The heroic people of Poland know the true value of freedom and nationhood
On Thursday, MEPs voted by 478 to 155 to apply economic sanctions. Not against Russia this time, but against two of their own member states: Poland and Hungary. Brussels accuses both countries of violating basic European values, and wants to trigger a mechanism whereby they must continue to pay into the EU budget but cannot claim funds from it – effectively an open-ended fine.
The timing was unfortunate. Poland has received the largest number of Ukrainian refugees, Hungary the second largest. They are in the front line in protecting what are surely the most elemental European values of all, upholding democratic pluralism in the face of an aggressive war waged by a tyrant.
I happened to hear the news of the European Parliament’s vote while in Tomaszów Lubelski, a small town on the Polish-Ukrainian border, where I was watching, awe-struck, as local people got on unfussily with meeting the refugee crisis.
It is hard to convey the extent to which Poles have mobilised to help their stricken neighbours. Public and private buildings are draped with the Ukrainian flag, and its cheerful colours illuminate local landmarks at night. Every business is doing its bit. Newspapers are printing Ukrainianlanguage issues for the new arrivals, phone companies are offering free data, hotels free beds. The rental cars at Krakow airport were thin on the ground because so many volunteers were driving women and children from the border. “You can bring as many people back as you are able to fit,” said the lady at the desk earnestly. “It’s a four-hour drive from here.”
Poles recently celebrated the centenary of the Polish-Soviet War, a campaign little known in the West, but keenly remembered here as a moment when a citizen militia saved European civilisation, turning back the Red Army from the gates of Warsaw. Now, once again, they are shouldering their burden; again, largely unthanked by their Western neighbours.
Every survey of public opinion – every poll of Poles, so to speak – shows that more than 90 per cent of respondents back giving unrestricted access to Ukrainians, and that around two thirds want to assist themselves. I am suspicious of polls that ask people in the abstract whether they’re ready to help, but the evidence on the ground – what economists would call the revealed preferences – suggest that most Poles are doing their bit. Fleets of private cars, vans and buses are ferrying refugees, first from the border to reception centres, and then from these centres to wherever they have friends or relatives. Mayors in frontier towns are handing out supplies in converted school gyms. Airbnb accommodation is offered free of charge, spare rooms are advertised.
This is open-source aid. Alongside the Poles are volunteers from every country, arriving with aid and leaving with people. On my first day at the border, I happened across a Gloucestershire county councillor who, with a small team, had delivered two lorryloads and four vanloads of assistance, and was planning to return the following week with vehicles wanted in western Ukraine. No government department could manage an operation on such a scale. No state agency could receive, accommodate and transport people in the way these individuals and charities are doing.
For what it’s worth, few of the refugees I spoke to planned to come to the UK. Some wanted to go to countries where they had friends or relatives; but most intended to remain in Poland. They had left husbands and sons in Ukraine, and wanted to stay as close to home as possible. The border states – Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Moldova and Romania – have absorbed 90 per cent of the refugees. Poland alone has taken five times as many as all non-front-line EU countries put together.
That said, our Home Office has again shown itself to be monumentally useless. Inert and inept in the face of the Channel crossings, it is also incapable of unlocking the door when there is a bona fide refugee crisis. Unable to keep people out, it is also unable to let people in.
It is worth taking a moment to deal with the accusation, often levelled in Brussels, that Poland (and Hungary) are pursuing racist immigration policies, showing a generosity to Ukrainians that they did not show to Syrians or Afghans. No doubt there are some racists in both places. But the most obvious difference between this wave of migration and the earlier ones is that these arrivals are almost all women and children.
In the summer of 2015, I worked in a hostel for migrants who had crossed the Mediterranean in rafts. Nineteen out of every 20 people I saw descending the gangplanks of the Italian rescue boats were young men. I say this in no carping spirit. They were bold, resourceful, ambitious boys who were doing exactly what I hope I’d do in their situation. But they were not refugees, at least not as we define that word legally. They were, in most cases, fleeing poverty and corruption rather than war or persecution.
That distinction ought to be obvious, but we are in a cultural moment when some commentators insist on seeing everything as evidence of racism, even Prince William’s innocuous remark – not helped by the fact that it was misreported – that people of his generation were shocked to see war in Europe. Poland has not yet been touched by the Great Awokening and finds such criticism bewildering. British academics might see everything through imagined hierarchies of oppression. They might debate whether gender is a social construct. But Poles see a difference between men who have left their families behind and families who have left their men behind.
It was such conservative attitudes that landed Poland in the dock in Brussels in the first place. Eurocrats see the current government as altogether too Catholic and, worse, nationalist. Its real sin was to declare that Polish national law was supreme over EU law – or, at least, that its own judges, rather than the EU’s, should get to decide when Brussels is going beyond the powers bestowed on it by the EU treaties.
Nationalism is the worst of all offences in Brussels, the sin against the Holy Ghost that shall not be forgiven unto men. But ask yourself this: what exactly is the Ukrainian war about? What caused the refugee crisis?
This is, au fond, a war about national independence. Ukraine was invaded because it insisted on being a fully sovereign nation rather than accepting a semi-dependent status. Ukrainians, in other words, are fighting for the national principle, for their right to form their own state and live under their own laws.
They understand, given their history, that this is the first and most important right. The other things that we and they value – fair trials, free elections, uncensored newspapers, personal autonomy – depend on being able to hire and fire their lawmakers. National independence does not guarantee these things; but it does enable them. Poles, given their own history, also understand this very well.
I am not trying to make a pointscoring Eurosceptic claim. Ukraine, after all, has asked to join the EU, though its circumstances are unique, and its application has to do with immediate security rather than comfortable arguments about selfdetermination. No, my point is a wider one. In a largely unremarked way, the Ukrainian war has vindicated the national principle – that is, the theory that government will work best where people feel common loyalties and affinities.
Until recently, this was about the most low-status opinion imaginable. To be a nationalist was to be a Neanderthal, a Trumpster, a football hooligan, possibly an actual Nazi. Yet the conflict – a war between people who want to live in an independent country and people who don’t recognise their right to do so – has made several Western commentators realise, possibly for the first time, why national loyalty matters.
It is our sense of national community, what Roger Scruton used to call “the politics of the first-person plural”, that makes liberal democracy possible. If we want government of, by and for the people, we first need to agree on being a people. Nationhood, and the shared patriotism on which it rests, is why we pay taxes to support strangers, why we obey laws with which we disagree, why we respect election results when our side loses. As the Italian radical Giuseppe Mazzini put it, in perhaps the pithiest ever summary: “Where there is a nation, let there be a state”.
That creed is still loathed in Brussels. It is still despised by lots of smart alecs in Britain. Perhaps you disagree with it. But look at what Ukrainians are suffering in its defence, look at what Poles are prepared to do to assist them, and then try to tell me that it doesn’t matter.
Seeing their remarkable response to the refugee crisis is a reminder of what truly makes liberal democracy possible