The leaders of France, Germany and Italy visited overnight. Will Poland finally "get back what belongs to us"?

Since Russia launched a special military operation against Ukraine, Poland, a dual member of the European Union and NATO, has been "active" and repeatedly accused Germany of "ineffective assistance to Ukraine." Earlier, Poland had been "killed" by Russia for refusing the "ruble settlement order".

On June 16, French President Macron, German Chancellor Scholz and Italian Prime Minister Draghi had just been to Kyiv and took the train to Poland overnight.

Sergei Naryshkin, director of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, said that the Zelensky government handed over the backup data processing center of the Ukrainian State Tax Service to Poland for hosting, which means that they have agreed to Poland’s annexation of Ukraine, and the Polish authorities will recover the “ex-Polish”. Eastern Territories" dream is about to come true.

Large-scale aid to Ukraine has brought many problems to Poland. Poland has accepted more than 3 million Ukrainian refugees, and the increased population continues to crowd out local public resources such as housing, education, and medical care, but the EU has not provided compensation for them, and aid funds have been shelved due to Poland's "judicial independence" issue.

The Russian-Ukrainian war once again exposed the intricate ethnic relations and bloody history of the European continent. By understanding Poland, which first broke away from the "East" and joined the "West", and covetted Ukrainian territory, we can better see what relics have been burned by the war that has continued to this day.

What separates the European continent is not white sausage, but white bread. Before the First World War, Germany, along with Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary, belonged to the Central and Eastern European countries that "eat black bread" - the German intellectuals at that time did not less carefully explain the difference between themselves and "Western Europe", but now Germany is Western European countries "for granted".

For more than a hundred years, the boundaries within continental Europe have fluctuated like the electrocardiogram of a seriously ill patient. Communities that were once within the same "empire" disintegrated into incompatible "nation-states" along the gaps of language, race, and religion; countries that once loved the same kind of black bread, because of war and massacres. Enduring trauma, no longer able to face each other without burden.

Poland and Lithuania, the countries that once merged into the Grand Duchy of Poland-Lithuania, have the glory of "Europe's most honorable republic" and the darkest bloody memory in Europe. Since the 20th century, the selection and elaboration of the former has been uncommon, because it does not meet the needs of the establishment of a nation-state; the memory of the latter is still unforgettable, and the shadows of neighboring countries and history are intertwined.

All the elements of the fierce collision of nation-states and empires can be found here, and beyond this, people can no longer find the "imaginary resources" of the community.

Descendants of Sarmatians

History always "repeats".

When the Russian-Ukrainian war broke out in late February, Germany's posture was quite cautious. Today, Germany relies heavily on the Russian gas pipeline Nord Stream 2 for energy. Poland's Law and Justice Party said in 2016 that the "North Stream 2" was a new version of the "Soviet-German Nonaggression Pact", because 2016 was the 60th anniversary of the Soviet Union's bloody suppression of Polish people's protests, and Poland moved it to commemorate it. More than 200 Soviet monuments, the Russian foreign minister compared similar actions to the destruction of monuments by the "Islamic State", and the Law and Justice Party retorted.

The 1939 Soviet-German Nonaggression Pact was a secret agreement between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany in Moscow. The treaty divides the spheres of influence between the Soviet Union and Germany in Eastern Europe. Poland and Lithuania have become victims of the great power game. The words of sacrifice are especially heavy. In Warsaw, Krakow, Vilnius... Monuments and graves are next to each other. , it was built by countless innocent people with their lives.

On the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Soviet-German Nonaggression Pact, 2 million people held hands and sang for freedom on a 595-kilometer-long road through Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. It is hard for people in Western Europe to imagine how much courage and despair people in the east need to experience to fight for an identity that belongs to "Europe".

Another decade later, Poland was the first to join NATO. Historically, Poland was the "most western" country. The Grand Duchy of Poland-Lithuania, established in 1569, had a republican electoral system from the very beginning. In reality, Poland's "westward turn" was also the most successful. But that wasn't the case in the past. The "Polish Essence" of the Grand Duchy of Poland-Lithuania, emphasizing the eastern temperament of the Sarmatians, was designed to fight against the "West".

