The Ottoman Yolk/ Europe View #138

Judging from the comments on the Economist website, some people have failed to see the joke in this article. It is NOT meant to be an attack on east European cuisine.


Europe.view

Ottoman Yolk
Jun 25th 2009
From Economist.com


What would a politicised east European menu look like?
“What’s “Cutlet Carpathian Style?”, your columnist asked innocently in a restaurant in Budapest recently. “You’re halfway through eating it when the Ukrainians take it away and say the rest belongs to them,” came an instant quip in return. The rest of the world may have forgotten, but Hungarians still remember the time when a large chunk of what is now Ukraine (and a lot more besides) was part of their old imperial kingdom.

The encoding of menus is a fascinating byway in gastro-linguistics. Any mention of “Hawaiian” means that chunks of pineapple have been added to the dish. Similarly, “Provençale” signals tomatoes and black olives. “Napolitano” means with basil and mozzarella; “Niçoise” is anchovies and eggs, “Veneziana” means onions. More generally, “traditional” usually means indigestible or overcooked. “Organic” means it costs more.

Alamy

A sprinkle of hope and a dollop of sadness

But rarely if ever do the menu terms have any political meaning. London’s best restaurant for real English cooking, Wilton’s, serves a dessert called “Guards’ Pudding”, invented in the trenches of the first world war (ingredients include breadcrumbs and raspberry jam). The officers who survived the wartime mincing machine apparently longed for the dish in peacetime London. The French “Macedoine” salad could be the big exception: it is a mixed fruit salad that some say was named after the ethnic confusion in Macedonia 100 years ago. But serious scholars have not endorsed that theory.

So it is tempting to try to create a menu with east European historical overtones. The starter might be Ottoman salad. That would be lazily prepared and slovenly served, and crowned with the yellow part of a boiled egg (the Ottoman yolk). Its unlikely ingredients range from sharp Balkan paprikas to gelatinous Levantine sweetmeats. It would stay on the table for ages, and some guests would end up picking bits out in order to create their own dishes (Bulgarian crudités, perhaps). Random offenders would be hauled off to the kitchen to spend a lifetime washing dishes, Janissary style.

The Hapsburger Auflauf (stew: but Hungarians would call it a goulash) would be equally varied but rather more successful, with Czech dumplings nestling quite snugly next to wisps of sauerkraut and paprika.

Romanov rissoles would be raw (and bleeding), prepared with extraordinary incompetence and bashed about by a madman. But they would be delicious compared with “Steak a la Soviet” (often known colloquially as Lenin’s Revenge): this would be a revolting mixture of gristle and animal fodder, enough to keep you alive but wishing that you were dead.

Diners would hastily turn to the more appetising part of the menu. Prague Spring Rolls would be a temptingly modern variation on traditional Czech cuisine, half-baked yet cooked with delightful enthusiasm by a kitchen crew of idealistic youngsters and hard-bitten types who have embraced nouvelle cuisine. Sadly, a jackbooted waiter stamps them to smithereens before you have begun to enjoy them. You then spend the next 20 years cleaning the restaurant windows.

Diners are told that Baltic Surprise is off the menu forever on seemingly dubious health grounds. Old people insist that it used to be delicious, involving herring and fresh herbs, eaten at midsummer with a lot of beer and dancing. Even trying to order it brings the threat that you will be locked in the cellar for life. But diners who persist will find it served with a flourish, having been cooked secretly in the kitchen from a recipe bravely preserved in the attic. Conversely, Kasha Putina (Putin’s porridge) is not on the menu either, though something is clearly cooking. Russians maintain that they love it, but the neighbours find the smell a bit overpowering.

Foreign Policy magazine (2)

Welcome to Baltland
In Russian, the Baltic states are called pribaltika—literally, the "Baltic shore." That infuriates Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians, as do most other attempts to lump them together. Estonians are the prickliest: Toomas Hendrik Ilves, now president, angered his southern neighbors by saying that Estonia should be more fairly counted as a Nordic country, not a Baltic one. That was tactless. But in truth, the differences are legion and the similarities—barring one chunk of tragic 20th-century history—scant.

