This book discusses historical continuities and discontinuities between the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, interwar Poland, the Polish Peopleâs Republic, and contemporary Poland. The year 1989 is seen as a clear point-break that allowed the Poles and their country to regain a ânatural historical continuityâ with the âSecond Republic,â as interwar Poland is commonly referred to in the current Polish national master narrative. In this pattern of thinking about the past, Poland-Lithuania (nowadays roughly coterminous with Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Russiaâs Kaliningrad Region and Ukraine) is seen as the âFirst Republic.â However, in spite of this âpolitics of memoryâ (Geschichtspolitik) â regarding its borders, institutions, law, language, or ethnic and social makeup â present-day Poland, in reality, is the direct successor to and the continuation of communist Poland. Ironically, todayâs Poland is very different, in all the aforementioned aspects, from the First and Second Republics. Hence, contemporary Poland is quite un-Polish, indeed, from the perspective of Polishness defined as a historical (that is, legal, social, cultural, ethnic and political) continuity of Poland-Lithuania and interwar Poland.
