Welcome to the 221st anniversary of Third May, 1791, Poland’s National Day.I gather that I have to speak in English; so I’ll do my best. I am being deprived of practising my Polish, which is a difficult language. When my wife was teaching Polish in France.... I got as far as the numbers trzydzie¶cie trzy, czterdzie¶ci trzy.

Poles will be celebrating today, wherever they are – obviously in PL (Polska Ludowa) itself, but also in Britain, America, Canada and in countries round the world. Like St Patrick’s Day for the Irish, or St David’s Day for the Welsh, 3rd May is the time when Poles assert their Polishness, and invite their friends to join in. I am very pleased to be invited and to be joining in.

Poland’s political health, in fact, could be gauged by the periods when Third of May celebrations were either permitted or banned. In the 19th century, it was banned for much of the time after the Rising of 1830-31, the Partitioning Powers being disinclined to permit displays of Polish patriotism. In the 20th century, it was first permitted in Warsaw in 1916 by the incoming Germans, who were keen to win Polish sympathies, and it continued under the independent 2nd Republic until 1939. Banned again during World War Two, it revived briefly and unofficially in 1945-46-47, only to be suppressed once again from 1948 to 1989. The current revival of Third of May is one of the outward signs that Poland today is free.

A couple of comments about the long lost Constitution that was passed by the Sejm on 3 May 1791 and which is the cause of celebrations. Firstly, it was a Constitution that was suppressed by the country’s enemies before it could be put into effect/effort. It became the symbol of intangible and spiritual values, therefore, like national identity, which can’t be suppressed even if the state itself is destroyed. Secondly, the Constitution of 1791 was NOT exclusively Polish. It was passed for the Rzeczpospolita or Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania, a state inhabited by many nationalities including Poles, Lithuanians, Jews, Germans, Belarusians, Ukrainians and others. Poles should remember it, I think, in the light of the wonderful old slogan FOR YOUR FREEDOM AND OURS.

Unlike most of your here, my wife and I spent Easter in Poland, where we live for part of the time. And I thought that I would spend a few minutes sharing my impressions of Poland today with you. It was snowing in Krakow on Easter Saturday.

But I’m sure that the general human and political climate is not so bleak. For those of you taking notes, I have 5 points:

1. Death of Communism (and I mean Communism, not Socialism, which is a perfectly honourable political tradition.) Communism in Poland is not merely defeated or deferred, it is DEAD. It is like Monty Python’s PARROT – deceased, defunct, passed away, a gonna that’s kicked the bucket, fallen off its perch, gone to meet its maker, pushing the daisies; YES, a DEAD PARROT! I say this because there are influential people in Poland, who are trying to tell us the opposite: they say that Communism didn’t really die, that the Polska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa (PRL) somehow lives on under a different name, that the secret police still pull the strings from behind the scenes, that Polish democracy under the 3rd Republic of Poland (RP) is just a façade. Furthermore, they conclude that patriots should resist and disrupt the 3rd RP, exactly as they once resisted the Communist state. It’s my duty to tell you that this sort of talk is BUNKUM, it’s a politically driven fairy-tail aimed at misleading vulnerable souls. (PO POLSKU – BAJKA POLITYCZNA, BREDNIE WREDNE, MARZENIE ¦CIÊTEJ G£OWY). Poland today is a free country, not without problems, but more secure and more prosperous then at any time in living history. It is not under threat, except perhaps from those political interests which refuse to move on. My plea, to shake off the ghosts of the Communist era, is supported by all that we know of how the late Bolshevik dictatorship actually worked. Marxism-Leninism was not jut an utopian ideology professed by starry-eyed acolytes. It was a blood-stained system of near-universal repression, enforced in Stalin’s day by mass murder and terror and in later stages by a ubiquitous network of controls, what I once called A SPIDER’S WEB of controls stretching all the way back to Moscow. The PRL was a puppet state, whose Communist leaders were directly controlled by their Soviet superiors. Polish Communists in that system were not free agents: they were a privileged caste of puppets hard-wired to the orders and instructions coming from the Kremlin. But all that has gone. The Soviet Union has evaporated. Faith in Communist ideology has disappeared, even in Russia. And most importantly, the spider’s web of controls has dissolved. The ex-Communists and their agents were left stranded like puppets without their strings, like dogs without their master; and they more than anyone had to change and to adapt to the new world of Free Poland.

