What is Poland anyway?

As I think I’ve mentioned before I misspent a portion of my youth in Poland. I first came here in 1997. In those days speaking English on the street could draw a crowd. It was almost impossible not to stand out. Although I am ostensibly a white northern European of fairly average height, weight, and demeanor Polish people somehow had the ability to identify me as a foreigner at 20 meters and seemed to be fascinated by the fact. On buses and trams people would swivel in their seats and openly stare at me as if expecting me to explode into flames or something similar. It was a very unnerving experience. I have been to the Far East where, as a white European, it is completely impossible to blend into the background and the experience was, amazingly, very similar. I eventually discovered that having my hair cut at a Polish barbers and buying my clothes in Polish clothes shops seemed to reduce my propensity to stand out like a sore thumb. But there are still many kinds of subtle body language that mark you out as a non-native. By the way, don’t believe anybody who says they can identify a Polish or an English person from the ‘way they look,’ it’s a complete pile of horse droppings. What they really mean is that they subconsciously register the subtle differences in body language that exist between cultures. I would be willing to bet real spending money that nobody could reliably identify Brits, Poles, Czechs, Russian, Frogs (sorry French), or Germans from photos alone – you need to see people walk and move, you need to see their body language. Any suggestion to the contrary is racism pure and simple. It is amazing how easy it is for me to spot English people on the streets of Krakow (not just because they have their trousers around their ankles) or Polish people on the streets of London, but 90 percent of it is down to their body language, nothing else. The way people talk to each other (even when you can’t hear the language they are speaking), the way they look at other people, the amount of personal space they try to preserve, and even the side of the pavement that they favor are all giveaways. Interestingly it was this last item that first turned me on to these differences. In my first few weeks in Poland I became convinced that Poles were incredibly rude and arrogant because they were constantly walking into me on the street. It took me ages to realize that people just pass each other on the opposite side to what I was used to. Two people walking towards each other on the street have to decide which side they are going to pass on, English people almost invariably choose to pass on the left while Polish people almost equally invariably choose to pass on the right. The vast majority of people never think about this but, believe me, as a foreigner it can cause all kinds of trouble. Slamming headlong into little old ladies with sharp umbrellas on numerous occasions doesn’t do anyone’s morale any good, and the medical costs for the treatment of stab wounds soon add up.

What I’m leading up to here, in my roundabout way, is the issue of culture shock. Culture shock is a very real phenomenon but it has nothing to do with unfamiliar food or unexpected customs or even an unknown language. It’s the sudden realization that you just don’t understand how the people around you are thinking. You feel that you can’t predict how they are going to react and that you can’t rely on them to understand how you are going to react. It usually hits after a few months, long after you think you have got to grips with the obvious difficulties such as language. You wake up one day with the feeling that you are the only human on a robot planet, or that you are the only robot on a human planet. It’s an extremely unpleasant experience that I’m sure hundreds of thousands of Poles have been through at various locations around the globe. I think this is the point at which one can start to try and understand the people around you. The fact that they put boiled eggs in their soup or drink out of very, very small glasses is completely irrelevant. It took me about 5 minutes to get over the novelty of such activities.

żurek – soup with boiled eggs in it (I love it)

