Succesful Polish statecraft

 

Letter to Editor of The Spectator

Dear Sirs,

I am sorry to witness my fellow Polish countryman wallowing in his masochistic hatefest towards his own country of origin (Letters to Editor, March 26th), as it was not a pretty spectacle. Also it was historically inaccurate. The Polish kingdom in the 11th and early 12th century, and again, following a period of dynastic divisions, in the 14th century and 15th centuries, was a formidable well run political unit that offered peace and prosperity to its citizens and protected them against German and Tartar invaders and eventually defeated the Teutonic Knights. In the next two centuries it offered the sophisticated model of a parliamentary multiethnic Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that tolerated many religions, at a time when Europe was riven with religious wars, and Poland's formidable army defeated the Turkish Empire and protected a vast territory, the largest in Europe, which ensured the supply of wheat and timber to the continent. When, following the greed and corruption of its leading nobles, Poland temporarily became a failed state in the eighteenth century and was dismembered by three powerful neighbours, it was able to sustain a struggle to retain its culture and national spirit for a hundred years in order to rise again like a phoenix at the end of the First World War and set up a strong state combining three regions with different administrative traditions and holding back the Soviets for 20 years. Again when it regained its independence after 1990 it set up a secular well administered democracy that was the only country in Europe not to undergo recession in the last 20 years. Every country can have its ups and downs over a long span of a thousand years but there is absolutely no reason to share Mr Kowalczyk's bleak assessment.

Yours faithfully

Wiktor Moszczynski