The world according to Norman
From Warsaw Business Journal Friday, May 14th, 2004
by Kamil Tchorek

Norman Davies is the foremost historian of Poland in the English language.
Norman Davies - Poland's unofficial ambassador

         For many foreigners, his books are the first stories of Poland they ever read. For many Poles, he is far more than a historian, he is a cultural diplomat to the English-speaking world.

         Davies' trip to Poland last month was a celebrity's whirlwind, which included the receipt of a cultural award and a tightly-packed media schedule. No surprise then, that the only place Davies could agree to for an interview was on the move, in a train compartment on a journey from Warsaw to Kraków.

         "I ended up in Poland by mistake," says Davies, looking out of the train carriage across the flat, snow-covered Mazowsze fields. Davies was meant to have gone to the USSR as an Oxford student in the 1960s, but because of visa complications, came to Poland instead. "I realized back then that even though I was a history student, I didn't know anything about the history of this part of the world."

         Davies' realization as a student, that Polish history has been obscured, was to be echoed throughout his work, right up to his most recent publication. But his interest in looking at the world from a Polish perspective seems to have opened up a taste for turning history upside down, which has drawn some harsh criticism.

         He has written a history of the British Isles with a new perspective from the Celtic lands, as opposed to the traditional bias towards England. In Europe: A History he has not claimed to write 'the' comprehensive history of Europe but 'a' history, seeing the continent from the perspective of Central Europe rather than from the traditional viewpoints of Paris and London, even going so far as to include maps that we have never seen before, turned ninety degrees so that Budapest and Warsaw at long last seem as prominent as their Western European counterparts.

         Rising 44, his history of the Warsaw Uprising, which has its sixtieth anniversary this year, again sets out to compensate for a historical imbalance. This event, so prominent in the minds of the eldest generation of Warsaw residents (many with vivid childhood memories of the Uprising), is virtually unheard of in Britain. But for Davies, this is just one aspect of a general lack of knowledge that the British and much of the world have about Central and Eastern Europe.

         In an opinion column in The Times of London two months ago, Davies described the British prejudiced view of the new entrants to the EU, that they are "Tiny, poor, nationalistic, troublesome, and above all, culturally alien. They speak obscure languages. They take inordinate pride in their eccentric histories." With Rising 44, Davies is again trying to clarify Poland's "inordinate pride" for the English-language reader.

         But he goes further. Davies argues that the British and American "...war-time love affair with the Soviet Union blinded them to reality," a voluntary blindness that extended from the political leadership to the press, unwilling to see the first battle of the Cold War already being fought on the streets of Warsaw.

         "Nobody would have dreamed of telling the French Resistance that it was anti-American to take Paris. But the Polish uprising was seen as anti-Russian, its heroes were described as criminals," says Davies.

         He sees the events of 1944 as an example of a "coalition that went wrong," an important reminder to Poles about the present and the near future. "When I was writing [Rising '44] there was another coalition being put together, on rather dubious foundations. Less powerful partners are more vulnerable to the whims of the great powers."

Davies sees Poland's camaraderie with America in Iraq as history repeating itself, of Poland as a middle-sized country offering itself up to win favor of a great power. But the great power can do what it likes, and has no need to return Poland its favors.

         "Poland has always been in this category of being big enough to play with the big players, but of not being strong enough to play on an equal basis with them," comments Davies. "Therefore they are liable to be a casualty. It was the case with Napoleon and it was the case in the Second World War." By being part of the 'Coalition of the Willing' Davies argues that Poland is playing with fire yet again.

         "If we had a balanced, healthy group of people running U.S. policy then there really would be a sense of partnership," says Davies, "But not with types like Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, even Cheney."

In the presence of President KwaŹniewski on May 3 last year, Davies repeated these concerns, "I said that Poland is in Europe and not in America. Poland's primary role must be in Europe. KwaŹniewski cannot afford to defy the French and Germans indefinitely."

         But Davies is not proposing a Polish foreign policy about-turn. Rather, he would like to see an intelligently steered course between the U.S. and the Franco-German alliance in Europe. This is because he is optimistic about Poland's future role in the European Union.

"The French and Germans are bound to lose the leading role in the EU that they've had for forty years," says Davies, "Two countries cannot dictate to twenty-three others." Davies looks to increasing diplomatic cooperation between the British, Spanish and Poles to shape the new European Constitution, and to ensure that no European nation, be it small or medium-sized, is ever isolated. "The future is not with Rumsfeld's 'New Europe' but with variable alliances and diplomatic permutations which will be constantly changing shape," says Davies. Davies is proud of Polish negotiators' fighting spirit at the EU Constitution talks. "In the next stage of negotiations the other partners, particularly France, will talk to Poland rather differently than they did before," says Davies. But his point is that Poland's international message must be that it stands up for itself, not that it wishes to disrupt European integration or align itself too closely to an axis with Washington.

