The two faces of Polish society

„Earlier this month, thousands of people took part in a midnight rally outside the presidential palace in Poland's capital, Warsaw, demanding the removal of a wooden cross honouring the victims of last April's plane crash, which killed the Polish president Lech Kaczyński. The »cross war« highlights a deep division in Polish society. On one level it has turned into a political battle between the liberal pro-market Civic Platform, and its main rival, the conservative pro-church Law and Justice party, led by Jarosław Kaczyński. The latter ran in the presidential election hoping to replace his twin brother, but lost to Civic Platform's Bronisław Komorowski. The issue has also become a focal point of tensions over the role of religion in society, as young secularist Poles who organised the latest demonstration using Facebook came face to face with elderly Catholic »cross defenders«.

But the intergenerational divide is not confined to Poland. In Britain, too, the same rigid boundary divides Polish »political« (post-WWII) and "economic« (mostly post-EU accession) migrants. Sociologist Michał Garapich begins one of his papers with a quote from an active member of the London Citizens organisation who, when asked by a Polish TV correspondent about her relationship with the older Polonia (Polish diaspora) organisations based in the UK said: »I am a Pole living in London, but I don't identify with Polonia.«

Marek Kazmierski, the editor of an independent London print-house Off_press, who emigrated with his family from communist Poland at the age of 12, wrote in an article: »I've spent the last year working with Polish people in the UK on various integration and cultural projects. Time and time again, I've been astounded by the amount of grief we seem capable of inflicting on one another. Fights in the press. Within community groups. Between cultural centres. Not in Poland. Here, in this land of plenty.« The main cause of the division seems to be the motivation for migration.”