Politics of the past: the use and abuse of history - Socialists ...

harmonious and prosperous, with the inclusion of Poles, Jews,
Ukrainians, and so on.
Q: After such a complicated history, do Poles now have a feeling
of freedom, independence, of being part of Europe? Or is the past
still haunting them?
It depends on who you talk to. There are more and more enlightened
Poles, young people who want to forget about that difficult
past. On the other hand, there still is a big group with a chip in its
shoulder. These are the people who say someone is trying to cheat
Poland, whenever there is some kind of crisis: ‘The Germans are trying
to use the EU to achieve what Hitler failed to do.’ That sort of
nonsense. But, in fact, after joining the EU Poland has done very
well. The anti-European, euro sceptic propaganda was focussed
especially on the peasants. Polish farmers would be starved to
death because of cheap food imports from the EU. They even got
to saying that Brussels favoured euthanasia for Polish pensioners.
Absolutely evil things. But it never happened, quite the opposite.
Polish agriculture exports have done very well.
Q: During the Cold War, many people in countries like Poland and
Czechoslovakia felt that West European social democrats were
too nice to the communist regimes. People like Egon Bahr and
Willy Brandt were regarded with suspicion. How, in your view,
does this connect to this confusion about what social democrats
stand for?
That was definitely the perception in Central Europe. People like
Willy Brandt started from the idea of convergence: if we talk with
our East German neighbour, they will get closer to us. But they
didn’t. So that line was not very popular in Eastern Europe. In addition,
Western trade unions had close connections with Soviet
trade unions in order to increase their leverage against their own
governments. It was common knowledge in Eastern Europe that
Soviet trade unions were organs of repression and had nothing to
do with workers’ rights. Western parties, like the Labour Party which
had close connections to these trade unions lost a lot of credibility
as a result.
Q: We asked György Konrád this same question and he said these
social democrats had been rather naive. Do you think Brandt’s
57 Norman Davies