In Estonia and Latvia, national consciousness began only in the 19th century with the emancipation of serfs, the growth of literacy, and the stirring of resentment against German barons and tsarist rule. Not so in Lithuania. Its identity is shaped by a folk memory of superpower status. The Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the last pagan state in Europe until 1387, once stretched to the shores of the Black Sea. It was larger than the Holy Roman Empire and had six official languages. Now the size of West Virginia with only 3.7 million people, Lithuania has shrunk. But its sense of grand identity remains. In any intra-Baltic discussion, Lithuania tends to lead with a grandiose self-centered plan, often with a blithe disregard for practicalities. In March 1990, for example, Lithuania mounted a frontal attack on the Soviet Union and declared independence; Estonia and Latvia, by contrast, initially held back and only declared "sovereignty."

The three countries also have different foreign phobias. Anti-Semitism has plagued Latvia and Lithuania, but not Estonia. Russia and Russification worry Estonia and Latvia more than Lithuania, which is instead twitchier about Poland. It has clashed with Poland repeatedly over the city of Vilnius (Polish-occupied in the interwar years) and in recent years over whether their respective minority populations can spell their names in official documents with letters such as ? (which exists in Polish but not the Lithuanian alphabet) or "?" (a Lithuanian letter nonexistent in Polish).

The three states have struggled, literally and figuratively, to find a common language. Older people speak Russian, usually badly in Estonia and rather well in Lithuania. Younger people speak English, often quite proficiently in Estonia and somewhat more rarely in Latvia and Lithuania. Almost no Baltic country studies or speaks the languages of the others. A Lithuanian diplomat once told me, "It is easier for us to find a Chinese speaker than an Estonian speaker."

Life under Soviet rule was different, too. Some Lithuanians were able to watch Polish television—a huge excitement during the 1980-81 Solidarity era, and always more informative than Soviet propaganda. Similarly, from the early 1960s on, Estonians in the north of the country were able to receive Finnish television, which broadcast subtitled foreign films and documentaries: a vital window into the real world. Finns also flooded into Tallinn on cheap, visa-free booze cruises. Estonians referred to them derisively as "moose" (because, as an Estonian woman once told me, they are "large and noisy, with clumsy mating habits").

The differences between the Balts are arcane and sometimes amusing. But they matter. Estonia's Nordic-style thrift, openness, and careful planning have proved almost ideal for the post-communist years. It was the wealthiest of the three before the occupation, and it is still the leader. But its smugness-the big weak point-has now let it down badly. Latvia's more diffuse identity has perhaps meant weaker bonds between state and society, which has allowed corruption to flourish and prevented a speedy response to the crisis. Lithuania's headstrong "we do it differently" approach has repeatedly cost it time and friends, but the lag spared the country the spending frenzy that has cost the other two so dearly.

Relations will never be as close as, say, between Estonia and Finland. But sibling rivalry has its virtues. It encourages innovation-what one country invents, the others can copy. And each country is determined to be the first to emerge from the crisis.

MAP BY KATHERINE YESTER

Edward Lucas is a senior writer at The Economist and author of The New Cold War: Putin's Russia and the Threat to the West.

Europe view 137

Europe.view

Summertime blues

Jun 18th 2009
From Economist.com

Will warm weather stiffen European spines?

WHEN the people who run the Western world go on holiday, bad things happen in eastern Europe. Last August Russia invaded Georgia. Over Christmas its gas spat with Ukraine left millions of European consumers shivering (from nerves, if not real cold). Easter (on the western Christian calendar) brought violent protests against ballot-rigging in Moldova.

What upsets this summer may bring can only be guessed at. A new war in Georgia is always possible. Crimea remains a combustible mixture of incompatible military and ethnic interests. The Kremlin’s relations with the once-docile regime in Belarus are uncommonly icy. Your columnist will be keeping his BlackBerry fully charged and close by the poolside.

Shutterstock

The Russia monitor

Whatever the summer crisis may be, it seems pretty clear that it will meet a crisper response from America than from the European Union. One example of that came this week when Barack Obama (presumably fairly busy with Iran, North Korea, health-care reform and other trifles) found time for an unscheduled meeting with Toomas Hendrik Ilves, the president of Estonia. That is partly a reward for the Estonians’ largely unsung service in Afghanistan (its soldiers get maimed and killed while most NATO warriors either stay away or shirk conflict). It also reflects the personal profile of the waspish and brainy Mr Ilves, America’s favourite east European politician. But it was also a coded message to Moscow: the “reset button” may be a useful gimmick to get talks going on issues such as nuclear weapons. But it does not represent any wavering in American support for the frontline states on NATO’s eastern border.

