The Ghosts of the Past
Modern-day Poland encompasses territory that was part of the pre-WWI German, Russian, and Austrian empires. And it seems that Poland’s recent election results partially track the separation between the formerly-German and the formerly-non-German parts of the country:
History’s impact can often be surprisingly long-lasting. It’s been a long time since taking midwestern agricultural products via train to Chicago and then by boat across the Great Lakes, across the Eerie Canal, down the Hudson, and to the port at New York was a major element in the American economy. But we still have two giant cities in Chicago and New York specifically because it used to be very important. I wouldn’t be surprised if the German-run bit of Poland was richer in 1918 than the rest of it, and that the differential has persisted since then. By the same token, we can expect the East Germany part of Germany to remain poorer than the West Germany part for a long time.
65 Responses to “The Ghosts of the Past”
Register
RSSLogin
Topic Cloud
ArchivesBlog RollAbout Matt YglesiasContact Me
Donate
January 16th, 2009 at 5:13 pm
In Nature’s Metropolis, William Cronon argues (successfully, IMHO), that the Great Lakes are not the reason why Chicago became the giant city it did in the nineteenth century. The railroads, and Chicago ties with commercial interests in New York and Boston, were much more important, IIRC. The Lakes were, after all, frozen for significant parts of the year, and commerce went out.
Fantastic book. Well worth reading.
January 16th, 2009 at 5:21 pm
One should also remember that the former Soviet Union took over a piece of Poland, compensating that country with the aforementioned piece of Germany (the former Soviet Union also took a piece of Germany that was formerly known as East Prussia).
January 16th, 2009 at 5:29 pm
Eerie Canal
That had to be on purpose.
January 16th, 2009 at 5:35 pm
Second Nature’s Metropolis, though I’d be surprised if Matt hasn’t already read it.
January 16th, 2009 at 5:38 pm
Chicago started becoming the transportation hub of North America in the 1600s when French fur trappers would paddle up the Chicago River from Lake Michigan, part of the vast St. Lawrence Watershed, carry their canoes about 1 mile across the very, very low continental divide in what’s now the Chicago suburb of Summit, IL, then float down the Mississippi Watershed to New Orleans. A canal replaced this portage in the 1830s even before railroads became a major deal.
January 16th, 2009 at 5:43 pm
New York City got big on account of the Erie Canal? Color me skeptical. (For example, I don’t even think it got a mention in Gangs of New York).
January 16th, 2009 at 5:45 pm
While there is certainly a correlation here, it is unclear which way the causation works. Both Silesia (the SW) and Pomorze (the NW) are heavily industrialized, and this is largely the reason why the voting went as it did. The other areas are much more rural and agricultural.
As for why this industrialization happened, this is largely a matter of natural resources. The NW has shipping, while Silesia is the heavy coal producer in Poland. It is possible that this heavy industrialization is why the Germans took that part of Poland, instead of the other way around.
January 16th, 2009 at 5:51 pm
Recently when moving from Chicago to San Jose CA, I got an object lesson in this, especially going through the Sierra Nevada. I-80 tracks the railroad which tracks the old indian trails which tracks the river all through there.
January 16th, 2009 at 5:56 pm
(the former Soviet Union also took a piece of Germany that was formerly known as East Prussia).
Yes, containing the city of Koenigsburg, now called Kaliningrad.
January 16th, 2009 at 5:59 pm
New York City got big on account of the Erie Canal? Color me skeptical.
I don’t think there’s anything remotely controversial about the notion that a water tie-in connecting New York Harbor with the continent’s interior (a couple of decades before railroads really began to take off) was a critical catalyst powering the growth of the country’s largest city.
While there is certainly a correlation here, it is unclear which way the causation works. Both Silesia (the SW) and Pomorze (the NW) are heavily industrialized, and this is largely the reason why the voting went as it did.
Yes, but surely one of the reasons these places industrialized is that they were ruled by Berlin and Vienna at at time when that meant being part of a more advanced industrial economy (access to capital, railroads, markets) than rule by the Czars.
January 16th, 2009 at 6:02 pm
That had to be on purpose.
At this point, it’s like authentication — that’s how we know MY really wrote it.
