Poland, the UK and the Brexit Vote

A great Polish Anglophile: King Stanislaw August Poniatowski

     

       In 2008, Richard Unger edited a volume entitled Britain & Poland-Lithuania: Contact and Comparison from the Middle Ages to 1795. In light of the UK’s vote for Brexit, it is worth going back to books like these, to ask where Polish-British relations have come from and where they might be heading. There are many narrative threads within the Brexit vote, but this is certainly one of them.

This is a story of intensifying contact, convergence and progressive entanglement between two European polities, one thousand miles apart. Throughout the Middle Ages and sixteenth century, contacts between these isles and the Polish kingdom were ongoing, albeit in a piecemeal, low-key way. Readers of Unger’s collection can pick up interesting morsels: the long shoes fashionable in England in the 1360s were called ‘crakows’, in the 1590s Cracow boasted its own Scottish pub. The monarchs of England and Poland exchanged infrequent, polite letters, mostly on crusading (and were often unclear even of one other’s names). It was in the 18C that mutual interest between the two countries picked up: the last king of Poland, Stanisław August Poniatowski, and his court were Anglophiles, with a strong interest in British literary and political culture. In 19C London, exiles from partitioned Poland were a high-profile cause celebre to many. In 1939, it was of course Hitler’s invasion of Poland which triggered the United Kingdom’s declaration of war; famously, Polish citizens played a role in the Allied war effort at RAF Northolt, Bletchley Park, Monte Cassino. It was as a result of this conflict that the first large-ish Polish diaspora settled in the UK, numbering some 200,000 people. The end of the Cold War, and Poland’s much celebrated joining of the EU in 2004, saw Polish citizens coming to the UK in astonishingly high numbers, attracted in part by the presence of an established Polish community in the country. Tabloid papers began to run stories alleging Polish vagrants roasted swans in English parks. And now we have this: a Brexit vote in June 2016, in which Leave campaigners voiced open displeasure about the presence of Polish shops on their streets, of Polish-speaking children in the school playground. Post June 23^rd, there are repeated reports of verbal abuse of Poles, and a nasty graffiti attack on the long-standing Polish Cultural Centre in west London – a place for international film, artists and theatre. A notable WWII alliance has given way to rancour and fear.

Polish shop, Oxford, 2013

But Poland is not just the Polish delicatessens on streets up and down the United Kingdom. Poland ‘over there’ is a NATO member, an EU ally, its nationalist Law & Order (PiS) ruling party currently engaged in its serious own stand-off with the EU over the rule of law. In meeting as a group of 6 self-styled ‘EU founder members’ the day after the Brexit vote, the EU west European states caused anger and dismay in Poland. Jarosław Kaczyński, leader of PiS, has quickly urged the EU to consider again a 2 speed Europe, with a new European treaty; Polish liberals fear Brexit might galvanise PiS towards a ‘Polexit’, allowing it to rule in populist style without sanction from Brussels. So the Polish government, and fraught Polish domestic politics, will play an important role in any forthcoming EU-UK negotiations on Brexit. The EU institutions in Brussels have a problem to the north with their British Brexit neighbour, and a problem to the east with openly nationalist regimes such as those of PiS (and Orban in Hungary).

Poland and Britain interacted for centuries in their very different forms: as medieval monarchies, early modern composite states, dynastic unions, and modern nation states. Now, with their very populations entangled in the 21C, Poland and the UK are interacting within a new globalised world and interconnected Europe, still speaking loudly of inviolable ‘sovereignty’, yet both in a strong mutual embrace they cannot easily escape. The Brexit vote is a British earthquake, but it is also a highly significant event in Central European history and politics. Poles, both in Lincolnshire and in the Belvedere Palace in Warsaw, are today actively shaping the UK’s history; just as the UK is shaping theirs. We shall see, to our relief or to our cost, whether in this decade the oscillating centripetal or centrifugal forces in European history will win out. 

Polish Cracower shoes - the height of 14C London fashion...
(From http://bit.ly/29o3x5E)