Interview with Prof. Dr. habil. Dr. h.c. Piotr Wilczek (University of Warsaw)

© © The Government of The Bahamas

H. M.: What does the English language, which you are very proficient in, have to do with the West? Is English the language of the West?

P. W.: English is now not only the language of the West – it is the global language, spoken widely in Western Europe, other parts of Europe, in Asia, and, of course, in the British Commonwealth countries scattered across the world. Like in Theresa May’s "Global Britain" slogan, I wish that Britain will go global and will remain our strong ally. I believe that English will remain a global language, spoken everywhere as the West’s contribution to the unity of the world but no longer as the Western language.

Some time ago, I was watching a video recording of a panel discussion organized by a language school in London which specializes in training foreigners in pronunciation, so that their spoken English may be more understandable in the workplace and in social life. The panelists, however, emphasized that even if this were possible, it would be strange to force people to completely get rid of their accents when their native languages are Spanish, French, Polish or Russian. You cannot force someone to speak like a native of Bristol or Manchester or as a Texan; the only consideration should be whether or not a non-native speaker is fully understood by his interlocutor. This, to me, is a real change in attitude. When I was learning English in the mid-1970s, the goal of many teachers of British English, who dominated in Poland, was to train people to speak RP – the "received pronunciation" – otherwise known as the royal British accent. Even if some teachers still adhere to this pedagogy and end up frustrating their students (because the RP goal is unachievable, unless you start learning English as a baby), the changes have been irreversible – English is no longer a Western language, but instead a global language spoken with variety of native and non-native accents. All of this reminds me of the problems that my American friend from Kentucky who lived in Glasgow faced and had major communications issues with his Scottish plumber. This was the case of two "western" native speakers of English. Eventually, they found ways to understand each other’s accents. I also remember the protests of American students when I was in Chicago: interestingly, they did not understand the English of their Asian professors.  

English as a global language and as a universal way of communication was initiated by the West and is obviously a part of the colonial heritage of the West. This fact reminds me of my major diplomatic faux pas: when I was presenting my credentials in Nassau as the Polish Ambassador to the Bahamas, I asked one of the Bahamian officials about their native language. He answered: it’s English. But I further insisted to learn about the original, native language of his ancestors. English, he answered again, quite bluntly this time, which made me realize how inappropriate my question originally was: although locally you might hear "Bahamian English", a mixture of British English, African influence and local dialects, the descendants of African slaves shipped to the Bahamas centuries ago speak the same language as the English settlers who brought them there, and British English has been the common language of the islands since their inception.

H. M.: Tell me about your encounters with Polish people and Polish organizations in the US. Have these encounters taught you something about the positions of Poles in the world? Do these positions represent a Poland that might be considered as the "East of the West"?

P. W.: According to the latest United States Census Bureau estimate, the number of Americans of Polish descent is 9.5 million, although only around 600,000 of them speak Polish. Most belong to the second, third, fourth or fifth generation of Polish Americans, who were born here and who are no longer Polish speakers. Many Polish American organizations concentrate on cultivating traditional cultural or culinary customs and events (celebrating Polish holidays, folk dancing or promoting Polish cuisine). Many of their members do not know Poland and do not speak Polish. 

Polish Americans, especially the Polish American Congress, have been very active in helping Polish people and in promoting the Polish case when Poland was under the Communist regime, and their support was crucial during Poland’s accession to NATO, which was a symbolic reunification of Poland with the West. This accession would not have happened as early as 1999 without pressure from Polish American organizations and activists. The New York-based Kosciuszko Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to educational, cultural, and artistic exchanges between the United States and Poland and established by Polish Americans in 1925, has worked tirelessly, even throughout the Communist years, through their programs and scholarships to ensure that Poland is an integral part of Western culture.

There are now new generations of Poles who are in their 20s, 30s and 40s. They are often successful entrepreneurs who work hard to maintain the positive relations between the US and Poland – two Western countries. I believe that, among Polish Americans and most Americans who understand Europe, the old, Cold War division between Western and Eastern Europe no longer exists. When I speak with them, I realize that they think of Poland as a part of the same (business) culture and the same civilization that is fundamentally western, and they often make serious business investments in Poland because they know that Poland is a normal, prosperous, civilized, western country. However, some of their parents and grandparents who left Poland in the 60s, 70s or 80s and never returned continue to view Poland through the same lens – as a backward, underdeveloped country – and had many traumatic experiences that make them reluctant to come back and visit. When they finally arrive in Warsaw, Krakow or their birthplaces, which are very often small towns and villages, they cannot believe to what extent the country has changed in the last 30 years. Their fears and trauma are understandable. For me, it is rather difficult to understand why many our fellow EU citizens from France, the Netherlands or Germany think of Poland as a backward, Eastern European country and who are not inclined to visit.

