Norman Davies: The Polish Land

The correlation between the state and the nature of the terrain on which it is situated poses some of the most fascinating problems of political geography. Phrases such as `river valley despotisms' or `Gulf Stream democracies' have been coined in attempts to explain why particular locations have spawned particular forms of government. In Western Europe, no one would dispute that the Swiss Alps, the English Channel, the Dutch dykes, or the Venetian lagoon have effectively sheltered the democracies which grew up under their protection. In Eastern Europe, Russia provides the classic example of how extreme conditions of space, climate, and poverty can foster correspondingly extreme traditions of autocracy.
In these general arguments, the Polish-Lithuanian Republic occupies an interesting place. If Muscovy was the home of the `patrimonial state', where everything and everyone was put to the absolute disposition of the ruler, it is curious that Muscovy's immediate neighbor should have developed precisely the opposite tendency. If Poland-Lithuania occupied a transitional location between Europe and Russia, one might have expected it to have manifested a transitional blend of European and Russian practices. But this is not the case. The Polish-Lithuanian state was as completely decentralized as the Russian state was centralized. Its ruler was as limited as the Tsar was absolute. Its regions were as wayward, as the Russian provinces were controlled. Its noble citizens were as free as the subjects of the Tsar were bonded. Its policy was as passive as that of Russia was active; and its failure was as great as Russia's success. The two great states which between them dominated Eastern Europe in the modern period were as different as chalk and cheese.

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[In Polish history], territorial security was an important consideration, though not a simple one. It can be seen to be the product of several contributory factors, including desirability, accessibility, defensibility, and tenability. (In other words, a given location is only secure when no one potential aggressor either wants it, or can reach it, capture it, or retain it.) Central Poland was certainly a desirable territory, both in itself and as a means of passage to points further afield. To its German neighbors, it offered space and the prospect of land for colonization, the notorious Lebensraum (living space) of the twentieth century. To its Russian neighbors, it offered valuable granary provinces, particularly in the south and south-east; a long-desired link with Europe; and a strategic buffer zone. It was also extremely accessible. Armies and people moving westwards out of central Asia, or eastwards out of Europe, were automatically channeled across Polish territory by the configuration of the land mass. Everyone from the Goths, Vandals, Avars, and Magyars, to Batu Khan in 1241-2, Napoleon in 1807-12, and Hitler in 1939-41, not to mention the Crimean Tartars, whose annual incursions lasted for centuries, rode into Poland with the minimum of hindrance. As in Russia, it has always been virtually impossible to deny the enemy an easy initial penetration. Extended lines of defense left unguarded loopholes which could always be swiftly exploited. On the other hand, the country was extremely difficult to hold in subjection. Invading armies melted away into the vast countryside. Insurrectionary forces found easy refuge in remote wildernesses. Almost without exception, the only effective way of controlling Poland for any length of time, once it was overrun, has been by indirect rule and local autonomy. This line has been followed by the Tsarist Government in the eighteenth century and from 1815 to 1830; by the French from 1807 to 1813; by the Germans in 1915-18, and by the USSR since 1944. Numerous attempts to impose direct rule, by the Tsar after 1831, and 1864; by the Bolsheviks in 1919-20; and by the Nazis in 1939-45, invariably provoked immense local resistance.

