alt Hacker News> This would be a new Poland. Wilson called for it to include ‘territories inhabited by indisputably Polish populations’ (this would become difficult to ascertain and haunt the future of the region)
I'm Polish, out of my 8 grandfathers: 2 come from modern day central Ukraine (Vinnytsia), 2 come from modern day Belarus (Ashmyany).
It's very hard to explain to people how weak the whole concept of nation state used to be in Eastern Europe till ww2.
From Eastern Germany to the Urals, every place you would go it was a deeply cosmopolitan mix of Germans, Jews, different Slav ethnicities and depending on the regions significant Romanians, Hungarians, Turks and some other minorities.
You would cross from one village to the other and the language would change, and in minor centers neighborhood and districts changed architecture and language. Different ethnicities also generally mapped to different professions and status. And those changes didn't really look like gradients, more like dispersed bubbles.
Ethnic tensions were always present, everybody literally hated and tolerated each other with Jews generally being the common scape goat.
My grandparents coming from modern day Ukraine vividly remember the violence and terror caused by UPA, the nazi-sympathizing Ukrainian militias. My mother's grandma could not forget till the day she lived (died in 2004) what she saw in her childhood village when Ukrainians came and started a massacre that saw her losing a brother, countless cousins, uncles and friends.
Of course, Poles have been the aggressors too, just a few decades before, when Poland attacked the Soviet Union in the 1920s and had its own share of ethnic violence against Ukrainians and Belarusians.
In any case, Eastern Europe is deeply plagued and poisoned by all of this past violence. No one is able to have a mea culpa moment, no one is able to admit their own guys were bloody murders often killing thousands of people like cattle. No one can admit their ancestors crap.
The same happens in the Russo-Ukrainian conflict. The Russians see in Ukrainians the accomplice of their biggest trauma (the Great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany).
The Ukrainians see in Russia the perpetrator of their biggest trauma (the 1920s Holodomor).
No side ever says sorry, no side ever takes responsibility, no side can move on. And Eastern Europe keeps being unhealed from its traumas and carrying this in modern age.
And a man that would rather see the world burn than step out (Putin) plays on those traumas he very well understands for his own personal lust of power.
Replies
I have two thoughts here. First, I'm surprised that you're calling out Eastern Europe specifically. This is one of my favorite videos about Europe:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJjhNVpSQzw
The entire continent was basically in a constant state of flux (and perpetual wars) through most of its history, ending with WWII in the West, with the fall of the USSR in most of the Central and Eastern Europe, and then continuing with some regional score-settling in the Balkans.
And even this is a bit reductionist: Spain was a dictatorship until about 1975! How crazy is that. This is basically the recent past of the EU.
For the misery of Central and Eastern Europe specifically, "Bloodlands" by Snyder is a good book. And this gets me to my second point: I think you're veering too far into relativism. Yes, every country did some shitty things - that's the history of the world for ya - but the Russian Empire and the German / Austrian / Prussian Empire can be singled out as especially awful when you look at the past 300-500 years. Even just by the simplest metric of the number of people displaced and killed, it's many orders of magnitude worse than what anyone else has done. This distinction is important because the legacy of bloody imperialism continues on the Russian side today - beyond Ukraine - and it's most certainly not excused by the fact that, dunno, Poland occupied Moscow once.
This is very well put, IMO.
And I feel that the Balkans are even more representative, although my perspective may be skewed because I live there.
> In any case, Eastern Europe is deeply plagued and poisoned by all of this past violence. No one is able to have a mea culpa moment, no one is able to admit their own guys were bloody murders often killing thousands of people like cattle. No one can admit their ancestors crap.
When has anyone ever done that? I don't think it's an Eastern Europe problem. You can unify disparate groups under one flag for a time, but top down coercion only goes so far. Look at how well the former Ottoman territories get along today.
> when Poland attacked the Soviet Union in the 1920s
That is disputed, there are sources that say that (mostly Russian based) and others that say it was the Soviets marching West to conquer Europe.
Going out for hikes through the Kashubian hills you can still find the old border markers from WWII era where the German border was.
> I'm Polish, out of my 8 grandfathers
You probably mean great grand parents. You can only have 2 grandfathers.
8 grandfathers that's an odd number. Sounds like a nice PH intro.
> when Poland attacked the Soviet Union in the 1920s
Eh, it was more complicated than that. Basically a gradual build up from 1918 advancement of Polish forces from west and Soviet from east into the territories abandoned by German armies, then "border incidents" then regular army clashes, and eventually a full blown offensive by Poland and counteroffensive by Soviets.
I guess you can interpret it as Poland invading soviet russia (no soviet union yet btw, and Poland was supporting one of the 3 Ukrainian states that existed at the time).
But yeah Poland wasn't innocent anyway. For example it did the Putin's Crimean trick on Lithuania back in interwar. That was much more clear-cut.
> In any case, Eastern Europe is deeply plagued and poisoned by all of this past violence. No one is able to have a mea culpa moment, no one is able to admit their own guys were bloody murders often killing thousands of people like cattle. No one can admit their ancestors crap.
That's just false.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giedroyc_Doctrine
Poland did mea culpa after WW2. The whole thing is based on recognizing that Poland has been imperialist and did bad things and that it's in the end bad for Poland to continue trying to control these territories because it pushes us into conflict against Russia without the support of the other countries.
On the other hand admiting guilt and renouncing imperialism makes us clearly the lesser evil for the countries in between and gives us buffer zone in case Russia turns evil again (which we predicted, and which did happened).
It was the basis for Polish eastern foreign policy for last 37 years and still is (it's another question for how long it stays that way if far-right wins the next elections tho).
I highly recommend anybody interested in Eastern Europe after WW2 to read Giedroyc and Mieroszewski. They were visionaires. They predicted back in 1950s that USSR will fall and that the independent nationstates that will appear will have 2 choices - go back to chaotic ethnic wars or drop the territorial and historical disputes. And they developed the doctrine in 70s and slowly persuaded opposition in communist Poland so when Poland regained independence in 1989 - almost all the elites bought into it. It was a big bet and it worked very well for Poland.
Sadly nowadays half of Polish political scene starts to move away from that, but that's another subject. Mostly just unchecked far-right propaganda.
The history of Eastern Europe is very interesting, in how that came to be. A combination of pure immigration and settlement of peoples from the more populous low countries and Rhine valley to Eastern Europe. There was expulsion of Jews from central and western Europe, leading them to migrate to Eastern europe for the comparative religious tolerance. Then there was the hanseatic league, which created German cities, settlements and districts throughout the East to bring goods west as part of a vast trade network. Then German miners and engineers being brought east to exploit mineral wealth. This isn't taught much in the western schools, but its fascinating confluence of factors that lasted hundreds of years in early modern europe that created this total lack of homogenous populations in eastern europe.