H. M.: The West is associated with concepts such as rationality, the tension between the secular and the religious, and the technological. Could you please reflect on each of these concepts individually through both a scholar’s lens and an ambassador’s lens? A follow-up question: is the West neutral?

P. W.: The tension between the secular and the religious, including the issue of rationality, has interested me both as a scholar and as an ambassador. In my early academic research on Socinianism, I was very much fascinated by the radical concepts of Christianity developed in the works of the Socinians and the way in which they influenced the Western European philosophy of the Enlightenment. The tension between "ratio" and "religio" and very radical (sometimes naïve) attempts to overcome it (as in the Religio rationalis by Andrzej Wiszowaty) also led to discussions about the tensions between the secular and the religious. We can see how the West, but especially Europe, developed in the direction initiated by Enlightenment philosophy and the French Revolution. There were also many examples of religious revivals (both Catholic and Protestant), especially in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries initiated in opposition to late 18^th century breakthrough ideas.

I found it very significant that in her inauguration speech at the European Parliament, the new President of the European Commission mentioned Greek philosophy and Roman law as "the cradle of our European civilization," but she did not mention Christianity.

The European mainstream worldview is secular and is sometimes challenged by conservative and faith-based initiatives which do not have, however, enough power to change the course of events. In this respect, America is very different. With an administration strongly supported by Evangelical circles and with a very religious Vice President; with initiatives for religious freedom and for the defense of Christians around the world; and with heated debates between conservative Christians and liberals, the United States is a fascinating laboratory for someone who wants to study the relationship between religion and politics – from Thomas Jefferson to Mike Pence. The best and most generously funded Museum of the Bible is located in Washington, DC, and TV evangelists are still watched on American TV and in American stadiums. Tension between secularism and religion has a very different dynamic here than in Europe and the Puritan tradition is still alive in various forms. When I think about my future research, I believe it will be about the relationship between religion and politics – a continuation of my research on the Reformation and Counter-Reformation in 16^th and 17^th century Europe. Paradoxically, these two areas of studies are not as different as one may think.

I do not know exactly what the word "neutral" could mean in this context, but I think that the West is not neutral. The debate about values and principles, including the role of religion in society, is very heated.

H. M.: You are an expert on the Reformation in Poland and throughout Europe. One could say that the Renaissance and the Reformation are the beginnings of the West. Do you have any thoughts on that moment as a beginning of the West and how Poland actively participated? Do you look at that historiography in your work as ambassador and consider things Western from that point of view?

P. W.: Obviously, you can think of the Renaissance and the Reformation as the beginnings of the West. However, the 966 Baptism of Poland as the beginning of Christianization is perceived in the Polish tradition as the real start of our "membership" in the West as a civilizational and religious entity. Many times in the past, Polish religious and political leaders emphasized Poland’s affiliation with the Western, Latin Christianity and, by extension, Western civilization. However, from the 14^th to the 18^th century, the Kingdom of Poland existed in a union with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and from the end of the 16^th century it practically functioned as one state. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was a kingdom with one sovereign, parliament and army. It comprised the larger parts of present-day Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Belarus and Ukraine. Thus, with the exception of Muscovy, it was the largest country in Europe at that time. The Commonwealth was a multinational, multireligious and multicultural country comprised less than 40 percent of Roman Catholics, the remainder of which was divided between the Eastern Orthodox, Jewish, Lutheran, Calvinist and even Muslim minorities (WILCZEK: 1999). For that reason, the tradition of Poland in the period when it was a major power uniting the East and the West was of course – also in the religious sense – both eastern and western. And obviously, this golden age of the Commonwealth in the 16^th and 17^th century coincided with the Renaissance and Reformation. I wrote a lot about these issues in my book, "Polonia Reformata," published in Germany in 2016, where I also referred to the concept of Poland as a heart of Europe (developed in the famous book by Norman Davies).

In his book published eight years ago, The Ghostly Body of the King. Peripheral Struggles with Contemporary Form, the Polish sociologist Jan Sowa discusses the idea of the old Polish Commonwealth as a periphery of Europe. This is a book about a peripheral, disintegrating and anachronistic country, deprived of a real king; after the death of the last king from the Jagiellonian dynasty in 1572, all subsequent kings were elected by the nobility, so they were not "real" kings. The real rulers of the country were rich magnates – landowners with their vast landed estates, which had been acquired thanks to the colonial expansion of Poland to the east. The country, which was finally composed in 1569 of two previously separate states – the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania – is perceived in Sowa’s book as a weak, peripheral, feudal, anachronistic state, but at the same time as a colonial power whose expansion to the east caused weakness in the central government and the power’s own unavoidable collapse at the end of the 18th century when it was partitioned by its three neighboring countries (SOWA: 2011).

