“Periphery” is the term that is currently most frequently employed to describe Poland’s place in the world – so frequently, in fact, that we do not even bother to consider what kind of periphery it is, and of what. In particular, we have lost sight of the consequences of this peripherality for the whole system that Europe continues to be. Meanwhile, the concept of “borderlands” has become so marginal that it is beginning to melt into peripherality. This chaos is no accident. Both terms refer to a space, and both are relegated by defining it. A solution therefore seems to be to refer to history. But which history?[1]

There is no doubt that approaches to history, be they of Poland or Central and Eastern Europe, have been shaped by each of our personal experiences, culture and education. This suggests that we participate in a national community – one of many such communities. When we think and speak, we refer to a relatively common set of concepts.[2] What sets historians apart is that they use these consciously and are sensitive to their variability and diversity when thinking about the “historical dialogue of neighbouring nations”.

Borderlands and peripheries play a key role in the concepts that determine the history of the Polish national community. Before trying to present them, I would like to offer two warnings. The first is that I have written about borderlands and peripheries on many occasions,[3] so one might well fear that I will have nothing new to say. The second results from the lengthy time I have spent studying the non-European past. This is what led me to tackle the issue from a civilizational perspective.[4] For both reasons, I am avoiding a review of research on the various approaches to borderlands and peripheries. In any approach, the Borderland will be connected to the presence of a border.[5] The problem is that civilizations do not have borders. A Periphery, meanwhile, implies the existence of a dominant Centre.[6] Civilizations that are not systems do not form a centre, so they do not know peripheries.

For these reasons, I focus on people and the relationships they form together – relationships in time and space. This human dimension intentionally sets aside the most topical issue of governance and management.

I have in mind firstly people’s capacity to form a community, which assumes the evolutionally developed conviction that this is a way to increase chances of survival. Sometimes a community is perpetuated by its readiness to work to sustain the current state of affairs, meaning safeguarding its future by making sure it can continue to exist. Such a collective action, cognizant of the need to make changes, can become a project, “a great collective project for tomorrow”.[7] People whose sense of existence is endangered sometimes take steps to protect their identity. This always entails the need for changes that are usually presented as maintaining continuity. Nevertheless, survival may demand much further-reaching (structural) transformations, and this is when projects seeking a new identity appear.[8] This has affected enslaved nations more frequently than those better situated in the world order.

Any ordering narrative, be it historical or based on stories, can emerge if it serves the needs of a community. A nation, for example. Our problem, I suspect, is the lack of clarity “on the theme” of the existence of the Polish nation. Here I am touching upon the key issue of the construction of an identity narrative. Contrary to views that have become common of late, this issue is an important element of academic discourse, as both Fukuyama[9] and Appiah[10] demonstrate. In tackling the problem of the Borderland and the Periphery, I am thinking in particular of the identity choices of people who identify with the national community.

I mean identity in systemic terms, namely awareness of the existence of the community (social system) and its capacity for identification. For a community to be fulfilled, especially a national one, it needs history for its participants to recognize themselves as “their own” – for them to be able to not just want this fulfilment but also be able to imagine it. No project of a shared future is possible without history, in the sense of a sequence of narratives about the past accepted by the community. This is the sense of the assertion that “a nation without history will die”. This is not a metaphor or an ad hoc slogan like those that even great leaders of national communities have left behind. It means to say that the narratives comprising a national history (res gestae) are not always consistent with what historians are inclined to regard as the study of the past. Determining the borderland or peripheral nature of a community and acknowledging a specific status are realized by confronting these discrepancies. At the same time, identification may be – and indeed often is – a consequence of acceptance of external identification. This is crucial to the definition of a community’s identity.

This is the first point.

