“In the Cold War period Polish studies in the UK tended to be subsumed into Slavic studies and was often lost in that amorphous zone, Central and Eastern Europe, or Eastern Europe, or Eastern Central Europe. Somewhere between two worlds, the Russian world beloved of so many Brits of a certain class and age, and Western Europe,” Kunicki starts.
“I am not in PR, I have no obligation to sell Poland, to create a magical place that does – or doesn’t – exist,” he goes on.
“It is not this great land of milk and honey. But it is a place that deserves in its own right – culturally, politically and increasingly economically – further attention from Brits and Westerners."
Mikołaj Kunicki suggests we also need to move beyond the traditional magnets of interest - the national-oriented, the inward-looking, the matrydom-based approaches. "Only then can we inject Polish studies into the global academic blood circulation system,” he says.
Polish studies as a discipline is fascinating not for parochial reasons, he continues. “It’s not about folk songs, 19th century poetry and national uprisings, all of which are great and in need of exposition too, but – and in particular in the present Ukraine climate – we need to look for example at crisis resolution, peaceful transition, democratisation and regime change," he says.
The centre at Oxford is the product of a series of meetings between the British heavyweights of Polish studies, Norman Davies and Timothy Garton-Ash, and also Margaret MacMillan, the warden of St. Anthony’s, plus a heavyweight of Polish business, Leszek Czarnecki, with the latter putting up GBP 5m and the former Oxford-style leverage and intellectual ballast.
“We are always in need of extra money,” Kunicki says. “The GBP 5m covers all startup costs, but we will need to generate some extra cash.”
“Czarnecki is a part of a newly confident Polish business community, one that looks outside and has ambitions beyond the merely commercial,” Kunicki says.
Kunicki still has some work to do to popularise Polish studies, he admits. “Poland has occupied an ambiguous place in the Western imagination,” Kunicki starts. “And it is time to change that.”
Timothy Snyder, who gave a lecture at the POMP in 2014, in his book Bloodlands, talks of this region as a somewhere betwixt and between, where the great battles, political, ethnic and ideological, took place during what he calls the Second 30-Year War between 1914 and 1945.
This is reflected in Kunicki’s work too. As a Senior Research Fellow in Polish Studies, he says his job is to offer a platform for exploring wider issues through the prism of Polish studies.
“I recognise the problems of translating, both in the literal sense, and in the sense of finding a way of telling a story about a place, with all its diverse and specific flavours and nuances, and at the same time the need to meet the recipients’ actual or perceived needs,” he says.
The recipient of course is a Western world for whom nuance is often an unnecessary anachronism of history.
“The US has a much stronger set of Polish study and research institutes. The notion of Poland and the need for centres of learning devoted to the country are stronger,” Kunicki says. In the UK, Polish studies are still something of a Cold War anomaly. Brits, embarrassed by their own betrayals, the story goes, and many academics in awe of Uncle Joe, passing secrets to the Soviets to spite the Americans, were often a little embarrassed by a Poland that either a) didn’t really exist any more or b) when it did exist was a loud-mouthed nationalist pain in the neck, Kunicki suggests.
But with perhaps up to 1m Poles living in the UK the image of Poland is and will continue to evolve, he believes. “This is a massive cultural and sociological shift and a new generation of people that are Polish and British in equal measure is emerging. That in itself is changing the relationship between the two places and creating something both new and exciting.”
We wander, as you do, into Ukraine.
“There is no equivalent of Solidarity in the 1980s in Ukraine,” Kunicki says. “This is a country that has different elites, a Soviet past. Poland wasn’t a Soviet republic, and that is key. The political models used in Poland are not really applicable here. Aggressive language is never a good thing, although the West should show it can impose sanctions."
The West’s response so far has been completely inadequate, Kunicki believes. "In some senses, the war is already there. This could be the shape of the new pattern of conflict, rearranging the map of the region. The US is now aware more seriously than before that words have a real impact in this part of the world. We have to stick with imperfect allies, and hope they can deal with the Russian games. The government seems quite shrewd, and let’s give them time, but it could get nasty, and history hasn’t set a very positive precedent. The West doesn’t have a great track record in understanding nuance generally, but here is a case in point. Look at the government make up and the role of the far-right. Time will tell,” he says.
But could time be a luxury of the professional historian, I suggest, inducing a weary shrug from our man from Oxford.