After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, among journalists concerned about the future of Poland as a sovereign political entity, reflections and calls for using the great historical opportunity presented to our country during the conflict in the East are becoming more and more explicit . Perceiving and taking advantage of the peripheral or semi-peripheral location of the Republic of Poland is a natural consequence of the Russo-Ukrainian War.
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The current location of our country right next to the core of the EU (Germany) on the one hand and next to the most aggressive empire of the modern world on the other (Russia, its Belarusian satellite and its Ukrainian victim) leads us to perceive our country as exceptional and this is not exceptional or in politics or history.
Friedman
When George Friedman predicted in his book “The Next Hundred Years” a decade and a half ago the growing importance of Poland as a dam against the outbreak of Russian aggression, even in our country, it was considered a political fantasy. Meanwhile, the recent visit of the Prime Minister of Japan to Warsaw and the declaration of financial support to the Republic of Poland in connection with the cost of aid we incur in supporting Ukraine is only confirmation of the assumptions of the US geopolitician, which even predicted this Japanese-Polish rapprochement based on opposition to the Kremlin. In the chapter on Russia, Friedman accurately predicted current events. In his opinion, Germany, faced with the threat of the Russian threat, will turn NATO support to Eastern Europe (!) on Poland to stop Russia. Sounds familiar? The author of “The Next Hundred Years” even predicted the emergence of the Three Seas factor on the political scene every year:
Around 2015, a new bloc of nations, mainly former Soviet satellites, will be formed in cooperation with the Baltic states. It will be much more energetic than the countries of Western Europe, with much more to lose and backed by the United States, and its development will be astonishingly dynamic. (own translation of the English version).
Poland as a “march”
It is nothing new in history that a new force is growing at the edge of a civilization, managing to successfully respond to an external threat. The “history writer of all times” Arnold Toynbee used the vocabulary of the medieval empire to describe this process, calling such states “marches”, i.e. political entities with more decision-making power and freedom than other parts of civilization.
In terms of political geography, nations, states or cities exposed to such pressures fall under the general category of “marchies” or frontier provinces, and the best way to study these types of pressures empirically is to look more closely at what proportion these pressures played in the history of their own communities, compared to the role played by the more sheltered areas within the estates of those same communities.
The British professor noted that the mechanism of strengthening the periphery in the face of an external threat has existed in history for at least five thousand years. Among the peripheral “marches” from which the revival of the whole civilization began, and certainly the strengthening of such a provincial power, he mentioned eg “Upper Egypt, which developed many fortification and defense plans in spite of Nubian invasions. Ancient Assyria would be one such advance to Babylon, though it eventually turned against it. For example, from the examples closer to us, the “march” for its civilization turned out to be Ottoman Turkey. This is how he described the situation of the seeds of the realm of the Sublime Porte:
With the breakup of this sultanate in the thirteenth century AD, the Karamans seemed to have the best and the Ottomans the worst prospects of all the Seljuk heirs. The Karamans inherited the core of the former Seljuq domain with the capital Qóniyah (Konya, Iconium), while the Ottomans came into possession of the worthless suburbs.
In modern Europe, the “marches” turned out to be Portugal and Spain, who, having repelled the attacks of the Saracens, took advantage of their peripherality to become superpowers. Austria, located on the European-Turkish border, created an empire that reached as far as the Balkans after repulsing the expansion of the Ottoman sultans, although here – according to Toynbee – the anachronistic political solutions of the Habsburg monarchy made it impossible to deal with internal problems to go. nationalism.
In other words, from a historical (Toynbee) and political (Friedman) point of view, peripheral countries have the potential to increase their position on the international stage, if they are sufficiently resistant to external pressure. It is difficult that for some reason this geopolitical mechanism, which has been operating for thousands of years, does not apply to Poland, whose location meets all the conditions for creating a strong bloc, a local superpower.
Are we done?
The Republic of Poland as the cornerstone of the Three Seas Initiative and the administrator of the region’s military security are aspirations carried out – better or worse – by the current authorities and supported by Washington since February 24, 2022. It therefore seems that the obstacle to strengthening the “march” (“Eastern flank of NATO”?) is more internal doubts. Some elites of the Vistula, opinion leaders and society – and this is a serious part – simply do not believe in the existence of such a possibility. In liberal centers such a discussion does not even exist, which is blocked by self-censorship, just as the prospect of breaking out of the Soviet bloc was blocked in the talks of the PRL establishment. External circumstances and quite unequivocal political mechanisms are on the side to strengthen Poland’s position, and against – as usual – the brains carved out with partitions, socialism and liberalism, the nation examined by history, or rather its not very bright part.
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Source: wPolityce