Some Geopolitics

Other than "everything", what do people argue about in Poland these days? At the Warsaw Welcome, there was a particular stress on a couple of issues that I've definitely heard a lot about. There's kind of an information backlog/torrent, a lot has been happening these last few days! So I'm not going to be quite chronological with the next few posts, but rather roughly thematic.

The Warsaw welcome was an interesting experience, both to hear what the Embassy officials said and what they did not say. Ambassador Feinstein specifically talked about two hot-button issues, the Katyn Massacre and visas to the United States. Both of these have some new developments.

The massacre in the Katyn Forest is something seared into the collective consciousness of most every Pole or person of Polish descent I've ever met. When the Soviet Union invaded Poland on September 17th, 1939, at the same time as the Germans were striking from the west, a bunch of Polish officers, intellectuals, priests and assorted other anti-Communists fell into the hands of the Red Army. The NKVD and Stalin decided to get rid of them. About 20,000 officers and civilians were brought into the Katyn Forest near Smolensk and other locations in 1940 and shot en masse. When the Germans invaded Russia, they uncovered the mass graves in the forest and broadcast news of this discovery far and wide as a propaganda coup. Except for once, Goebbels didn't actually have to lie that much. When the government-in-exile in London requested an investigation into the matter, the Soviets severed relations with the London Poles. The official Moscow line for a long time was that the massacre had been perpetuated by the Nazis, who then tried to pin it on the Soviets. And for a long time, that was the official Western line as well. With the fall of the Soviet Union, the truth came out...yet not the entire truth. U.S. records relating to the massacre have just been declassified and are available at the National Archives, so we'll finally be able to know how much the Roosevelt administration really knew about what really happened, and how they reacted. The opening of the Archives has been relatively big news in Poland.

The second hot-button issues pertains to visas. American citizens can come to Poland as tourists without applying for a visa, yet Polish citizens going to America have to go to a U.S. Embassy or Consulate (which means either Warsaw or Krakow), pay a fee, get interviewed, and maybe they get the visa, maybe no. If they don't get the visa, the fee is not refundable. This causes a great deal of outrage among Poles, particularly considering that the Polish military is heavily engaged in Afghanistan and played a large part in Iraq and holders of many other national passports can travel freely to the U.S. Pan Kowal points out that this kind of policy is short-sighted from the U.S. perspective, too: Polish nationals can travel freely in the Schengen Area. So, who really wants to be a tourist in the U.S. anymore? Ambassador Feinstein assured us that legislation is pending in Congress to remedy this situation, and apparently the Obama administration supports it. Unfortunately, I think that everyone on Capitol Hill has other things on their minds right now. And I fear that in many other ways the U.S. is neglecting its relations with Poland and thereby losing a lot of the goodwill we have over here. Now, the Ambassador took the Atlanticist view that Poland drawing closer to Europe is good for U.S. relations because we are close to the Europeans. I would note that the Europeans are a quarrelsome lot, and the EU does not really have a coherent foreign policy and tends to stumble in 27 separate directions. As such, hoping to influence Eastern Europe through the EU seems like not as good a bet as influencing this part of Europe directly.

According to what we were told at the embassy, crime has also steadily been on the decline in Poland, particularly violent crime. Apparently, right when the wall came down the U.S. Embassy considered the security situation "critical" as it related to crime. Yet now, that particular worry ranks as "low." Prof. Kowal noted that in general, theft of personal equipment like cameras and laptops and cell phones is not a big issue here, largely because odds are the crooks have a better laptop than you do anyway. The cell phone point is especially germane in my case as I got mine for 60 PLN or about 20 bucks. You do have to worry about pickpockets and cash, however. Those guys are apparently quite good, and everybody loves getting their hands on the almighty zloty. The fact that there was a news story on a major national network about how drunks were falling over in the street in Wroclaw and getting into medical problems was encouraging. No, it isn't encouraging for the drunks, but it does suggest that that's the biggest mayhem the network producers could think up that night. Of course, the embassy staff stressed, and they are absolutely correct, that this does not constitute license to just tune out completely. Like in any urban environment, there are also neighborhoods that it's best to avoid. But in general, so far I've felt reasonably safe walking the streets. 

Finally, and on a happier note, Poland has been increasingly active in democracy promotion around the world, as an example of a country that transitioned from totalitarian satellite state to more-or-less parliamentary democracy. The Economist has generally noted that Poland is probably just about the most successful state in the old Warsaw Pact, and now Poland is increasingly sending people to places like Tunisia to lecture about how to do the whole freedom thing in an orderly fashion. I'm sure the Poles do this in their own inimitable style, and if you have known any Poles you know exactly what I'm talking about.

It's also pretty obvious that things are in a state of flux here in Poland. You see construction and remodeling almost everywhere, and even since I've been here last (May 2011) I can see changes. For example, Krakow Glowny, the main train station in Krakow, has a new train shed that could be in Switzerland someplace. The Faculty of Chemical Engineering at the Polytechnika Krakowska had a very "Wschodni Blok" or eastern bloc look to it last year. Now that the building has been re-painted and spruced up a bit, it looks almost Western, with the elevators (the three-man "box of doom" with no dedicated elevator door, just the exterior door on each floor that you must open by hand) giving away the fact that you're in Eastern Europe. You also see certain kludges peculiar to this part of the world, like a Fiat towing a Mercedes around attached only by a piece of nylon rope. If you've visited Eastern Europe, you've probably seen a lot of this.

In general, I haven't even seen much evidence of that notorious Polish fatalism. I did encounter some not particularly friendly people in Warsaw, but they have a reputation for being the New Yorkers of the nation. Granted, I've only been around for a week, but on first impression this is not a country full of depressed people. And why should they be? As I was walking through the square in Torun today, the sun shone, the town buzzed with activity, there were bright colors, and the old song "John Barleycorn" was firmly on my mind.