January 16th, 2009 at 6:14 pm
Chicago got big because it became a railroad hub. I doubt that there was ever any significant amount of commerce going
all the way from Chicago to New York via the Great Lakes and the Erie Canal. To go by water from Chicago (on the southwestern shore of Lake Michigan) to the beginning of the canal at Buffalo (at the northeasternmost point on Lake Erie), you’d have to go several hundred miles north to where Lake Michigan joins Lake Huron, more than a hundred miles south again to Lake Erie, and another hundred or more miles east on Lake Erie almost to Niagara Falls. In the process, you might have to portage on one or more occasions in the passage between Lake Huron and Lake Erie. The fact is that, by the end of the Civil War, if not as much as a decade or more earlier, the railroads had become the principal method of transporting materials from the midwest to the eastern ports (most notably, Baltimore).
January 16th, 2009 at 6:15 pm
It is possible that this heavy industrialization is why the Germans took that part of Poland, instead of the other way around.
The Germans did not take that part of Poland — rather, Poland took that part of Germany after WWII. Before the end of WWII, and for hundreds of years before (long, long before industrialization), the western part of present-day Poland had been German as part of the various incarnations of Eastern Pomerania, Neumark, Prussia and later unified Germany. What is now the Polish coastline, for example, had been German since the Middle Ages. Polish territory at the time was far to the east of what it currently is.
A good analogy is to the US. Texas, California and the Southwest are not American, but before the mid-19th century were Mexican.
January 16th, 2009 at 6:18 pm
New York was America’s largest city and it’s center of finance before the Erie Canal was built.
January 16th, 2009 at 6:19 pm
Texas, California and the Southwest are not American, but before the mid-19th century were Mexican.
Meant to say “Texas, California and the Southwest are now American, but before the mid-19th century were Mexican” — I blame Yglesian typo influence.
January 16th, 2009 at 6:20 pm
New York was America’s largest city and it’s center of finance before the Erie Canal was built.
Yes, but it became even bigger thanks to the Erie Canal. Had the Erie Canal gone to, say, Boston, NY would have lost some of that commercial traffic.
January 16th, 2009 at 6:23 pm
Stefan,
I think there are several indian tribes who will be happy to remind you that neither the US or Mexico had existed for even 100 years when they were fighting over that land…
January 16th, 2009 at 6:42 pm
But we still have two giant cities in Chicago and New York specifically because it used to be very important.
It could very well become important again. Moving stuff by train is cheaper than moving it by truck with a much lower carbon cost. And water FTW on both accounts. With all the hand wringing over the demise or at least semi-demise of the auto industry glosses over a certain truth, that Detroit is a fantastic place to manufacture things in an era of expensive gas for the same reason it was before gasoline came along.
January 16th, 2009 at 6:48 pm
In New York City and Chicago, you have some continuity in population: my family, for instance, has been in the city since 1916 for my dad’s side, and earlier for my mother’s. So it’s not too surprising that there are a lot of cultural traditions still around from that time.
In the formerly German parts of Poland, there isn’t much continuity, since the people who were living there before 1945 were ethnically cleansed after World War II. I think the election patterns are a coincidence, and I’d be willing to bet that very few pre-1945 cultural traditions are still extant in the area.
January 16th, 2009 at 7:19 pm
I know a few Polska. There’s a difference. Western Poles and those from Warsaw tend to look down on the Poles from Poland (really the old Russian parts). I don’t know where the Poles who replaced the Germans in Silesia etc came from (in Poland) but they definitely changed when they got there. The split between the parties is as you’d expect the PO (orange) is Western-oriented and the PES (blue) populist.
January 16th, 2009 at 7:20 pm
we can expect the East Germany part of Germany to remain poorer than the West Germany part for a long time.
That’s because the GDR was literally bankrupt when Germany reunified.
January 16th, 2009 at 7:32 pm
The old Russian empire used a narrow gauge railways, as opposed to wide-gauge European and American standard. Hence the eastern Poland’s railroad network, which was built to Russian standards, is strongly connected to former Soviet Union, while the western part is better connected to Europe. Nowadays, when it’s better to be connected to Europe, the former German part of Poland has an advantage.
This is all about the persistence of network formats.