From all of this, it should be evident that geopolitics have indeed affected Poland's development, but only in a negative way. The absence of any outstanding geographical features, has served to give added importance to forms of state organization, to the exploitation of resources, and to dynamic psychological factors. The historical geographer is left with questions such as why Poland was unable to organize its considerable human and economic resources as efficiently as its neighbors; why, in the crises of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in terms of soldiers per head of population, Russia was ten and Prussia thirty times more efficient than Poland; or why both Russia and Prussia possessed the demonic drive to expand whilst Poland did not.
One line of approach is provided by relative chronology - by the fact that Poland developed much more quickly than her neighbors. The Polish kingdom as unified in the fourteenth century developed with precocious rapidity, expanded into territories once ruled by the moribund Ruthenian principalities, and associated itself with the overblown Grand Duchy of Lithuania. At this stage, Muscovy was still an insignificant backwater, struggling to shake off the Mongol yoke. Prussia still lay in the grip of the Teutonic Order. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Poland-Lithuania was the largest, and arguably strongest, state in Eastern Europe. In 1569, when the constitution of the united Polish-Lithuanian Republic was finally sealed by the Union of Lublin, the political link of the Hohenzollern dukes in Prussia with their relations in Brandenburg was confined to the promise of an eventual reversion on the failure of male descent. In Muscovy, Ivan IV, whose barbarous extermination of Novgorod and other Russian countries was matched only by the sensational violence towards his own subjects, had still not crossed the Urals, and was battling to gain a foothold on the Volga at Kazan, and on the Baltic at Narva. Thus the Polish system gelled at a time when internal prosperity was at its height and the external threat was still small. The decentralized traditions of defense, finance, and executive power were perpetuated in line with previous conditions, and not in expectation of increased pressures. It could be argued that Poland developed too soon, or too easily.
A second line of approach is provided by the Lithuanian connection, which complicates any arguments based on the geography of central Poland. For 407 years, from 1385 to 1 793, Poland and Lithuania were joined together, first by the personal union of crowns and then by a constitutional union. Their association was longer than the comparable experience of England and Scotland since 1603. The Lithuanian state as founded in the thirteenth century may be seen as the last and most successful of the primitive and usually ephemeral enterprises which emerged in Eastern Europe from the ninth century onwards. Like Kiev Rus' (which has been aptly described as `a glorified Hudson's Bay Company'), like the Great Moravian `Empire', or like the primitive Polish Kingdom of Mieszko I, it was created by a team of intrepid warriors whose ability to conquer vast areas of sparsely populated prairie, was far greater than their powers of permanent administration. Its existence was prolonged by the union of 1385 with the Polish monarchy, with whose assistance the rising threat of the Teutonic Order was averted; and its feeble hold on the southern provinces of Volhynia, Podolia, and the Ukraine was ultimately recognized by their transfer to the Polish Kingdom at the time of the constitutional union. Yet Lithuania always remained the more vulnerable and weaker half of the Republic. Its human resources were fewer, its economic base more precarious, its defenses more open, its nobility more wayward, its capacity to defend itself was more inadequate. Its position adjacent to Muscovy called for a sterner stance. From the end of the fifteenth century, the Polish army was continually required to bolster the flagging performance of the hard-pressed Lithuanians. As time went on, the Grand Duchy proved to be a burden which weighed ever more heavily on the shoulders of the Kingdom. If one holds therefore that the institutions and traditions of the united Republic grew naturally from the circumstances of Poland, one might equally maintain that their extension into Lithuania was one of the principal causes of their failure. But here again there are serious drawbacks. One has only to remember the role of Lithuania in repeated Polish Risings throughout the nineteenth century, long after the legal link broken, to realize that the bond between Poland and Lithuania was not quite so artificial or burdensome as geography alone might imply.
By this time, the dull sublunary amateur who imagined that Geography could give simple clues to the central problems of Poland's History will be forced to have second thoughts. The once tempting idea that geographical conditions in the Polish lands nurtured Democracy as surely as Muscovy nurtured Autocracy does not find support in detailed research.
At all events, great caution is necessary. It is all too easy, having refined the constituent factors of political geography, to pretend that they represent the elements of a mathematical sum. They do not. They provide the variable constituents of social and economic life which in turn forms no more than the material for the exercise of human will and the making of arbitrary decisions. Political affairs are conducted by men whose perception of the objective realities of their predicament is rarely confident and never exact, and who are free to ignore them or defy them as they choose. In Poland's case at every turning-point, - in 1385, 1569, 1683, 1717, 1794-5. 1918, or 1944 - decisions were taken or avoided which could have been different, and which could have led to different results. The Polish state, like every other political organism, was created not by predetermined forces, but by men. Its collapse in the eighteenth century was no more inevitable than its resurrections in the twentieth. Its future is no more ascertained than that of any other country. Geography, in fact, as `the science of our revolving earth', describes little more than the potter's wheel. Man is both the Potter, and the Clay; and it is Man, not Geography, that is the villain.

From Norman Davies, God's Playground, New York: Columbia University Press, 1982 (Chapter Two: Polska - The Polish Land).