Secondly, I assume that this reflection on Borderlands and Peripheries refers to Poland. I was guided by a question posed to conference participants: “History – yes, but which history?” – an allusion to Juliusz Słowacki’s epigram “They marched crying Poland…”. This was about reminding Poles of the need for conscious identification. This poet thought that anyone who wanted to be a Pole must be aware of his or her own identity by answering the question “which Homeland?” The later transposition into the question “Poland – yes, but which Poland?” expressed a now multigenerational tradition of conflict over what “our recovered land” should look like and who should rule it.[11] Yet, the crux of the matter still lies – today just as in times of bondage – in determining the nature of Polishness and in the capacity to express readiness to take responsibility for the Homeland. It is in this responsibility that Poles’ dispute with Poland – the fundamental circumstance of their dialogue – can be found.[12] That is what makes them Europeans, today just as in the sixteenth century. And we can say the same, incidentally, about the Polish representatives at the Council of Constance, not because of their highly valued qualifications but rather because their views raise the fundamental question of human rights.[13] Yet the dispute over the rule of Poland is the opposite of dialogue because every answer to the question “but which Poland?” excludes acceptance of others – excluding them from the community. Ultimately, this leads to civil war. When this is impossible – because of a lack of sovereignty, for example – the exclusory conflict weakens the national bond. In the end, the marchers from Juliusz Słowacki’s epigram are left without “the expression on their lips”, and then they cry “down with those who think differently than us”. Such calls[14] were popular in 1940s Poland, when control by the Soviet army precluded civil war and opponents were dealt with not just through physical violence but also intellectual oppression. Under the pretext of giving a new answer to the question “but which Poland?” (people’s Poland, of course), all others were excluded with the (effective) threat of annihilation.

So we see that marching and shouting slogans has a long tradition and can have various meanings. The “marchers’” fight for Poland is not only an attempt at a brief solution but above all signifies the creation of an exclusive history. This is a monological relationship, yet wrangling with Poland requires discernment within oneself, remembering “the expression”: it is a dialogical relationship. In this context, I am in favour of history as a sequence of narratives comprising Polishness, but not as a set of scenarios that are deployed to establish rule over Poland. The intention to show this history in a civilizational context leads to the thesis of peripheralization as the outcome of the loss of the sense of Borderland.

To propose such a thesis, the field of study must be expanded. Consideration of the question of identity prompts reflection on East-Central Europe.[15] Poland’s history then becomes an enquiry into the place it occupies in Europe. The European perspective should mean the search for participation in civilization, not modelling Poland according to any version of Europe.

And this is the second point.

There is a third point too, resulting from the overwhelming pressure of the present. Any thinking about Poland in Europe and the nature of Central and Eastern Europe is determined by the situation in the European Union.

This is therefore an attempt to treat Europe as a civilization. Poland should feature in this model, so it is the story of its place. Having said this, I must point out that Poland as an imagined construction exists regardless of where its place is deemed to be, whether that is in a civilization or in any other form of Europe. Moreover, as a representation of a human community, Poland has figured in history regardless of our or any other constructions called Europe. But it is not the vicissitudes of the understanding of Europe in history that is the issue here.

The question “which history of Poland?” leads us towards issues that are more civic than academic. The issue is how do we build a project for the future? Not what kind, but how? And here I express my view that the history of Poland was founded in the process of people shaping their own form of existence in a space created by values derived from Roman Christianity: in a civilizational space. I put this in the form of the idea of the influence of the borderland on the formation of this belonging. Being in the borderland concerned the open nature of the border created with Others-Aliens, resulting in a kind of application of this value system – a certain separateness in the world of Western Christianity.

First, then, presence in Europe as creation, not application. Whenever Poles recognized themselves as a nation, they were not “entering” Europe and were certainly not seeking admission to it. They were the “old Poles”, free citizens of the Commonwealth who created Europe in the East as they saw fit. Their Sarmatia Europiana was European by virtue of its dialogical nature, not because of some external judgement. This, as we know, appeared along with the concept of Eastern Europe in the eighteenth century and following the formation of the West as a form of domination in the global dimension in the nineteenth century.[16] Retreating in the face of Russian expansion and gathering itself against English domination, Europe created a new idea: cutting itself off from the East. This detachment coincided with the Partitions of Poland and removal of its statehood.[17]

More than two centuries have passed since this turmoil, and various histories of Poland have emerged in this time. It is striking just how much these stories have been marked by the trauma of the Partitions! The result was an incessant construction of narratives showing how it came to destruction and how “we will strike out for independence”. It is widely recognized that the acute burden of a rejection complex weighed on these narratives. This tangle of negative attitudes had well-known compensations in the form of myths of grandeur and phantasms of power. I would also add that this mythological character also has an opposite narrative that demonstrates the eternal nature of Polish dependence.

