Comment by qwytw

2 years ago

> But a half millennium ago it was the largest state in Europe by area. Since then, the country has been attacked and dismembered more than pretty much

To be fair the country become entirely dysfunctional (mainly due to internal reasons) long before it was dismembered. By the 1700s while technically retaining most of its territory it basically became just a "playground" for Russia, Swedish and German armies to fight each other in... and the country's elite had very little interest or desire to prevent that (or rather it was a very low priority for them and their weren't willing to sacrifice their economic and political status for it).

> Italy

I'm not sure Italy had many advantages in that regard. It was already dismembered to begin with and for several hundreds of years it was just a prize for major European powers to fight over (in many ways it was in even worse position than Poland). On the other hand even at its peak Poland was extremely economically and socially underdeveloped compared to most of Italy which seems like a much bigger reason.

> Germany > resources from colonies might have played a role in their industrialization.

I'm not sure that's true in this case. Yes Germans were doing a lot of "colonizing" in Eastern Europe but I'm not sure German states in Germany "proper" necessarily benefited that much from it. And to be fair historically Poland only has itself to "blame" for being outmatched by a minor state like Prussia which began as a Polish vassal but somehow managed to turn itself into a global(ish) superpower over a few centuries.

4 comments

qwytw

Reply
keiferski  2 years ago

I’m not super interested in arguing about the finer details. The point remains that Poland was colonized, destroyed, and occupied from roughly the late 19th century until the 1990s, and so anyone blaming the lack of development there on occupying forces is in a large sense correct. The fact that Poland today, unoccupied, is rapidly approaching the development level of leading EU countries further emphasizes the point.

  • qwytw  2 years ago

    > rapidly approaching the development level of leading EU countries further emphasizes the point.

    Well same applies to pretty much all of Central/Eastern Europe, and my point is that events prior to the 1900s didn't necessarily have a huge impact on the current situation (look at Finland). It's not like the Russian Empire in the 1800s was particularly more oppressive towards the overwhelming majority of the population or mismanaged the country to higher degree than the Polish nobility that preceded them (of course only in relative terms).

    Napoleon winning/not losing as bad might have changed significantly everything but Poland's problems in the 1600s and the 1700s were primarily caused by internal issues.

    Being independent alone is often not enough (e.g Portugal/Spain were left completely behind the rest of Western Europe economically and even socially until the mid to late 20th century).