The Sarmatians repeatedly mentioned by Polish romantic writers belong to the Indo-European language family, and some people say they are of Iranian ethnicity. They came to the Crimea to live earlier than the Greeks, and then gradually moved northward. The concept carries a mystical air to it, and in ancient oil paintings, men in dresses, lavish oriental motifs, weapons studded with ornaments, bush-like braids and beards, Persian names—that belong to Poland Cultural confidence.

In particular , the poetry of the Polish "national poet" Adam Mickiewicz revived the Sarmatian cult in the 19th century. Later, as long as the Germanic culture promoted by the Habsburg Empire and Germany was about to gain power, the Poles would immediately bring out the origins of Polish aristocratic style, and Sarmatian clothing would immediately repel the fashion in Paris and Vienna. The last mayor of Lviv to be appointed by Vienna, in order to show his Polish identity, had him dressed in oriental clothing when he was buried after his death.

However, Mickiewicz does not necessarily "belong" to Poland.

Just as Wroclaw, which once belonged to Poland, became Breslau in Germany, Poland has also grown from the "heart" of Mickiewicz, the hometown of Nobel Prize winner Cheslaw Milosz- Vilnius disappeared. Vilnius was given to Lithuania by Stalin and became the capital of the latter. There are still gorgeous buildings from the Baroque era and the German economic boom, with exquisite streets, quiet courtyards, elegant churches, and good restaurants. Like Europe where time stands still in every corner.

The psychology of the descendants of the Sarmatians is complex: neither the East nor the West is a destination, and the interior has long since fallen apart.

Between September 1939 and June 1941, hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens were killed, most of them academics, military officers, politicians, writers, musicians. Only after this did the real war, the destruction of cities, massacres and exiles. Contemporary Polish writer Andrzej Starschke once said that he despised the Russians because they developed the Polish national identity to a terrible and inhuman level; he despised the Germans because they had no human side at all .

"Russians are like animals or devils to us, while Germany reminds us of machines and robots, which is the psychological state of the descendants of Sarmatians in Europe today."

Contemporary Polish poet Adam Zajayevski scoffs at the "essence of Poland" because there's not much left of the concept: "A folk-Catholicism, paired with Pilogan (a popular Eastern European dumpling) and Balshiro ( Polish borscht), and not much else."

From Lublin to Lublin

If the nationalities are strictly divided according to the place of birth, Mickiewicz, who is regarded by Poland as a "national poet" and wrote the famous sentence "Lithuania, my motherland", should be considered a Belarusian. He was born in Novogrudok, the town's People spoke Yiddish and Polish at the time.

Vilnius, where Mickiewicz studied at Vizhno University, is the most typical example of the formation of a nation-state. Other Eastern European cities, such as Lviv and Riga, have only two ethnic groups at stake - Poles and Ukrainians for Lviv, Latvians and Germans for Riga. In addition to Poland and Lithuania, Vilnius is also regarded as a "natural capital" by Belarusians.

At the end of the First World War, Vilnius had 35 newspapers in Polish, 20 in Lithuanian, 7 in Russian, 5 in Yiddish, 2 in Belarusian. The name of Vilnius has also been changing, in addition to "Vilnius" in Lithuanian, there are "Vizhno" in Polish, "Vilnia" in Belarusian, "Vina" in Russian, Yiddish "Werner" in slang. During the 20th century, Vilnius was transferred from one country to another on at least 13 occasions.

Mickiewicz's changeable "identity", as well as Vilnius's changeable status, ultimately point to the multi-ethnic "empire" - the political heritage of the Grand Duchy of Poland-Lithuania.

In the 14th century, the Grand Duke of Lithuania, Wladyslaw II Jagello, married a Polish princess and won the Teutonic War, and the relationship between the two countries became closer. In the 16th century, the "Kingdom of Poland" and the "Grand Duchy of Lithuania" were combined into the Grand Duchy of Poland-Lithuania through the "Union of Lublin" in 1569.