This approach is heavily influenced both by the skepticism of 19th-century Polish historians from Cracow and by the works of Polish historians of the 1950s and 60s who were inspired by Marxism and the French Annales school of historical research. For this reason, the historical analyses presented in this controversial book are not new. The author very skillfully combines findings and conclusions of prominent Marxist historians with cultural and psychoanalytical theories of trendy, contemporary French and British thinkers. The whole concept of the old Polish Commonwealth as a periphery is of course not new and is likely to be appreciated by readers today as more reliable than the concept of Poland as the heart of Europe or a part of Western Europe.

It is merely a coincidence that Niall Ferguson’s famous book, Civilization: the West and the Rest, was published in the same year. The book, authored by a renowned Harvard and Oxford historian, examines what the author calls the most interesting question of our day: "Why, beginning around 1500, did a few small polities on the western end of the Eurasian landmass come to dominate the rest of the world?" He attributes this divergence to the West’s development of six "killer apps" largely missing elsewhere in the world. According to him, Western Europe’s domination over the rest of the world was based on "competition, science, the rule of law, medicine, consumerism and the work ethic" (FERGUSON: 2011).

And the Western European work ethic – as we have known very well since the publication of Max Weber’s book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism – is based on Protestantism. In this context, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was a peripheral country, in no sense being the center or the heart of Europe, as Europe was understood to be Western Europe. Although Poland was the largest country in Europe – geographically understood – and is also accused of having been a colonial power, the real powers and colonial powers perceived as central to Europe were England, France, Spain and the Holy Roman Empire. It is not accidental that none of the European territories beyond the borders of the ancient Roman Empire were included in the dominant discourse of Europe. The territory between the West and the East, between the eastern borders of the Holy Roman Empire and the western borders of today’s Russia, was radically called by Sowa a "no man’s land". In this way, Sowa recalled the old concept of Eastern Europe. The story of how the continent of Europe came to be conceived of as divided into Western Europe and Eastern Europe is presented by Larry Wolff in his fascinating book entitled Inventing Eastern Europe. The Map of Civilisation on the Mind of the Enlightenment:

Almost all of the commentators on Eastern Europe, whether they ever set foot on its soil, looked upon it as half-barbarian and half-civilised and wrote about it in a condescending manner that has affected Western perceptions ever since (WOLFF: 1994).

Whatever we may think about the validity of the old concept of Eastern Europe and the new attempts to justify its existence, as well as about the division between the East and the West or the "West and the Rest," it would be difficult to replace the cultural, economic and political concept of Poland as a periphery with a geographical, Romantic or nationalistic concept of it as the heart or midpoint of Europe – not to mention the idea of Poland as a part of Western Europe. As you can see, the position of Poland as a part of the West in the age of the Renaissance and Reformation has been questioned. But, in my opinion, Poland and the whole Commonwealth was seriously "westernized" at that time, at least politically and culturally (cf. WILCZEK: 2016).

H. M.: What have you read recently (big or small, a line of poetry or a book) that gave you a new perspective on some notion of the West?

P. W.: I would again refer to President Macron’s interview. This is one of the most important, recently published texts on the West. I think that every American and European politician, expert and academic should read it. Even when we completely disagree with some of the author’s statements, the diagnosis he presented is one of the most thought-provoking recent statements on the condition of the West – that includes both Europe and America. However, we should not forget that the concept of Western civilization (whether more conservative, like in Trump’s aforementioned speech in Warsaw or more liberal) is still present in the thinking of public intellectuals both in Europe and America, and is also fundamental for the contemporary idea of Europe and America, even if we have to rethink the postwar idea of transatlantic relations. In light of current challenges, the vision of the transatlantic relationship established in the 1950s or 1960s is no longer valid in confrontation with Chinese ambitions, Islamic terrorism or the refugee crisis. But I strongly believe that the idea of the West still exists in the hearts and minds of both Europeans and Americans. Often times, they just don’t speak about the West. I hope that this notion of the West will never be considered politically incorrect or anachronistic, although in today’s global environment it is impossible to speak about "the West and the rest". The globalized world is much more complicated. The West no longer plays a dominant role and we should rethink its role and its future.