Poland and the United Kingdom have been allies for years. But, since the outbreak of the Ukraine war, that union is becoming stronger. This week, the UK government announced up to £10 million in funding for a joint UK-Polish partnership to erect two purpose-built villages in Lviv and Poltava to shelter more than 700 of Ukraine’s most vulnerable displaced people. The UK-Polish partnership will also provide £2.6 million for power generators to serve some 450,000 people in schools, hospitals, and community centres in retaken and front-line areas, and up to £2.5 million distributed in partnership with the Red Cross to support those suffering under extreme weather conditions. This strengthening of the UK-Polish partnership in delivering aid to Ukraine comes hot on the heels of last week’s surprise two-day visit to Poland by the Prince of Wales, and appears a strong response to the state visit of Chinese president Xi Jinping to Moscow that same week.
Prince William is the first British Royal to have visited Poland since the invasion of Ukraine last year. His visit included thanking British troops in Rzeszów on Poland’s Eastern Border as well as speaking with Polish troops of 3rd Brigade Territorial Defence Force, playing table tennis with Ukrainian refugees, dining in Butero Bistro – an openly LGBTQI+-friendly restaurant in Warsaw, laying a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and meeting with president Andrzej Duda.
The regulated pomp, formality and coldness of the meeting between presidents Xi and Putin stood in stark contrast to the warmth and freedom of Prince William playing with refugee children, and sitting down to a £7.50 meal with his staff in a self-described ‘queerspace with comfort food’. The visits reveal two worldviews clashing against the backdrop of East-Central Europe: the borderlands where clashes of this nature have always taken place.
The Polish government is seen as one of the most controversial in Europe
Presidents Xi and Putin share a desire to ‘change the world’ together in a manner not seen ‘for a century’, in the spirit of ‘friendship, cooperation, and peace’ between the two countries. The CCP – with Russian leadership as a junior partner – wants a world in which there is a right way and a wrong way to live. We in the West embrace a more chaotic multiplicity of ‘good-enough’ forms of life, a somewhat scruffy rubbing along together, which creates more room for individuality, but often leaves us confused and divided as to who and what we are.
It was into this cultural confusion that the new European democracies of the post-communist era emerged in the 1990s – with the greater cultural certainty of nations that had spent centuries resisting the imperialist ambitions of neighbouring powers – and with an intransigence in opposing foreign influence which established Western culture often finds baffling or distasteful. This national certainty, vocalised by Ukraine, is now the cultural bulwark which stands between Western democracies and the neo-imperialism of China and Russia. It is supported financially and militarily by those who have a pragmatic interest in keeping the Russian establishment tied up in regional conflict. However, it is the cultural exchange taking place between Central Europe and the West (in tandem with the exchange of troops, technology, and materiel) which is laying the more lasting groundwork for resistance against the Sino-Russian world reconfiguration project.
Polish PM Mateusz Morawiecki, speaking at Heidelberg University last Monday, highlighted that Europe could only be strong if it were a continent of nation-states – not a super-state government ruled by elites. He stressed that ignoring the cultural differences between countries would result in an overall weakening of Europe at a time when Ukrainians were fighting for the very freedoms which all Europeans hold dear. He indicated that the nation-state is best-placed to protect these freedoms, highlighting that all other – grander – systems were ‘illusory’ and ‘utopian’.
Morawiecki’s comments appear to equate the cultural prospect of a European superstate to the superstates which are Russia and China. A surprise visit to Poland by Japanese PM Fumio Kishida last Wednesday, and Japan’s pledge to aid Poland’s development efforts shows that this vision of a global community of nation-states is winning strategic and ideological allies outside of the West as well, wherever authoritarian imperialism threatens.
The Polish government is perceived as one of the most controversial in Europe, due to conflicts with the EU over judicial appointments, and its more restrictive view of progressive social policies. Prince William’s visit to Poland was made at the request of the British government. A Royal visit may well have been preferable to a government one at a time when Britain is seen to be re-engaging with the EU, following Rishi Sunak’s victory in the Commons on the Northern Ireland Protocol. Prince William’s visit to a restaurant that is openly friendly to the LGBTQI+ community in Warsaw in turn highlights the overriding liberal values which the community of Western nations will protect, even while supporting Poland’s geostrategic role as frontier country and chief ally to Ukraine. Polish news coverage was quick to appreciate the soft power of an established constitutional monarchy as one of Britain’s greatest assets, and a force which could unite those divided by politics.
The new democracies of East-Central Europe have all the vitality of countries which have forged an identity through rebellion against tyranny – a strength of national character which presidents Putin and Xi underestimate at their own peril – but they lack the gentle affirmation of an establishment. Long ago, Britain built an establishment to run an Empire: having lost that Empire, and failed to find another purpose, for too long we lent the affirmation of that establishment to the new rich of regimes whose leaders brazenly repress their own minorities, and are now perpetrating similar aggression abroad. We are partly to blame for giving Russian and Chinese leadership the impression that we would welcome a slow re-configuration of the international system in their image, as long as outward conformism to Western norms were maintained. By allying with Ukraine and Poland, we now convey the opposite message.
Western ideas decayed as the concept of Western identity fell out of fashion following the Cold War – we preserved the shell of our former traditions, inhabiting them without understanding their meaning. Poland and Ukraine lost the forms and traditions of an established society in successive wars and uprisings, but retained an inherent understanding of their value, precisely because of their loss. The re-engagement between the two sides of Europe is now essential to the preservation of our way of life, in the face of the onslaught of those who would destroy it – both from inside our borders and without. The Prince of Wales laying a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Warsaw, which commemorates Poles who died in the Battle of Britain among others, reminds us that this is not the first time that Britons and Poles have joined forces against tyranny of this nature.
The elements of Polish politics which in peacetime make Western progressives bristle are born of the same instincts which are able to discern the neo-imperialist ambitions of Russia and China – and resist them – in a way which the divided plurality of Western democracies cannot. In peacetime these impulses benefit from softening through contact with nations which have enjoyed more continuity. In war, the Ukrainians fight, and the Poles help them, because these nations understand their role in history is to resist being forced to be what they are not. By engaging with them more closely, we in Britain may finally, after more than a century, rediscover a purpose defined by who we want to be.
Anna Richards grew up in a British-Polish family in Warsaw
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