         For Davies, this is where Poland's raised military profile in coalition with America over the past year can be put to good use. "It can't do Poles any harm to have a raised profile so that when they negotiate, people take them more seriously," he says, "Kwasniewski saw an opportunity to raise Poland's profile. That was not a bad thing, but raised international profile is as far as it goes. Economic or financial reward in Iraq does not necessarily follow."

         Davies says that there is a Polish tradition of fighting against the odds, which has brought tangible reward. When politicians in Paris and Berlin know that Polish special forces where among the first combatants in Iraq last year, it demonstrates Polish political will.

         Looking back to the Warsaw Uprising, though it was finally defeated by the Nazis as the Soviets looked on from the east bank of the Vistula, Davies says the event had a lasting impact on Soviet treatment of Poland.

         "There is no doubt in my mind that the Soviets treated Poland relatively gently after the Warsaw Rising," says Davies, "Look what Khrushchev did to Hungary in 1956. Why didn't he do that in Poland at the same time? Because the Soviet Union knew they would have an even mightier fight on their hands in Poland."

         For Davies, Poland's military presence in an American-led coalition adds a new dimension to relations with Israel and the international Jewish community: "Polish foreign policy and most educated Poles are very pro Israeli. But remembrance and shared history become very complicated. We want to remind the forgetful world what the Poles of Warsaw did in 1944. That is not in any way a conflict with the remembrance of the Holocaust. After all, there was a sizable Jewish contingent in the Home Army."

         Davies points out that one of the problems of the history of the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 is that it has been confused with the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943. "The history of the holocaust has become so dominant in education and popular writing that most people in America and Western Europe could not tell you accurately what happened in Eastern Europe during the war," says Davies.

         Davies recalls the Chancellor of Germany's invitation to the fiftieth anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising in 1994. "He accepted the invitation," says Davies, "...and said how moved he was to be invited to the anniversary of the Ghetto Rising. He later made a wonderful speech about reconciliation."

         Davies says that he has heard a rumor that President Bush has been invited to the sixtieth anniversary of the start of the Warsaw Uprising in August this year. Although he admits that the visit is unlikely, he says that in the event of it happening it would be the last big occasion for the history of the Uprising to be accurately remembered.

         Nevertheless, the issue of the Warsaw Uprising is and will remain hugely controversial in this country, on the subject of whether there was a conspiracy to ensure its failure, and whether it should have been attempted in the first place.

The First Polish Immigrants

     By the time the Mayflower landed in 1620 at Plymouth, Massachusetts, a group of Polish artisans had been hard at work in Jamestown, Virginia for more than 12 years. A full year before the Puritans' arrival, the Poles had helped to establish the democratic process in the New World by staging America's first labor strike.

     Captain John Smith, the colony's leader, saw early on that in order to survive, Jamestown had to do more than just feed itself. It needed to produce goods that could be exported and sold at a profit.

     The new land had an abundance of pine trees whose sap could be tapped to produce valuable pitch, tar, resin, and turpentine. Smith knew exactly where to find men skilled in the manufacture of these commodities. The captain had spent some time in Poland and was familiar with the flourishing pitch, tar, and glass industries there. So, it was to Poland that he sent his request for artisans.

     The first Polish immigrants arrived in 1608. They were probably indentured servants, which meant that in return for their passage to America, the men had agreed to work for the colony for a certain number of years.

     Smith praised the Poles as hard workers and took note of the fact that two of them had saved his life when he was attacked by Indians. The doughty captain was probably thoroughly surprised, then, when the Poles went on strike.

     In 1619, as the colonists were preparing to elect members of the Virginia assembly, the new governor announces that only men and women of English origin would be allowed to vote. The Poles, having already repaid their debt of indenture, responded to this announcement by laying down their tools. If they couldn't vote, they said, they wouldn't work. This refusal to work was the first such action in the English colonies and a bona fide American milestone.

     Their startling demand was quickly met, and a democratic precedent was set. The court record of the Virginia company for July 21, 1619, puts it best: "Upon some dispute of the Polonians in Virginia, it was now agreed...they shall be enfranchised and made as free as any inhabitant there whatsoever."