America’s attention to detail contrasts with the rather feeble efforts that the European Union has been making in the region. An insightful new paper by the European Council on Foreign Relations (EFCR), a think-tank, shows how the EU is complacently frittering away its advantages and losing out to Russia in the countries of the new “Eastern Partnership”—Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine.

On paper, the EU’s position should be invincible. It trades more with five of the six countries (Belarus is the exception) than Russia does. That is a big shift from the days when the Kremlin dominated the ex-Soviet economic space. The EU’s freedom and prosperity give it a lot of soft power too: even a distant prospect of membership counts for a lot more than the tangled embrace of Kremlin-run projects such as the still abortive Eurasian Economic Community or the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO). Belarus has flounced away from an important CSTO summit meeting amid a bitter row about new Russian barriers to its food exports.

Yet the Eastern Partnership is faring poorly. Launched by the crippled Czech presidency at the Prague summit last May, the new programme is struggling to make an impact. From the big EU countries, only Angela Merkel bothered to show up at its birth. And Germany was among the countries that insisted that the most vital ingredient in the package—liberalisation of visas—was diluted almost to the point of meaninglessness.

The paper’s authors argue that while the EU fiddles on the sidelines, the six countries remain badly run, stricken by economic downturns, and under constant pressure from Russia. To take just one example, Russian media, particularly television, is hugely popular, and strongly pushes the Kremlin world view. European media, by contrast, make a negligible impact. When crises erupt, the EU’s response is belated and feeble. The ECFR wants the EU to appoint high-level envoys with real clout to spend serious time and energy dealing with the region. When they are not on their holidays, that is.

CEE Euro-election results

Scary elections in eastern Europe

Time to start fretting
Jun 11th 2009
From The Economist print edition


Boring centre-right parties did well—but so did quite a few nasties
INTEPRETERS in the European Parliament trying to translate the remarks of George “Gigi” Becali may struggle. Even in his native Romanian, his puzzling syntax and coarse slang make him a butt of satirists. The interpreters may also blench at what he says, especially about Jews, gays, Roma (Gypsies) and women. But they may be spared this for the time being because a court has banned the newly elected Mr Becali from leaving Romania pending a criminal trial for kidnapping.


Xenophobes and populists have been elected in old European Union members such as the Netherlands too. But their east European counterparts make the westerners seem tame. Mr Becali’s fellow victor on the Greater Romania list is Corneliu Vadim Tudor, a vituperative nationalist who was once court poet to Nicolae Ceausescu, the former Communist dictator.

Yet international co-operation among politicians who hate foreigners is inherently tricky. Hungary’s far-right Jobbik party, which won three seats, may join its Balkan counterparts (including two members of Bulgaria’s explicitly racist Ataka party) in Roma-bashing. But they will have little in common when it comes to minority rights for Hungarians in neighbouring countries such as Slovakia and Romania, where Magyar irredentism is a convenient bogeyman for local chauvinists.

There were shocks at the far-left end of the spectrum too. One winner in Latvia was Alfreds Rubiks, a hardline former Communist who was jailed for backing a Kremlin-inspired coup against Latvian independence in 1991. Most Latvians see him as a pariah. His victory highlights the ominous rise of Soviet nostalgia among the country’s increasingly alienated Russians. In Estonia, by contrast, ethnic Russian parties flopped. The soft-left Centre Party got their votes, and more besides. The most striking Estonian result was the election of Indrek Tarand, a popular ex-diplomat who ran as an independent to protest against rules stopping voters from choosing among candidates on party lists.

As in western Europe, the main stories in the east were thumping wins by centre-right parties. Poland’s ruling Civic Platform did strikingly well, with 25 seats to 15 for the main opposition, the more populist Law and Justice party. In the Czech Republic the centre-right Civic Democrats won nine of the 22 seats, against seven for the Social Democrats and four for the Communists. In Hungary the ruling Socialists (ex-communists) did very badly, with only four seats to 14 for the conservative Fidesz party. That augurs well for the right in next year’s general election.