The European story of Poland is one of the borderlands. Furthermore, it is our story about the lost borderland of Europe. The realization in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that the political community in which they lived was Poland was not concerned with the question of whether it belonged to any civilizational realm. The citizens of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth were aware of the scope of the common values that composed the nascent Europe: they distinguished it as much from the Turk as from the Muscovite. They were not the only ones to believe in their role as a bulwark, and it was not this ideological creation that mattered. Certainly important was their awareness and conviction that they were fronting up to safeguard Christianity,[18] although I suspect that standing with their backs to the emerging Europe was more important in this role! But it seems important to note that the European expansion in the early modern period produced Borderlands. These were structures, ways of life, and cultures constituting an integral part of Europe but in no way subordinate to it. This reality was a product of our Sarmatians.

The borderland is in fact a space, real and imagined, formed as a result of recognizing the alienness of what is outside of our identification. As I have said, this process is revealed in crossing borders: those creating alien social systems, but also those marked by our identity.[19] This is because the borderland remains within the community of belonging as a form of behaviour towards alienness within what we recognize as our own. We must therefore distinguish between the Other and the Alien and discern the difference between culture and civilization.

The borderland is always a certain form of life associated with territory. This results from the fact that people belonging to one civilization (must) retain a constant relationship with the alien civilization. The borderland does not mean being “between”, still less existence “both here and there”. The forms of borderland life are various, but they are always related to belonging to one civilization.[20]

 

In this case, that civilization is a European one. In European history, the Borderland was the form and expression of expansion. In the early modern period, its breadth and scope were astonishing, but it did not lead to global domination. This came later, and with it a new narrative about discovering and conquering the world. I therefore make a clear distinction between pre-colonial and colonial expansion, with a dividing line around the mid-eighteenth century.[21] The fundamental difference was the establishment of dominance derived from a new type of economy, later called capitalism. This early expansion gave rise to empires, which, however, remained a form of control and not of transformation. Even in the case of extermination, it was part of the universal experiences of violence. This also concerns the first global empire, created by Spain, and it is even more visible with the Portuguese expansion, for which the concept of empire seems inadequate. These were called overseas expansions to emphasize the role of shipping and control of the seas in the process of gaining dominion over peoples and lands. This process did not occur on the European continent. One gets the impression that Christian countries remained on the defensive here from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century. In the Mediterranean world too, we cannot point to any type of expansion. On the contrary, political actions were defensive, and in the economic sphere they were conservative. The only direction of continental expansion was towards the East, and expansion on the eastern flank of the continent was quite different from the western variety. What lay beyond in the West was the ocean, while to the East stretched an equally boundless plain covered with forests and steppe.

Moreover, the continent had always been open to various expansions from the East. From the West and from the sea, the Vikings and Normans were sporadic threats, while from the East there was constant pressure from the people of the steppes and deserts. The Huns, Goths, Slavs, Arabs, Mongols and Turks created a memory of threat, but in the fifteenth century Western Christianity was more worried about the Black Death than the fall of the Eastern Empire.

Thus, the first border was the border of the memory of threat. ­Indeed, there is scarcely any ‘frontier’ effect of the bounds of expansion here, but there was also no “border” – no blocking boundary.[22] The borderland in the East of the continent meant above all the border area.

This lengthy digression is important for two reasons. First, we must recall the key role of the reaction of social systems to expansion, which was effectively erased by the colonial narrative. Next, it is essential to consider the adaptation of the people conducting the expansion to the local circumstances. From the fourteenth century onwards, two expansions of historical import were taking place in the eastern part of the continent. This is how I define the creation of a space that allows confrontation between people from different civilizations.[23]

The first, on the Baltic, was pursued by military orders hacking out a living space for themselves at the cost of the last pagan peoples: the Prussians, Yotvingians, and Samogitians. The State of the Teutonic Order gradually became the vanguard of modern political and economic organization. It can be regarded as European. The second expansion, meanwhile, was by no means European. It was pursued by Lithuania, which in the matter of a century consumed almost all the lands between the Baltic and Black Seas that are oriented along the axis of the Dnieper River. Facing constant pressure from the Teutonic Order, it was equally aggressive towards the Ruthenian principalities and Poland.

