Warsaw notes

I recommend a trip here.  Imagine a European country with (roughly) a four percent growth rate and the streets full of young people.  Dining out here is much better than it was in Milan, and cheaper too (eat in the serious Polish place on the left side of the food hall, Hala Kozyski, and get gelato afterwards).  What seems to be the city’s second best hotel is less than half the price it would be in Western Europe.  For better or worse, e-scooters and bike lanes are everywhere.  The city has a lively concert life, even in August.

There aren’t many traditional tourist sites.  Construction workers will look at you funny if you visit the remnants of the Warsaw Ghetto, and the memorial plaque isn’t exactly prominent.  The city’s much-heralded Jewish Museum is as much a critique of the Jews during medieval times as anything else.  I don’t consider those sites as focal for the Warsaw population as a whole, but the official side of life here has not exactly taken the German tack of ongoing apologies.  It is now against the law to suggest that Poles were complicit in the Holocaust (now only a fine, the threat of imprisonment was removed).

These days the 1953 Stalin building downtown looks quite beautiful.  Cross the river to see more of Warsaw’s residential districts, such as the Praga district, and stop by to see the architecture — both new and old — near the Neon Museum.

“Poland issued more first-time residence permits to non-EU citizens than any other EU nation in 2017, with 86% of them going to Ukrainians, in the latest available European migration statistics. Those Ukrainians accounted for 18.7% of all newcomers to the entire EU.”  (WSJ link here).

Poland is a country where nationalism doesn’t seem to be going away.  In fact, there seems to be a kind of intertemporal substitution into a new nationalism, a secure nationalism, finally safe from the bullying of larger neighbors.  Polish flags are everywhere.  So many Poles, even secular ones, view the Catholic Church as the central institution of Western civilization, and indeed they have a concept of Western civilization as having a central institution (though a minus for gay rights).

The country is not on the verge of becoming a “Western liberal’s dream,” at least not in terms of mood or rhetoric.  Yet actual life here is fairly liberal, and is more prosperous every day.  2019 has been the best year in Polish history, ever, and you feel it palpably.

Do not be surprised if more and more of Western Europe sees Polish nationalism as a model to be copied.

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