The exception was Slovakia, where the ruling centre-left Smer (Direction) party led by the prime minister, Robert Fico, did well on a paltry 19.6 % turnout, the lowest in the EU. His party won five out of 13 seats, with the fragmented conservative opposition polling poorly, as did two nationalist fringe parties in the coalition government. Both had featured in a string of recent corruption scandals.

The real significance of the elections may lie less in the composition of the new European Parliament than in pointers to the future course of national politics. Mr Fico, for example, will need to find new allies after next year’s general election if his present coalition partners continue to flop. Poland’s Civic Platform is on track to win the presidency next year.

Scandal-strewn Bulgaria is holding a parliamentary election on July 5th. If the European contest is any guide, the vote should be lively but nasty. Mafia-linked parties did alarmingly well in the European poll, though they did not win any seats. Vote-buying was common, as were other lurches towards rule-bending and ballot-rigging. In what looks like a blatant attempt to penalise minor parties, the authorities tried (but failed) to raise the election threshold to 8%, the highest in Europe. Legal chicanery meant that an opposition coalition had great difficulty even registering. Sadly, EU officials monitoring Bulgaria’s shaky progress towards clean government will have plenty to put in their next report. It is bad enough when dodgy characters win votes, but even worse when they count them.

Latvia

Latvia's economic woes

Lat in the lurch

Jun 11th 2009 | RIGA
From The Economist print edition

Vultures are circling over Latvia

LIKE many small countries, Latvia has struggled to attract outsiders’ attention. Now it is famous, and hating it. The economic contraction—GDP down nearly a fifth, imports and exports down by more than 40%—is on a scale rarely seen in peacetime. Life support for the economy is being given by outsiders. Foreign banks are nervous (see article). Much depends on parliament accepting more big budget cuts: nearly $1 billion this year and the same next year. The package includes ditching the flat tax on incomes. The government agreed to this new budget, belatedly, on June 8th.

That should unlock the next $1.67 billion tranche of aid from the European Union and the IMF, part of a $10.6 billion deal from late last year. But is it throwing good money after bad? Some bits of good news suggest that the economic collapse may have halted. Latvia’s flexible economy means it may manage painful reforms that amount to an “internal devaluation”. That could regain lost competitiveness and restore growth.

Others think that Latvia must sacrifice the peg to the euro that has been the centrepiece of economic policy. The Bank of Latvia has spent over a tenth of its reserves in the past fortnight propping up the lat. Interest rates have spiked, and a government debt auction failed last week. Sweden’s central bank is borrowing €3 billion ($4.2 billion) from the European Central Bank, in case it needs to shore up Swedish banks that lent in Latvia. Past crises in Latin America and East Asia echo ominously. Bengt Dennis, a Swedish adviser to Latvia’s government, says devaluation is inevitable.

But the lat’s guardian, the Bank of Latvia’s governor, Ilmars Rimsevics, is unshaken, pointing to the “beauty” of the currency-peg system. All lats in circulation are backed by euros. If people want to switch, they can, but as interest rates rise, holding lats becomes more attractive, he argues. The central bank’s independence from government is legally impregnable.

Joaquín Almunia, the EU’s monetary affairs commissioner, backed the peg this week. But political weakness still overshadows Latvia’s chances. The steely (critics say arrogant) Mr Rimsevics is barely on speaking terms with the prime minister. Latvia’s real deficit is not in the public finances but in the state’s credibility, squandered in the past by spendthrift and sleazy politicians.

europe view 136 on history (again)

Europe.view

Let us have no lies
Jun 11th 2009
From Economist.com


Using the law to salve a guilty national conscience
YOU automatically lose an argument if you call the other person a Nazi, states an adage coined by Mike Godwin, a writer about the internet, in 1990. With that in mind, it is wise to proceed with caution when discussing analogies between the Holocaust and anything else. Yet as Russia’s draft law on criminalising challenges to the Stalinist version of history comes closer to reality, it is worth looking at the successes and failures of other attempts to make certain views of history illegal.

Germany, Austria and more than a dozen other European countries have laws that more or less ban “denial” of the Holocaust. Sometimes these are part of general prohibitions of Nazi activity. Sometimes they are more generally framed as anti-hatred laws.

How far that is justifiable in theory is debatable. Every country curbs free speech to some extent (look at American companies’ use of corporate libel laws, for example). Whether one particular set of sensitivities deserves more protection than another is a matter for public debate: if voters mind enough one way or another, the politicians will pass or repeal the laws concerned.