The Grand Duchy of Poland-Lithuania has a vast territory, including today's Poland, Russia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Belarus, Ukraine, Slovakia and Romania; there are many ethnic groups, including Poles, Lithuanians, Czech-Moravians, Wallachians, Magyars, Tatars, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Russians, Czechs and other ethnic groups; Orthodox, Eastern Rites, Catholics, Judaism, and Christianity coexist; the area and population are in the forefront of Europe.

The Polish-Lithuanian Grand Duchy also leads Europe in its political system. The "Polish electoral system" is essentially a kind of aristocratic democracy - a mixture of aristocratic republic and electoral monarchy. The parliament controlled by the House of Representatives nobles limits the power of the monarch, and the nobles have free veto power. This system is a modern democracy, a constitutional monarchy Pioneer of system and federalism, so the Grand Duchy is also known as the "First Republic of Poland".

The two main states of the Grand Duchy, the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, are equal in principle. Poland has not implemented a policy of assimilation to Lithuania, but because of its huge economic, military and cultural advantages, it has become a de facto ruler. Lithuania was quite independent at the beginning. Due to the huge gap between Lithuania and Poland in all aspects, the language and culture of Lithuanian nobles were automatically "Polishized", so that under the rule of the Grand Duchy of Poland-Lithuania, people's recognition of "Lithuania" became lower and lower. .

At that time, Germany (Prussia), Austria and Russia did not rise strongly, and the Grand Duchy of Poland-Lithuania was creating a small "imperial hegemony" here. In the middle of the 17th century, the Grand Duchy entered a period of political chaos, and the country's power was declining. In 1772, it was divided three times by the three powerful neighbors Austria (Habsburg-Lorraine Dynasty), the Kingdom of Prussia and the Russian Empire, and it was destroyed in 1795.

After that, any attempt to restore the glory of the "Empire" was in vain. The development of Lithuanian nationalism is the most critical part of it, which integrates the national ideals since the French Revolution and the German Romanticism. Medieval history rather than the "national origins" of the Grand Duchy, Poland and Lithuania went to very different fates.

In the early 20th century, Piłsudski, a Polish revolutionary and a politician who inherited the Lithuanian tradition, was never recognized by the Poles and Lithuanians despite his repeated claims of the idea of a republic. After his death in 1935, his body was buried at Wawel Castle in Krakow, which houses the tombs of successive Polish kings, including Grand Duke Jagello of Lithuania; his heart was removed from his chest and placed in Rosa's Tomb in Vilnius The garden, according to family tradition, is next to the tomb of the mother.

The separation of Piłsudski and "body and mind", like the deletion of all Polish words in Mickiewicz's representative work "Mr. Tadusch" in Lithuanian textbooks, symbolizes the irreversible division between Poland and Lithuania.

In 1569, with the Union of Lublin, the largest state in early modern Europe was born. In 1939 and 1944, with the Soviet-German Nonaggression Pact and the Lublin Agreement, Poland and Lithuania split for the last time into small, ethnically divided nation-states in the modern sense. The Soviet Union gave Vilnius, which belonged to Poland, to Soviet Lithuania.

During the Gorbachev era, Lithuania held mass demonstrations for the Soviet-German Nonaggression Pact, against which was the slogan of the Lithuanian nationalist movement in the 1980s. However, if it is really taken literally, Vilnius has to be returned to Poland.

In the early 1990s, when relations between Poland and Lithuania were tense, Lithuanian students had to choose the most humiliating event in the nation's history.

"Lithuania! My homeland!"

Lu Xun highly praised Mickiewicz, saying that he was "a poet of the era under the oppression of foreign races, who advocated revenge and hoped for liberation".

Mickiewicz grew up in a respectable Polish family, and his mother may have been of Jewish ancestry. He was born in 1798 and studied at the University of Vizhno in the early 19th century, when Tsarist Russia pursued a policy of attracting local elites rather than the brutal assimilation after 1863, so Vizhno University was the largest in the Russian Empire at that time At the university, the language of instruction is Polish, and the students are competent enough to assimilate the cultural heritage of the Grand Duchy of Poland-Lithuania.

