21. The New Polish Question, with Adam Zamoyski & Marek Matraszek

Uncommon Decency

Piotr S. Wandycz, the Yale historian, reflected once that “what to the Poles was the Polish cause, to the outside world was the Polish question”. To be sure, he was writing in 1980 about the successive European conferences of territorial partition, from Vienna in 1815 to Potsdam in the immediate post-war. But this axiom sounds perhaps more prescient than ever since Poland’s much-touted entry into the pacified end-of-History after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Speaking of a “new Polish question” sounds provocative at best, and at worst a parti pris for the national conservative persuasion of the PiS party currently in government. And yet one cannot fully understand the political cycle of the last 15 years without a level-headed reexamination of the imperative of Polish sovereignty and self-determination that had been for centuries so menaced by enemies East and West. Whether we like it or not, these sentiments are again front and center in the political imagination of broad swathes of Polish society. Adam Zamoyski and Marek Matraszek will help us pierce the partisan veil imposed by the liberal internationalist consensus that has, by casting Poland as a backsliding, retrograde, proto-authoritarian state, distorted our common understanding of the uniqueness of the Polish experience. Enjoy!

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