From that point of view, it is hard to quibble with Russia’s desire to protect and sanctify the memory of its millions of soldiers who fell in the fight against Nazism. As the western wartime allies wallow in nostalgia, it is worth remembering that more than ten times as many “Soviet” (admittedly a loose term) soldiers died in combat than British and American troops combined.

But it is also worth noting that Holocaust-denial laws have done little to restrict the pernicious myths peddled by those who think the Jews were the victors, not the victims, in the second world war. In fact, a bit of legal persecution is just what those advocating fringe history most want. They can argue that the authorities are trying to suppress the “truth” because they have no other answer to it. What is in reality little more than a bunch of quibbles, anomalies, loose ends and historical puzzles becomes a grand scheme of events, and thus more potent in attracting the gullible or prejudiced.

The best antidote to Holocaust denial is truth, such as the excellent nizkor.org, which provides a painstaking refutation of the mythmongers’ cases, backed up with meticulous documentation. (An enterprising group of researchers ought to provide a similar dossier to rebut the equally absurd claims of the 9/11 conspiracy theorists).

Of course, questioning the Stalinist version of history is not directly comparable to Holocaust denial. If anything, the label should be on the other side. When a Russian defence-ministry website can argue straightfacedly that it was Poland that started the second world war, it is hard to accept that the authorities in Moscow are really interested in nailing falsehoods, rather than—as they seem to be—promoting them.

But Poland has not responded by banning the import of modern Russian textbooks, or passing a law making the denial of the Katyn massacre (which Stalin ordered and then blamed on the Nazis) into a criminal offence.

Banning a particular version of history is usually a sign of a guilty conscience. In the case of continental Europe, it is to make amends for collaboration and perpetration during the darkest years of the last century. In Russia’s case, what should be a source of proud sorrow—the heroism of those who fought and defeated Hitler—is being used to cover up Stalin’s behaviour: both his bungling of the Soviet defences against Hitler’s attack, and before that conspiring with the Nazis to carve up the Baltics, Balkans and central Europe.

Europe view 134, history

EUROPE

Europe.view

Magistra vitae?
May 28th 2009
From Economist.com


The fine line between disagreement and propaganda
FORGET gas, nukes or Iran. The deep divide between Russia and its western neighbours is about history. President Dmitry Medvedev has set up a commission to look at “falsifications of history that damage Russia’s interests” (he should use a comma: this phrasing implies that other falsifications promote Russia’s interests). A draft law in the Duma would criminalise equating Stalin and Hitler, or denying that the Red Army “liberated” eastern Europe from fascism. Whether out of cynicism or nostalgia, Russia’s rulers have resurrected the Soviet view of history, itself a product of the Stalin era. For the countries of central and eastern Europe, this is not just obnoxious, but threatening.

It would of course be foolish to expect complete harmony between Russian and western views of history. British and French textbooks seem to describe utterly different events when the many wars between the two countries are concerned (as a schoolboy in Britain, your columnist could never quite work out why the hardy and heroic English won victory after victory—but ended up losing to the supposedly far inferior French).

AFP

History is in the telling


Moreover, no version of history is final and nothing should be taboo. Plenty of questions about the past century remain unanswered, not least about Britain’s role. How far did Neville Chamberlain’s shameful betrayal of Czechoslovakia in the Munich agreement prompt Stalin to intensify his friendship with Hitler? And how should blame for the catastrophe of the Warsaw Uprising be shared between the Polish military leadership on the ground, the government-in-exile in London, the British and American authorities, and the Soviet Union?

Similarly, different forms of collaboration during the war deserve more study. Should, for example, the émigré Cossack leaders such as Pyotr Krasnov who fought on Hitler’s side be counted in the same category as the Russian Liberation Army of General Andrei Vlasov, formed by captured Soviet soldiers? Tens of thousands of Russians fought alongside the Nazis, with mixed motives: deluded, desperate and despicable. How might they be compared with the Estonians and Latvians who fought the Soviet advance in 1944? It is easy to paint the past in simple brushstrokes of evil black and brilliant white. But adding carefully chosen shades of grey creates a more informative picture.