January 16th, 2009 at 7:37 pm
As a proud Polish-American only a generation removed from leaving the home country, I prefer to see it as the old pre-WWI Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and Prussian/German Empires contained territory that was part of Poland. Before they decided to carve up our homeland between them.
No bitterness here!
January 16th, 2009 at 8:13 pm
Hm, there seems to be another Stefan out there….oh well, time to come up with a distinguishing and weird name for commenting…
January 16th, 2009 at 8:18 pm
It was part of Poland in the 1600s. Prussia took this part from them in the First Partition (1772). My mistake was saying Germany instead of Prussia, but it is essentially the same ethnic group.
Poland is not a 200 year old country like the US. Keeping track of the Polish map over the years will give you whiplash.
January 16th, 2009 at 8:31 pm
As some of the people above implied lots of Poles in the Western part, especially places like Wroclaw (formerly Breslau) actually came from what is now Western Ukraine. Germans were kicked out of western Poland and Poles were kicked out of western Ukraine.
January 16th, 2009 at 8:33 pm
Poland is not a 200 year old country like the US.
That’s right. It’s only 80 years old, if you want to be technically accurate.
Marty Busse is right about the lack of historical continuity in much of Poland. The German run bit of Poland may have been richer than the Russian run part in 1918, but the German run part today is inhabited to a large extent by Poles who came from Eastern Poland, which is now occupied by Belarus, Lithuania and Ukraine (Lviv, Minsk, Vilno, etc.) who took the place of the native Germans who were sent packing. So the inhabitants of the Western “richer” part actually share the cultural traditions of the Austrian and Russian controlled regions. And you’ll hear Eastern dialects of Polish spoken in the West of the country.
Also Poland was split 3 ways, so if the electoral split really reflected the pre-1918 traditions you’d expect Austrian controlled Southern Poland (which was the nicest area – Cracow, etc. and most industrialized in post war Poland, and maybe even pre WWI) to have a different pattern than North East and North West.
In short, MY is full of shit.
January 16th, 2009 at 8:39 pm
“Chicago got big because it became a railroad hub.”
Lake Michigan is the principal obstacle in getting by railroad from the northeast to the north central and northwest states, so it’s hardly surprising that there is a railroad hub near the south end of Lake Michigan.
But why was the railroad hub located not at very south end of Lake Michigan (i.e., around Gary, Indiana), which would have provided the shortest routes to the northwest, but an inconvenient 20 or so miles north at the mouth of the Chicago River?
That’s because Chicago was already the dominant transportation hub due to its location where the two most important watersheds of North America, the Mississippi and the St. Lawrence come closest together.
So, Chicago has always been a great place to do business, so it’s also always been a great location for notoriously parasitical politicians who exploit businesses.
January 16th, 2009 at 9:23 pm
i’ve read several histories of the period between 1800-1860 recently, and most of them do claim that the erie canal magnified the economic importance of new york. but, it is also important to remember that new york has the best deep water harbor on the eastern seaboard, so it was going to be big even if dewitt clinton didn’t get he canal going….
January 16th, 2009 at 9:23 pm
Actually NYC was already the largest most diverse and most important city in the country before the Erie Canal. True about that second city you mention though.
January 16th, 2009 at 10:33 pm
The parties in the election are the traditionalist conservative Law and Justice (blue) and the more free-market liberal, pro-Europe Civic Platform (orange). Hypothesis – the traditionalists do better in the (less historically uprooted) Russian part of the country and the liberals do better in the German, more industrialized part occupied by (descendants of) transplants. Makes sense to me. But does anyone have a map of Polish income by region?
January 16th, 2009 at 10:38 pm
I suspect the similarity between the old boundaries and the current electoral is partly coincidence, partly due to differences in industrialization. However, keep the following in mind:
(1) Being more industrialized doesn’t mean being in favor of market policies, particularly if your industries are old style ones like mining, steel, and ship building, which are still big in Silesia and at the coast.
(2) The south east, Silesia, was industrialized because, well, … there was tons of coal in the ground! Can’t really credit the Germans with that, can you?
(3) As others have observed, there was a radical change in population in the western, formerly German, parts of Poland, after WW II. And many of the newcomers came from the very eastern parts of Poland that were lost to the Soviet Union. That should have an impact on things.
(4) Never underestimate the impact of the EU. The western parts of Poland are closer to the EU (in terms of transportation) and are more likely to directly benefit from trade.
