PREFACE TO ORIGINAL EDITION OF VOLUME I ixremoter past. He is bound to pay some special attention to those aspects of his
subject most closely connected to the world in which we live.
There is, above all, the capital problem of definition. For the historian who
aims to write a comprehensive survey of a European country, the really difficult
task lies less in the interpretation of historical facts than in defining what facts
are supposed to be interpreted. In this regard, it is much easier to discredit the
syntheses of rivals and predecessors than to construct a coherent scheme for
oneself. Oddly enough, modern Marxist-Leninist historians in Poland have
swallowed the old nationalist ideology hook, line, and sinker. Although their
socio-economic analysis of the development of the Polish national community
represents a new tack in modern historiography, their unquestioning acceptance
of the permanent existence of that community throughout recorded history
stands in complete agreement with the definition of Polish History as assumed
by pre-war nationalist scholars. Very few Polish historians have doubted the
contention that the Polish community of their own day was the sole legitimate
claimant to the soil on which they live, and that they are the natural and exclu-
sive heirs of all those earlier communities who occupied those same lands. Yet
such a contention, though politically convenient, is demonstrably false. The citi-
zens of the People's Republic do not have the same things in common as the citi-
zens of pre-war Poland, still less with the subjects of the stateless Polish nation
of the nineteenth century or of the Kingdom and Republic of earlier times.
A more cautious approach would suggest that nothing in our present under-
standing of European History permits us to view the growth of its constituent
nations as an 'autonomous... organic... process'. There is something to be
said for analysing the development of states and institutions from that point of
view, but nothing for applying it to the development of nations. In Poland's
case, where the existence of the state has been intermittent, and only partly coin-
cidental with the life of the nation, it would seem to be quite inappropriate.
In my view, the historian has no safe choice but to examine the pieces of the
puzzle separately, with no hope of fitting Society, State, and Nation into some
neat and consequential pattern. I do not maintain, of course, that Polish History
is completely fortuitous or disjointed. What I do say is, firstly that the role of
arbitrary external influences and of foreign powers has been no less important
than that of coherent domestic forces; and, secondly, that the instances of dis-
continuity are no less in evidence than the strands of continuity.
In the history of the Polish State, the established order has been overturned on
at least five occasions - in 1138, in 1795, in 1813, in 1864, and in 1939. On each
occasion, all concrete manifestations of a unified political community were lost.
At the end of each disembodiment - in 1320, 1807, 1815, 1918, and 1944 - the
new order which came into being owed little to its predecessors, and was
obliged to make a fresh start, in new conditions and under new management.
Similarly, in the history of the Polish nation, the destiny of its members has been
fused for long periods and in the most intimate way with that of other peoples
- in the early centuries with the Czechs and other Slavs; from 1385 to 1793 with