Sadly, Russia is not looking for such nuances. Indeed, it is demanding that other countries abandon complexity and fit their history into the Soviet straitjacket. This may resonate inside Russia but it rings the wrong bells abroad, particularly as grim anniversaries approach: the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the Soviet attack on Poland, the annexation of the Baltic states and Western Ukraine, and the massacre of captured Polish officers at Katyn.

Soviet authorities found it hard enough to explain Stalin-era crimes convincingly, even with complete control over the media and the secret documents safely locked away in a Kremlin safe. It will be still harder for Russia to try to revive the same arguments now. Indeed, the more Russian propagandists insist, the more loudly other countries will shout their version. They may sound a bit hysterical to a western audience that finds history rather boring. But Russia will sound worse: bullying and mendacious.

Vladimir Putin’s remarks in Budapest on the anniversary of the 1956 Soviet invasion were a model of how to sound tactful and contrite without exactly apologising. That could have worked elsewhere. Poland has been trying softly-softly tactics on Katyn, hoping that it would make it easier for Russia to back down on issues such as opening the files. But the response was “What do we get in return?” Such an approach might be justified in trade negotiations. Applied to an unsolved case of mass murder, it sounds wrong.

History, again

Europe.view

Mentioning the war

Jun 4th 2009
From Economist.com

Misaligned histories in Britain and eastern Europe

BRITAIN is gripped by a feeling of historical injustice. The 65th anniversary of the D-Day landings has been hijacked by the ungrateful French and self-obsessed Americans. President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to grandstand with Barack Obama. Neither country wants to admit the role of British (and Canadian) forces in the victory in Normandy. The Queen (the only living head of state actually to have worn a uniform in the war) was not even properly invited.

Yet this is how the Poles usually feel when the war is discussed. And not only them. One of the most tiresome statements in the British mythography of the war goes along the lines of “Our island fortress fought alone—all of Europe was either conquered by Hitler, or stayed neutral.”

AP

They didn't surrender either

It is hard to find even the narrowest sense in which that is true. Britain never surrendered, but neither did many other countries; their governments-in-exile shared the delights of the Blitz with us in London. Few if any countries counted as truly “conquered”. The Nazis met systematic armed resistance in France, Norway, the Netherlands, Denmark, Greece, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia and other countries as well. By contrast, the Channel Islands, which were under German occupation during the war, were not exactly a hotbed of anti-Nazi resistance.

The most fatuous expression of this fatuous Britain-centred view of the war came when the xenophobic British National Party used a picture of a Spitfire in a poster. The party’s strategists presumably thought this epitomised British national pride. Unfortunately they failed to check the markings on the plane depicted. It actually flew in the RAF as part of the Polish 303 ("Kościuszko") squadron.

In short, if the British want their wartime history to be treated fairly by other countries, they need to make sure that they themselves present a balanced perspective. Admittedly, that process is in part underway. Your columnist’s bookshelves groan with two giant tomes examining Anglo-Polish wartime cooperation. The historians were given unprecedented access to the files of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (commonly known as MI6). They didn’t find much (spies tend to regard record-keeping as a menace, not a duty).

Some of the most interesting documents turned out to have survived, neglected and untouched, in cardboard boxes in the attic of the Sikorski Museum in London. It is nearly 20 years since the British Foreign Office finally acknowledged that the Katyn massacre was the work of the NKVD, not the Gestapo (disclosure: this newspaper covered the disclosure of Katyn abominably, demanding that the Polish government-in-exile sack those responsible for slandering the Soviet Union—see article).

Against that background, how should Britain deal with another looming snub: the planned Polish commemoration of the start of the war in Gdansk on September 1st? It is entirely reasonable for the Poles to highlight the unprovoked Nazi attack. It is touching that Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, is planning to attend to highlight Polish-German reconciliation (that has two strands—the epic process launched by Willy Brandt in 1970, and the more recent rapprochement caused by the change of government in Warsaw).

It is outright remarkable that Vladimir Putin is apparently planning to attend (thus distracting attention from the equally disgusting Soviet attack on Poland on September 17th 1939). The message is “Poland was attacked, but we survived and now we are all friends”. But what about the British, who declared war on Nazi Germany September 3rd in response to the invasion? Senior British figures will not want to provide the unacknowledged backdrop for a German-Polish-Russian love-fest. Will anyone notice if they don’t show up?