2. Residual Mentalities
I have often said that the way people think changes slowest of all; and it’s true that some groups of Poles have failed to benefit from the new opportunities. Some groups like the shipyard workers at Gdañsk, where Solidarity began, have suffered most harshly through no fault of their own; their shipyard was largely dependent on orders from the Soviet Navy. Generally speaking however, the younger generation have taken to the conditions well: we see a lot of them in England and are duly impressed. Yet among the older generation there is a considerable number who feel strongly that their expectations have not been fulfilled. I suspect that many harboured unreal expectations in the first place, hoping that all former opponents of Communism would be richly rewarded by the new order, or that their particular views would automatically dominate. About one quarter of the Polish electorate regularly vote for politicians who milk the resentments for all they’re worth.

But what do we call this phenomenon? I myself have long been looking for a phrase or a term to sum it up. Sometime ago, an American professor writing about Poland coined the term of POST COLONIALISM. (Australia knows something about post colonial attitudes) The professor in question seemed to think that her invention could somehow be applied to the present Polish government. In this, I believe, she was wide off the mark. But ‘post colonial’ does seem to fit the main Opposition group and its supporters pretty accurately. It rightly identifies them as people who lived in a Soviet colony and fought against it, sometimes very valiantly, but who continue to imagine that the colony still exists, even though it collapsed over 20 years ago. These ‘post colonials’ belong to the same category as Don Quichote de la Mancha : they tilt at windmills which only exist in their minds, and they fear dangers that are no longer fearful. As a result, they belabour their former friends and colleagues from Solidarity, not the nation’s enemies.

3. The Orphaned Nation
The Roman Catholic Church has played a central part in Polish affairs for over 1000 years, and never more so than during the phase of collapsing Communism in the 1980s. The election of the Polish Pope, John Paul II/Karol Wojty³a in 1978 undoubtedly provided the psychological stimulus to the rise of Solidarity, and during the next quarter century, his role as ‘The Father of the Nation’ the supreme moral authority, is beyond dispute. In my view, ‘JP2’ was not just the greatest Pole of his generation; he was one of the greatest world leaders of my lifetime.

We should not be too surprised, therefore, that the passing of the Polish Pope in 2005 has left a void that no-one has been able to fill. What is more, in the years that followed his death, the moral void appears to have attracted an array of false prophets, populists and scare-mongers, who are broadcasting the exact opposite of the late Pope’s teaching. If you remember, Pope Wojty³a’s central message to the Poles was Nie lêkajcie sie! Fear Not! Don’t be Afraid! Be yourselves; with supreme skill, he managed to undermine Community propaganda without ever bad-mouthing it directly. Karol Wojty³a, being full of faith himself spread hope and confidence among his flock. Nowadays in painful contrast, we are confronted by a gallery of self-styled ‘patriots’, who seem intent on spreading fear, anxiety, hatred and suspicion. (‘Patriots’, I might add, was the name that Communists chose for themselves in 1944-45, when they didn’t dare to call themselves Communists.) But to return to the present, if it isn’t the Smolensk Heresy, it’s the on-going hunt for supposed collaborators, or the very discreditable campaign to discredit Lech Wa³êsa. Despite the frequent religious verbiage and a fair smattering of god-collars, these would-be seekers after the absolute truth do not stop at religion. They are doing their best to convince us that Poland is in deadly danger, that the Cross itself is under attack, that the country has fallen into the hands of tricksters and traitors, and that all manner of nasty foreigners are planning to do us down, even that the present day, democratic government of Poland rules by murder and deceit I don’t exaggerate. If you listen to the rhetoric seriously, you’ll realise that it’s all a load of very un-Christian codswallop. But it’s out there; and any self-respecting Catholic should hesitate to repeat it.

