518 WOLNOSC
currency for eleven of the existing fifteen members inevitably complicated the
preparations of would-be applicants. In any case, the admission of forty million
Poles with a large peasant class and a GDP barely one-third of the EU's poorest
member was no easy matter. It was always going to lay down a more formida-
ble challenge than the recent advent of nine million wealthy Swedes, eight
million Austrians, or five million Finns.
In that context, it was a comfort to hear Helmut Kohl visiting the Jagiellonian
University during his last term as German Chancellor and talking to an audience
of students about his hopes and fears. He likened 'the ancient European city of
Krakau' to his own homeland on the Rhine, which in his youth had still been
suffering from a long-standing legacy of war, hatred, and repeated invasion.
The message was not lost. Even so, Poland's application was moving at a
leisurely trot rather than at a gallop. Formally entered in 1994, it was not due to
reach fruition, together with the applications of Hungary, Slovenia, Estonia,
and the Czech Republic, until 2004. With colder winds beginning to blow from
further east, the pace began to look dangerously inadequate. If, as the rhetoric
of the Commission maintained, enlargement into the former Soviet Bloc was 'a
political imperative', the EU could not afford to wait passively whilst applicants
tried to scale the ever-rising walls of the acquis communitaire. The EU would
have to adapt itself energetically to the needs of the applicants. On this front, the
turn of the millennium brought nothing in particular.
Poland had entered the twentieth century as a mere historical concept.
Politically, it had been widely regarded as a lost cause. Verloren ist verloren.
Polish society, divided between the three partitioning powers, was in the throes
of rapid modernization, and was not expected to resist the pressures of
Germanization and Russification indefinitely. The Polish state restored in 1918
was destroyed only twenty-one years later. Fifty more years passed before liber-
ation arrived once again.
Throughout the century, therefore, the most moving and the most relevant of
texts was the one written in exactly 1901 by the Cracovian artist and dramatist
Stanislaw Wyspianski. In his play Wesele (The Wedding Feast), there is a scene
where the Poet is talking to a young girl:
POET: You can seek Poland throughout the whole wide world, young
lady; and you'll never find her.
GIRL: Perhaps searching is a waste of time.
POET: Yet there is just one small space -.
Now, Jagusia, just place your hand
Beneath your breast...
A tarn puka? (Is something beating there?)
GIRL: A coz za tako naukai (What sort of lesson is this?)
Serce -! (That's my heart!)
POET: A to Polska wlasnie (Exactly. That's what Poland is!).