homeland. Poland’s current homogeneity is very much an enforced product of the Second World War and its immediate aftermath. It is also something not seen in Poland since at least the middle of the fourteenth century. The pasts of Poland and its neighbours are too intertwined for easy, compartmentalized analysis. The nation-state is not yet dead, but, if it were, a reading of Poland’s history might be much facilitated. It may not matter very much to a Briton or American (not that these labels are without their own pitfalls) that a Pole will refer to the city of L’viv (in Ukraine) as Lwow; it would probably not matter to a Ukrainian. But it might matter to a Ukrainian if the label Lwow is applied to L’viv in a book such as this, aimed at a wider, non-Polish or non-Ukrainian readership. In such a context, ‘Lwow’ might say something which ‘L'viv’ does not (and vice versa): a descriptor with a baggage of Polish overtones and belongings; whereas to a Pole, in the same context, ‘L’viv’ might well appear a denial of the Polish character of a great trading city which was once part of Poland. Seemingly innocuous ‘Lemberg’ - how Lwow/L’viv was labelled by Austrian bureaucrats - is a hopeless anachronism. Comparable alarms and suspicions can still be generated over other descriptors: Gdansk/Danzig; Torun/Thorn; Wilno/Vilnius; Grodno/Gardinas/ Hrodna; even Oswiycim/Auschwitz. If this is a particularly acute problem for historians of Poland (even if born in Britain) seeking to project their past for the benefit of others, it is a problem found throughout much of eastern Europe and bedevils the writing of any history of the region. In this context, the early part of this book is careful to use the term Rus’ (not Russia) for the regions to Poland’s east - if we cannot avoid the charge of furthering Polish terminological imperialism, we would certainly wish to avoid that of abetting its Muscovite variant.