Mr. Tardusch was written by Mickiewicz during his exile in Paris in 1834. The poem tells of the love-hate relationship of an upper-class family in Lithuania, and the story ends abruptly in the spring of 1812. Napoleon's army then swept across Lithuania and headed straight for Moscow. The young Lithuanian nobleman in the poem joins the French army. There is historical evidence for this, as it is said that one-third of the upper-class youth who joined Napoleon's ranks in 1812 were students of the University of Verge.

Mickiewicz's enemy was Tsarist Russia, who gave him a government scholarship. There was no nationalist agitation in his time, he just hoped that the Grand Duchy of Poland-Lithuania would be restored to its glory. In 1830-1831, after the failed Polish uprising against Russian rule, the closure of the University of Vizhno and the scattering of students, Mickiewicz began to work on Mr. Tardusch.

Today, every Polish and Lithuanian student knows the first sentence of the poem: "Lithuania! My motherland! You are like health, and only those who have lost you know how precious you are."

In fact, the three substantive words in the sentence "Lithuania! My homeland!" have changed their meanings.

The meaning of "Lithuania" has undergone a transition from nostalgic homage to the Grand Duchy of Poland-Lithuania to a desire for a nation-state. The rhetoric of Romanticism split after 1863 into contradictory versions of nationalism. Polish federalists, Belarusian patriots, and later Polish and Lithuanian nationalists all interpreted the term in their favor.

The subject represented by "I" has also changed. The end of the First World War and the collapse of European powers under the old pattern opened up a full-scale competition between modern nationalists, early modern federalists and communists. Poland and Lithuania emerged as independent states, each for 20 years, and the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic for 7 years. World War II, Nazi Germany's "Final Solution" and the Soviet Union's expulsion policy determined the fate of Poland and Lithuania in the second half of the 20th century.

The question of the "motherland" is equally acute. Under Soviet rule, Lithuanian culture assimilated Vilnius, the city where Mickiewicz was educated, fulfilling the dream of Lithuanian nationalists. At the same time, this matter has to be understood in the context of the cleansing of Polish and Jewish cultures. About 90 percent of Jews died in the Holocaust, and about 80 percent of Poles were deported to Poland after the war. Moreover, in 1939, Lithuanians made up only 1% to 2% of the city; by 1959, of the 236,100 inhabitants of Vilnius, 79,400 (34%) told census takers that they were Lithuanian; 1989 In the last census of the Soviet Union, Vilnius had a population of 576,700, of which 291,500 were Lithuanians, accounting for 50.5%.

In the less than 200 years that the Polish-Lithuanian Grand Duchy has disintegrated from substance to connotation, from the history of conscious "choice" of Mickiewicz, one can see that ideology contributes to "imaginary" the important role of the community. A society of the same ethnic group, language, and culture may not necessarily form a nation-state, but a society of the same ethnic group, language, and culture, shaped and driven by ideology, has basically become a nation-state or a political community.

Ernest Gellner once said that "the nation is defined in terms of will and the combination of cultural and political units", that is, nationalism creates the nation, and its enthusiasm includes "culturally creative, utopian". , the positive creative side". Benedict Anderson's "Imagined Communities" is best known for the claim that a nation is an imagined community in a political sense, that is, it is not a collection of objective social realities, but an imagined creation.

The assertion that the state is not the product of social factors such as religion, language, race, etc. loosens the knowledge of nationalism established by ethno-nationalism in the nineteenth century. The definition of nation is no longer biological, but "imaginary".

At the same time, we also see that this loosening is used by separatists to justify separatist nationalism, and they have finally found a theory that "imagines" the nation without the commonalities of race, language, religion, and culture , in Spain, in the United Kingdom, in Hong Kong and Taiwan, in the current war-torn Ukraine, this trace appears from time to time.