Something about Poland had been bothering me for months, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. There was something very different about the way Poles saw their own country that was very evident but extremely difficult to describe. It was shortly after my ‘culture shock’ moment that I began to see it. Simply put it is this: Polish people do not see Poland as their own country. I can hear the howls of disapproval and baying for my blood already, but let me explain. Poles clearly have a powerful sense of pride, but it is really pride in the Polish people, not pride in their nation. These are different things. Poles believe that Polish people are the most intelligent, passionate, moral, humorous, generous, god-fearing people in the world (who knows, they could be right) but they think that the Republic of Poland is a bit rubbish. In other words, they don’t feel that the actual internationally recognized entity that bears their name is worthy of it. The very obvious reason for this is that Polish people didn’t really create the nation that bears their name. It’s well know that ‘Poland’ has been invaded, occupied, and generally mucked about for centuries. The various kinds of Poland that have existed for the past 500 years have essentially been constructs imposed by outsiders. The triumph of 1989 was really the first time for hundreds of years that Poles had the opportunity to make the kind of country that they really wanted and they are still struggling with this awesome responsibility. There are so many aspects of modern Poland that are completely at odds with the Polish character that one can’t help but reach this conclusion. I will cite just two. Firstly, Polish people love the forests and the countryside. They pine to live in cosy wooden houses under the shade of pine trees with big dogs running about and deer grazing in the forest clearings. In fact most of them live in desperate broken down Stalinist housing blocks while 90 percent of the country is completely empty. This clearly wasn’t a housing system designed by Poles for themselves, and of course it wasn’t – it was imposed by a Soviet dominated regime that was focussed on having the maximum number of workers within easy reach of industrial facilities and administrative control. Which leads neatly onto my second point; bureaucracy. Poland is famous for its labyrinthine and all-encompassing bureaucracy and all Poles hate it. How did this system come to exist? Bureaucracy is completely alien to the Polish character and most Poles spend their whole lives trying to find ways of avoiding, bribing, or tricking the system. Clearly, this system was not invented by Poles and does not reflect their character. Again, it’s something that has been imposed from outside and the people haven’t yet found a way of ditching it. On the one hand there is enormous fear and respect for the system while on the other there is absolute contempt for it. It never ceases to astonish me how little respect Polish people have for their national institutions. The police are regarded as a joke, parliament as a corrupt talking shop for self-serving demagogues, and government is regarded with the same kind of suspicion that is reserved for people who turn up at your door selling time shares in Spain. Polish people have almost no faith in or respect for their institutions, and it’s easy to see why. They didn’t make any of them and many of the people involved in them are still operating under a system of rules imposed under a period of foreign rule. This is what I mean when I say that Poles don’t feel that the nation they live in reflects them as a people. To a foreigner it seems as if the Polish people are living in a foreign country even when they are at home. They don’t trust or believe in their republic. They’re desperately proud that it exist, but endlessly embarrassed by its form. This is a profound and formative period in their history and all this silly talk about ‘being European’ or ‘modern’ or ‘capitalist’ is completely beside the point. The very soul of the Polish people is struggling to shake itself free from decades of suffocation and they are going through a period of extreme confusion in which they have to figure out what is really them and what is just baggage from the past.

Kaczynski – ‘Truth and Justice,’ what is this, a Batman comic?

It’s very hard to explain how weird this is for an Englishman. We complain about our governments and criticize our police but we basically believe in them because they reflect us. Polish people look at their institutions and see fractured confusion. This is, of course, also a reflection but not a comfortable one. I think that a lot of Poles simply throw up their hands and say ‘there’s nothing I can do’ – they decide to concentrate on making money, or moving abroad to make money, rather than face a situation that seems hopeless. They abandon the republic safe in the knowledge that the Polish people themselves are safe in their centuries old techniques of ’surviving in spite of everything.’ Now is not the time for that. Now is the time to stand up and say ‘wait: this is not the country I want – do it the way I want or I’m going to vote you out of office and jump up and down on your head.’ This is the time to say ‘I am not afraid – this is the Poland I want. Stop playing with my insecurities and start suggesting some stuff that I can actually get behind.’ It’s clear to me that in a thousand years time Poles will look back on this period with immense pride (a second 1410) but it’s equally clear that most Poles today have no idea of the significance of the period in which they are living. Government is being left to third-rate crackpots and geriatric fanatics while the new generation of highly intelligent, highly educated young Poles are sweating their guts out in fast food restaurants in London.

Hey, it feels good to get that off my chest!

PS. I just looked at the BBC profile of Poland and apparently there are still laws against ‘deriding the nation and it’s political system’… seriously?