Meanwhile, the Kingdom of Poland, reconstructed in the first half of the fourteenth century, strove with all its might to take control of the equally important historical axis marked by the Vistula and Dniester rivers. This expansion was European to the extent that it was accompanied by an intensive process of colonization. The turning point was 1385–1386, when the Lithuanian Grand Duke Jogaila was elected King of Poland. We think about this in the context of the unions of Krewo and Lublin as stages in the Polish eastern expansion. We should also take other acts of union into account![24] This does not change the fact that for almost 200 years the Krakow throne was occupied by a Lithuanian dynasty. And when the ­Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth – the Commonwealth of the “Two Nations” – was founded, its elites were dominated by Lithuanian and Ruthenian families. The dispute over the meaning and significance of the union, the Jagiellonian idea, and the consequences for the historical trajectory of the Commonwealth has lasted for generations and is irresolvable.[25] This is because we know no alternative.[26] What is important is something else, as protecting the eastern flank made it possible to complete the expansion by combining two seas, thus linking the Mediterranean with the Baltic area.[27] In the fifteenth century, Poland took control of the forces emerging on the North-South axis, becoming permanently involved in the dynamics of the European dialogues.

This was a turning point to match the adoption of Roman Christianity, and what made it interesting was that it was fully controlled by Poland’s own forces.[28] There was one more way in which the space emerging around this axis proved unique. It took the form of a Borderland. The reason for this was geopolitics, as the post-Union success needed no further partitions: effective defence was sufficient. This turned out to be founded on Christianization and Polonization. In the modern context, this entailed adopting the resources of values long since rooted in Polish culture as well as Latin, the universal language of the elites. At the same time, the new political creation was proving to be open to Aliens, Outsiders. The open border resulted in an Encounter.[29]

 Successive generations presented this whole sequence of events to each other in narratives intended to confirm continuity. Myths and legends shaped the community. But what if we reorganize these narratives to make civilization, not the local community, the frame of reference? But what if to this end we do not accept the narrative created by Others – not only because we will not find ourselves in it? And if we see in it our image as Others, even Aliens, perhaps subalterns, then a postcolonial interpretation will not help. It will only perpetuate our inferiority and exclusion complex.

Let me quote myself once more:

The principle of submissiveness to the hegemon was also implanted in European societies detached from the dominant West. It created the conviction that, in its separateness, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth consigned itself to peripherality and was rightly ­eliminated. I see matters quite differently. Europe, locking itself into the increasingly exclusive formula of the West, brought upon itself pathologies that in the twentieth century barely escaped causing the annihilation of civilization. So it is about not glorifying separateness but recognition of participation in the dialogue that shaped this civilization.[30]

The Polish-European narrative speaks of a Borderland of civilizations and its destruction. In the case in question, the annihilation affects both Poland and Europe: it is a shared defeat. In these two “incarnations”, we tell our story with full responsibility for both success and failure. Success was assured by the Polish version of dialogicality, and the failure of the Sarmatian project came with the loss of this dialogicality. The narrative about Poland developed after the failure, thus the focus was not on losing the capacity for dialogue but on the distance from Europe.

In short, by accepting or in fact designing their own borderland existence, the “old Poles” invented themselves in a form that from today’s perspective I treat as an independent variant of civilization. This Poland was European as it invoked the same Christian, Roman and Greek values. Yet it was also a separate formation as it was established independently. This was manifested in the simultaneous dialogue of the former ­Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, as well as its Encounter with Alienness. These circumstances resulted in a separate civilizational trajectory.[31] Determining what the Poles of the past thought about it is a major challenge. I don’t even know where to start… Tracking the way in which they lost their existence would be an important element of a revision of the history of Poland – a revision that is absolutely essential. Revision does not mean consent to revisionism, to writing a vision of the past as a sequence of historical mistakes. After all, no project can be built without a past, and this past cannot be interpreted without diagnosing the condition of the community seeking its identity. In other words, history is for building bonds, but how can a narrative be formed when the bond of the community weakens? Our problem is the weakening and perhaps even disintegration of bonds, a fact that every successive reconstruction endeavours to disguise. The post-1989 transformation failed, or perhaps succeeded only partially[32]? We don’t really know how to answer the question “why?”. The question mark refers to the critical assessment of the state of the national bond, as well as to weakening impulses geared towards “catching up” but not to “reproducing”.[33] Has history been mythologized, invented, and distorted?[34]

