Polish academics, diplomats, journalists and intellectuals appear on the BBC, speak at Oxford, publish with Western presses.
The British press is writing about Poland.
Except often it isn’t.
A Pole is writing about Poland.
The message has travelled to London and come back carrying acquired authority. Added value in a libidinal supply chain.
Lacan would recognise the trick immediately. The subject receives its own message back from the Other and mistakes the echo for recognition.
The Other, meanwhile, may barely be listening.
How many Guardian readers genuinely require a detailed recalibration of Polish-Ukrainian symbolic hierarchies before breakfast?
How many Spectator readers are exercised by Poland’s national brand?
Some.
But probably fewer than the symbolic importance of publication suggests.
The real audience may partly be back in Warsaw.
The Polish intellectual enters the metropolitan conversation, but frequently as the Polish intellectual.
Russia.
Ukraine.
Communism.
Memory.
Catholicism.
Borders.
The complicated East.
He escapes the periphery by becoming its exceptionally articulate representative.
Poland remains interesting because it remains slightly elsewhere.
European, but not quite ordinary.
Western enough to recognise.
Eastern enough to explain.
Small enough to admire.
Wounded enough to love.
Weak enough not to threaten.
It “punches above its weight”.
It warns Europe.
It remembers what Europe forgot.
It knows Russia.
It stands on the frontier absorbing danger on everyone else’s behalf.
Poland remains a buffer even when the tanks have gone.
A symbolic buffer.
It absorbs Europe’s fear.
This is not something “the West” consciously does.
There is no West capable of doing it.
That is the Lacanian point.
There are newspapers, universities, governments, broadcasters and millions of people mostly thinking about something else.
But there is an imagined position from which recognition is presumed to come.
London.
Oxford.
The BBC.
Perhaps Timothy Garton Ash in a seminar room.
Some residual fortress of European seriousness.
Someone inside must surely be taking notes.
Polish history fits the role beautifully.
Defeat.
Martyrdom.
Resistance.
Liberation.
Return to Europe.
These dates contain real histories and enormous suffering.
They also produce an extraordinarily legible Poland.
Romantic.
Brave.
Trampled upon.
Resurrected.
A nation forever dying for Europe and then asking Europe whether it noticed.
The cuddly version of Poland is surprisingly durable.
A normal Poland is harder to use.
Thirty-eight million people.
A large economy.
A large army.
Mortgages.
Traffic.
Divorce.
Bad television.
Good restaurants.
Obnoxious neighbours.
Extraordinary kindness.
Provincialism.
Cosmopolitanism.
People buying kitchens and worrying about their children.
A substantial European society containing the same mixture of generosity, stupidity, beauty, boredom and cruelty as everywhere else.
That Poland has less symbolic charm.
Worse, it might be a rival.
Another centre.
Another place capable of looking rather than merely being looked at.
This is why national branding is fundamentally absurd.
There is no Poland behind the representations waiting for the correct advertising campaign to reveal it.
Poland in Kyiv is not Poland in Berlin.
Poland in Moscow is not Poland in Washington.
Poland in The Guardian is not Poland in The Spectator.
Identity is relational.
It changes with the gaze.
The brand cannot finally be fixed because the object itself is continually being produced through recognition and misrecognition.
And then there is Britain.
Why should London still possess this power?
The empire has gone.
Industrial supremacy has gone.
Britain cannot decide what Britain is.
Yet London, Oxford, the BBC and the English-language press retain something of the imperial position of enunciation.
Things still become oddly more international once they have been said there.
A dead empire can have a remarkably lively echo.
Perhaps empire survives longest not in territory but in the apparently innocent question:
Who gets to describe whom?
And this is where the boomerang comes back.
England becomes the object.
Oxford becomes provincial.
The BBC becomes peculiar.
Westminster becomes ritual.
Received Pronunciation becomes an accent rather than the absence of one.
British history ceases to be History.
England becomes somewhere.
That may be the most useful thing Poland has given me.
Not the ability to explain Poland.
The ability to make England strange.
Then even time changes.
For England: Normandy.
For Warsaw: uprising, destruction, abandonment.
For Britain: television pictures of a wall coming down somewhere else.
For Poland: the collapse of the political world people inhabited.
For Britain?
One might have to look it up.
There is no single European historical clock.
There never was.
Imperial centres simply acquired the privilege of making their own chronology look universal.
Their dates became History.
Other people’s dates became regional history.
And perhaps that is what these Polish essays in British newspapers finally reveal.
Not what Poland is.
Not even how Britain sees Poland.
They reveal the machinery through which peripheral places seek recognition from centres whose authority survives partly because the periphery continues to address them as centres.
Poland speaks towards London.
London reflects Poland back.
Poland hears itself from the West.
And somewhere inside the echo is the old request:
Look at me.
See me.
Tell me I am here.
The imperial boomerang returns.
The interesting moment comes when we stop catching it.
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