4. Economic Success
Until quite recently, Germans used to talk disparagingly about the Polnische Wirtschaft, ‘the Polish Economy’, it was an old idiom referring to any sort of mess or mismanagement. They don’t do it any longer, because Poland’s economy is doing just as well as Germany’s. It is performing considerably better than the British economy, for example. In 2008-10, Poland was the only country in the European Union to avoid recession, and economic growth and buoyancy has continued. In the current year, analysts are forecasting 3% growth for Poland, while the United Kingdom has just slipped back in recession. How exactly this has happened, I am not able, as a non-economist, to say. I am tempted to talk of the second ‘Miracle on the Vistula’, another Cud nad Wisla. But it does pay witness to prudent policies and to financial manage competence. Some years back, I advised Premier Tusk to aim at turning Poland into another Ireland. In the meantime, Ireland has fallen down the chute, and Poland has taken Ireland’s place as a rising star. Everything, of course, is possible, and this is no time for complacency. The European economic environment is not at all healthy. Even so, the doom-sayers, who didn’t give Poland a chance, have been proved wrong. Poland has been given a boost both by EU subsidies and by remittances from Poles working abroad. But that’s not the whole story. Foreign investment continues to flow in, dynamic cities like Wroclaw are booming; small businesses have risen to the challenge of international partnerships, and Polish agriculture is one of the biggest food exporters on the continent. Not bad, not bad at all. The Polish government now possesses a reasonable economic foundation from which to tackle many remaining problems.

5. A Place in the Sun
As a historian, I don’t need telling that the 20th century saw Poland trapped in the worst geopolitical place on the planet – Nazi Germany on one side, Stalin’s Soviet Union on the other. When people of my age were children, Hitler and Stalin were planning to exterminate Poland forever. The Polish lands were at the heart of the Nazi Lebensraum which was due to be resettled and totally germanised. For his part, Stalin ordered the shooting not just of Polish officers at Katyñ and elsewhere, but also, in 1938, of the entire Polish Community Party. This is evidence to argue that in those years neither Hitler nor Stalin were considering any future for Poland whatsoever. As we know, circumstances changed after 1941, and after 1945 a much reduced and battered Poland was able to re-emerge, but only as a Soviet satellite.

These facts form the essential background to any estimate of Poland’s role in the world today. Poland is not a great power. Polish politicians who try to pose as strongmen only look ridiculous. At the same time, as a viable, middle-ranking country, Poland is far from insignificant; it is growing in stature every day, especially within the counsels of NATO and the EU, the Europe-wide organisations that provide a measure of context of material and military security to all.

Poles, in fact, should be thankful for where they are, and should work hard to consolidate the gains of recent decades. In this, the worldwide Polonia can play a useful auxiliary role, not least by spreading positive vibrations about contemporary Polish developments. Wild talk about enemies and traitors is hopelessly out-of-date. The Nazi Empire collapsed; and, as Foreign Minister Sikorski has remarked the Germans are scarily passive. The Soviet empire has disappeared as well Mr Putin’s Russia, much diminished, is desperate to sell Europe oil, and is not going to risk upsetting his key market by messing with Poland. He has far more severe issues in the Caucasas and on the Chinese front.

SO CHEER UP! DON’T LISTEN TO THE DOOM MERCHANTS. NIE LÊKAJCIE SIÊ.

In other words, 2012 is not 1791. Don’t pay attention to the false historical parallels which evoke the name of TARGOWICA or of Tadeusz Reytan.

Despite its numerous pressing issues, like health care, pensions or unbuilt motorways, Poland is not going to be partitioned among its neighbours like the ill-fated Commonwealth of Poland Lithuania. Nor, at the other end of the scale, is it going to be transformed into some dotty, hare-brained, utopian Fourth Republic, free of blemishes. At long last, Poland is a normal, middle-ranking country, proud of its achievements and aiming, like Australia, to provide a decent home for all of its inhabitants. It is no longer a victim, or a potential victim, and can happily wave good-bye to the typical victim’s mind-set. And finally, Poland’s present Third Republic has a working, democratic constitution, which guarantees all the rights that were enshrined by its tragic predecessor of 1791 and which is not about to be overturned anytime. It even protects the rights of those who ignore it and who, in defiance of reality, love to feel persecuted. So surely it’s time to relax, to lay off a bit, and to value what we have: time to enjoy your dinner, to enjoy a glass of wine, and to enjoy the companionship of the evening.

In this spirit, please let me close by raising the old Polish toast,
KOCHAJMY SIÊ! Let us love one another!

Professor Norman Davies FBA, CMG, OZ