Poland and Our Geopolitical Moment

Abstrakt

Esej:
Poland and Our Geopolitical Moment.

The history of Poland was critical to the history of Europe as a whole over the course of seven centuries. The Grand Duchy of Lithuania and its successor the Polish-Lithuanian Union was a one time one of the largest political entities on the continent. It had the misfortune, however, of being caught between sev-eral other large empires, and disappeared in three successive partitions in the late 18th century. Poland re-emerged after the First World War as a sovereign country, only to be swallowed up again after the Nazi-Soviet Pact, re-appear-ing in 1945 as a war-ravaged satellite of the Soviet Union. It was only in 1989 that the country could emerge finally as a fully sovereign and democratic na-tion, standing at the core of a new Europe “whole and free.”