This book discusses historical continuities and discontinuities between the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, interwar Poland, the Polish People´s Republic, and contemporary Poland. The year 1989 is seen as a clear point-break that allowed the Poles and their country to regain a natural historical continuity´ with the Second Republic,´ as interwar Poland is commonly referred to in the current Polish national master narrative. In this pattern of thinking about the past, Poland-Lithuania (nowadays roughly coterminous with Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Russia´s Kaliningrad Region and Ukraine) is seen as the First Republic.´ However, in spite of this politics of memory´ ( Geschichtspolitik ) - regarding its borders, institutions, law, language, or ethnic and social makeup - present-day Poland, in reality, is the direct successor to and the continuation of communist Poland. Ironically, today´s Poland is very different, in all the aforementioned aspects, from the First and Second Republics. Hence, contemporary Poland is quite un -Polish, indeed, from the perspective of Polishness defined as a historical (that is, legal, social, cultural, ethnic and political) continuity of Poland-Lithuania and interwar Poland.