Does this deal with the problem put before us? After all, the proposal to interpret the past as a process of “creating Europe” – not as “entering it” as a lost and unrecovered sense of borderland – does not mean questioning past history, regardless of whether we believe in the possibility of recreating a non-existent world, or rather an imagined sequence of stories. My essay aims to show that history, including national history, should answer the question “which future?” Disputes over bygone events, seeking to reconstruct them as accurately as possible, are part of history as an academic discipline, which should be performed professionally, meaning, above all, honestly, but history as a narrative only makes sense if it serves future projects. The dispute is not about interpretation of the past, although it is these narratives that are so important. It is about our awareness of how things are.

The narrative about Poland as a lost Borderland is a relatively fresh and optimistic one, but the perspective of the country as a perpetual periphery of Europe and the world is old and boring. In my view, peripherality is, above all, not an eternal state. It began with the crisis of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the breakdown of its European axis. Political defeat and being pushed away from the West were the consequences. A dual or perhaps rather multifaceted peripheralization marked the fate of post-Partition Poland.[35] Poland reborn did not manage to change its position in the world, and following the disaster of 1939 it got stuck in another version of dual dependence. This is why the attempt at transformation made after 1989 proved so difficult and so difficult to assess. There is a consensus on Poland’s peripheral state, but not much more. The periphery is dependent, secondary and imitative. It does not introduce its own resources to solving the problems of the Centre in today’s form of the European Union. This perspective limits our thinking and paralyses action. Consequently, it prompts the creation of phantasms, whether of past glories or of eternal nothingness. Peripherality is a falsified consciousness that succumbs to illusions; it is a lack of desire to embrace the challenges of the future. The sense of borderland was once a response to the challenges of those times – a response permitting the autonomous creation of one’s own experience.

I want to emphasize that the collapse of the Commonwealth’s project, resulting in the liquidation of the state and more than a century of absence during the nineteenth-century transformation of the continent, marked a significant change in the formation of Europe. I mean not only the absence of Polish names and Polish affairs in most Western historical studies. What I mean is that the fate of Poles can, at best, be traced in stories about the history of the state that made an agreement to tear the Commonwealth apart. One will not find, for example, a treatment of the phenomenon of emigration from Polish lands, but only from Germany, Russia and Austria. This is something far more serious than the obviously peripheral status of these lands. They simply do not exist in any narrative about nineteenth-century Europe. Only in monographic depictions will we encounter, for example, the “Polish question” as a subject of diplomacy – possibly of some political calculations by the great powers. That is why I have described this state of affairs as the loss of the frontier by Europe narrowing to the West. I want to emphasize how much the West’s disconnection affected its subsequent fate: the twentieth-century war and revolution.

In this sense, the history of the lands of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and its inhabitants, who did not always identify with Polishness, occupies less space in European history than the former colonies,[36] even if we take Polish migration to the former metropolises into account. This is the effect of today’s peripherality, but there is something else too. This specificity was perfectly evident not only in the nineteenth-century powers’ consistent désintéressement in Poland’s fate, but also in the course of the negotiations of Versailles and Tehran. This is where I discern what I called a trap – one could also use the metaphor of a “black hole” – for peripherality was not just the unfortunate fate of people living in this space “beyond the limes”. Peripherality proved to be a trap for Europe. The consequence of that situation from the nineteenth century was the European catastrophe of the first half of the twentieth century. What emerged was a rump Europe, rescued by the American nuclear umbrella and, though capable of making internal peace, failing utterly to meet the challenges of the coming global century. Pure chance, or rather a regularity of civilizational evolution?

Entering the structures of the EU did not change Poland’s peripheral status. That was not possible without an effective transformation. This responsibility must be accepted, regardless of views,[37] yet failure to notice how the endurance of the European peripheries weakens Europe is an element of a very long process. The borderland was an element that dynamized modern Europe. The loss of the Borderland is not a historical regularity, but what did become one was the peripherality that resulted from this loss, which proved to be a thoroughly unfavourable situation. To rebuild the European dynamic, it seems, it is necessary both to discern the historical consequences of this loss and to understand the significance of eliminating peripherality for the future of Europe.[38]

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