"Slavic View of History"

Europe’s Problem—and Ours by George Weigel from the latest issue of FIRST THINGS explores the fascinating and fundamentally Chrisstian understanding of history that focuses not on economics but on culture embraced by Soloviev, Solzhenitsyn, Pope John Paul II, Vaclev Havel, and others.

This "Slavic view of history" is exemplified by Poland, a country I am begining to admire more and more:

Poland is one embodiment of this way of thinking, which Poles believe has been vindicated empirically by their own modern history. In 1795, with the Third Polish Partition, the great powers of the region—Russia, Prussia, Austria-Hungary—completed the vivisection of a political community whose origins went back to the last years of the first millennium of Christian history; thus for one 123 years, from 1795 to 1918, the Polish state was erased from Europe. Yet during that century-and-a-quarter in which you could not find “Poland” on any map of Europe—a time in which the Russians and Prussians, in particular, made strenuous efforts to eradicate the idea of “Poland”—the Polish nation survived. Indeed, the Polish nation survived with such vigor that it could give birth to a new Polish state in 1918. And despite the fact that the Polish state was beset for fifty years by the plagues of Nazism and communism, the Polish nation proved strong enough to give a new birth to freedom in east-central Europe in the Revolution of 1989.

How did this happen? Poland survived—better, Poland prevailed—because of culture: a culture formed by a distinctive language (Slavic, yet written in a Latin alphabet and thus oriented to the West as well as the East); by a unique literature, which helped keep alive the memory and idea of “Poland”; and by the intensity of its Catholic faith. Poles know in their bones that culture is what drives history over the long haul.