For most of my life I have been suspicious of borders.
This is partly generational and partly political. I grew up in an England in which the people I knew who talked most enthusiastically about borders were generally people I didn’t particularly want to resemble. Borders belonged to nationalism, immigration controls, flags, soldiers, customs officers, people demanding to know where you came from and, occasionally, suggesting you return there.
The better world was supposed to contain fewer of them.
Then I moved to Poland.
I have lived here, on and off, for much of my adult life, and one of the things Poland has taught me is that a border looks very different depending upon which side of history you approach it from.
For a Briton, the border has traditionally been somewhere else.
There is an enormous moat around Britain called the sea. The last successful invasion occurred in 1688, and we politely renamed it the Glorious Revolution because the alternative would have been embarrassing.
Poland has enjoyed no comparable luxury.
For much of the last three centuries, the fundamental Polish political question has not been what a border excludes but whether the border will be there at all.
The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was partitioned at the end of the eighteenth century. Poland disappeared as a sovereign state for 123 years. It survived elsewhere: in language, literature, religion, memory, family, emigration and an extraordinary political imagination in which a country that did not exist continued stubbornly to regard itself as a country.
When Poland returned in 1918, its borders were almost immediately fought over. They moved again catastrophically during and after the Second World War. Cities changed countries. Populations moved or were murdered or expelled. Lwów became Lviv. Breslau became Wrocław.
The border was never merely a line on a map.
Perhaps this helps explain something about contemporary Poland that western Europeans sometimes find difficult to understand.
Poland seems obsessed with defence.
There are soldiers at the frontier. There are walls. There are anti-tank obstacles and plans for fortifications. There are enormous defence budgets, American weapons, Korean tanks, Patriot batteries, anti-drone systems and Tarcza Wschód – the Eastern Shield.
The Polish government says that by the end of this year around 260 kilometres of the frontier will have been prepared with engineering defences, including fortifications, obstacles, logistics and reconnaissance infrastructure. Four Territorial Defence brigades have been reorganised into a new Border Defence Component responsible for parts of the system.
Poland has been allocated more than €43.7 billion under the EU’s SAFE defence instrument, the largest allocation to any member state, with money intended for air defence, anti-drone systems, artillery, military mobility and the Eastern Shield itself.
It is tempting to see all this as militarism.
Sometimes it is.
But I think something more complicated is happening.
A border is a defence against uncertainty. We construct borders between ourselves and strangers, between the familiar and unfamiliar, between the person we think we are and everything threatening to disturb that understanding.
A house has a door, a body skin. A language distinguishes those who immediately understand us from those who don’t.
None of these borders is absolute. Every one of them leaks, which is why we keep rebuilding them.
The five years since the pandemic have been an extraordinary experiment in this psychology.
First the borders of Europe literally closed. A virus turned other human bodies into possible threats. Families were separated. Airports emptied. Governments suddenly rediscovered territorial sovereignty with astonishing speed.
Then came the Belarus border crisis.
People from the Middle East and elsewhere appeared in the forests along Poland’s eastern frontier, encouraged and channelled there by the Belarusian state. Human beings became instruments in a geopolitical confrontation.
Then, in February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. Millions crossed Poland’s border from the other direction and something interesting happened.
The same country frequently portrayed abroad as pathologically hostile to migrants opened homes, railway stations, schools and cities to Ukrainians on a scale that made simple accounts of Polish xenophobia inadequate.
It doesn’t mean the treatment of people on the Belarusian frontier was therefore justified. It means that borders are never merely about foreigners.
They are about relationships.
Who is approaching?
Why?
Under what circumstances?
What do they want?
What do we owe them?
What might happen if we open the door?
What might happen if we don’t?
These are political questions.
They are also extraordinarily intimate ones.
On my mother’s side there is a Quaker inheritance, a belief – one I still find deeply attractive – that violence reproduces violence and that killing another human being represents a failure of politics rather than its fulfilment.
I still think this is true.
Unfortunately, Vladimir Putin also exists.
Pacifism becomes considerably more difficult when somebody else is willing to drive a tank through it.
And this is where Poland has changed my politics.
Not by turning me into a militarist. I still find uniforms faintly alarming and patriotic speeches often unbearable. Polish romantic can be occasionally ridiculous.
But perhaps that too deserves a little generosity.
Imagine maintaining a nation for more than a century without possessing a state.
You would probably become rather attached to poetry. You would need Mickiewicz and Chopin and uprisings and heroic failures because sometimes symbols were what remained when institutions disappeared.
The mistake is to imagine that because nationalism can become grotesque, the thing it is trying to protect must therefore be imaginary.
Poland has created something worth protecting.
Not some ethnically pure essence called Polishness. Poland is worth protecting precisely because it is not pure.
It is Warsaw cafés and Ukrainian children speaking Polish with accents. Vietnamese restaurants. Silesians and Kashubians. Catholics leaving Mass and atheists complaining about Catholics. Gay couples. Nationalists. Feminists. Football hooligans. Professors. Taxi drivers. Belarusians running from dictatorship. Ukrainians running from missiles. Indians delivering food to people arguing on X about immigration.
It is contradictory, irritating, frequently gruff and extraordinarily alive.
Poles themselves can be difficult. This is hardly classified information.
British people often mistake Polish directness for hostility because we have developed an elaborate theatrical system for concealing hostility behind courtesy.
A Briton can say That’s very interesting while meaning I would rather chew through my own leg than listen to another word.
A Pole may simply tell you it is stupid.
There are advantages to both systems.
But after nearly three decades of living among Poles, the thing I increasingly notice isn’t hardness.
It is tenderness.
But present in friendship, family, food, children, animals, neighbours, enormous tables, unnecessary quantities of soup and the extraordinary Polish capacity to appear furious while performing an act of considerable kindness.
Poland in fact has given me everything: love, family, work, a place, a new language, support, friendship and meaning and I am immensely grateful.
Perhaps this is why I now understand the obsession with defence differently.
The question isn’t finally what are we defending ourselves against? but perhaps what are we defending?
If the answer is racial purity, Christianity against Muslims, heterosexuality against gays, Poland against foreigners, then the border becomes a prison.
Eventually there is nobody pure enough to live inside it.
But if what we are defending is the possibility of ordinary life – the right to disagree, to love badly, to raise children, to speak whatever language we happen to speak, to worship or not worship, to complain about the government, to make money, lose money, write books, drink coffee, play football, be left alone – then defence begins to mean something different.
The fortification exists so that life behind it does not have to become a fortress.
That, perhaps, is the paradox Poland now faces.
The stronger the external border becomes, the less necessary the internal borders should be.
A confident Poland does not need to be frightened of Muslims, Germans, Ukrainians, gays, liberals, conservatives, Brussels or people who speak Polish badly.
Security should make generosity possible, otherwise the fortress has already failed.
So, somewhere along the way, without really deciding to, I seem to have crossed another border. Poland stopped being the country I was observing. It became somewhere I would defend.
I hesitate even writing that sentence. It sounds absurdly romantic.
Nobody knows what he will do when the sirens actually sound. History is full of men who gave magnificent speeches and subsequently discovered urgent business in London. Courage is much easier before anybody starts shooting.
So I make no claim about heroism.
I know only that when I imagine the possibility of Russia attacking Poland, my first thought is no longer:
Where would I go?
It is:
I’m not leaving.
Perhaps I would.
Fear does strange things to people.
But the instinct surprises me.
And that seems to me the Poland, and perhaps the me in it, worth defending.
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