Anyway, I don’t know the real reason for this map, but let’s not jump to conclusions here.
January 16th, 2009 at 10:42 pm
Look, the main point is correct. Chicago got big & rich by being a hub, and so did New York. They remain huge and influential today, although trade & transport have changed.
Look at the southeast U.S. if you want a more concrete example of the point. It’s been the poorest region in the country since colonial times, and still is. It also tends to vote (and, well… secede) as a block.
January 16th, 2009 at 10:52 pm
This post explains how “voting patterns in the 2008 election [in the deep South] were essentially determined 85 million years ago, in the Cretaceous Period.”
January 16th, 2009 at 11:33 pm
New York took off when it was made the Capital at a very critical juncture – just as a real federal government is established.
Population of Philadelphia, 1776 – 40,000
Population of Neew York city, 1776 – 5,000
Population of Philadelphia, 1790 – 23,000
Population of Neew York city, 1790 – 33,000
That’s 18 years before the canal is planned, 35 years before it is finished.
January 17th, 2009 at 12:18 am
Good point on NY already being a major player in advance of the Erie Canal. It’s a flawed analogy, but the concept is correct.
Just look at Mississippi, Arkansas, Alabama. Compare them anywhere else where education is actually prized.
January 17th, 2009 at 1:41 am
I will never forget the words of my graduate school architecture professor Hanno Weber, “Chicago became Chicago because St. Louis chose not to.”
January 17th, 2009 at 2:36 am
Stefan and Ekogan make the important point: 1918 is not the key date here….it’s 1945.
Yes, the map that correlates to the nice colors is a 1918 map, but when it was redrawn to include the ‘Corridor’ – there was no associated ethnic cleansing (as happened on a wide scale in 1945). So whatever the Germans were doing to develop the area in 1918 was still effectively happening up through 1945.
Economic development in Prussia and Silesia outpaced the ‘pure’ Polish areas in the 19th and first half of the 20th century for alot of reasons, not least of which were German land reforms that boosted agricultural output in the region starting in the 1840’s (as central poland was still basically operating as a feudal economy), goosing population growth, leading to the establishment of market-driven industries, trade infrastructure (rail networks, port facilities, the Oder canal) all of which set the stage for heavy industry growth that was possible because of concentrations of coal and non-ferrous metals (notably Copper, Lead, and Zinc) which don’t appear in the rest of Poland. Whether the ‘reset’ button was hit in 1945 in terms of population or not, this area has a 75 year head-start in terms of industrial infrastructure.
Wait…what was the question again?
January 17th, 2009 at 2:59 am
A few things:
- pre WWII is partly wrong – the map shown is pre WWI and the Austrian Empire ceased to exist aftr WWI
- these regions had been “Polish” around 1000, then “German” for 8-900 years – but that did not mean a clear cut separation, rather a mix of population
- Prussia being more developed, in all ways, than the Russian Empire, the Polish population in Prussian territory certainly had a different outlook than the one in Russian territory – but given how long ago it was, and how much population mov ed from previously Eastern Poland (annexed by the USSR) to newly annexed Silesia, Pomerania and Posnania in 1945, this Prussian heritage is certainly not what is at play here
- what is at play is, as other comments put it rightly, the difference in urban and industrial development, linked to natural but also to historical conditions (Prussia vs Russia)
- for an example of voting patterns really depending on the different imperial and post-imperial heritages, on the contrary, see Western vs Eastern Ukraine, just next door to Poland
January 17th, 2009 at 6:22 am
1.
Eastern Germany is still comparatively poor – and will stay so for some time in the future:
because the more active and talented and mobile part of the population has moved to the West, leaving the East without enough quality of labour to succeed. It is a development that sustains itself: The more quality is lost, the more incentive for remaining quality to leave.
2.
The pre-WW I Eastern Germany was mostly poorer than most of the rest of the Deutsches Reich (with the exception of Silesia and the city of Königsberg), and politically backward. – But the Germans there almost all had to leave after 1945.
TS (No. 32) gives a good explanation for the surprising pattern we see on this Polish election map. I add: As the Polish people in the New West of Poland were mainly refugees, they were uprooted – their traditions were broken … maybe that fate qualifies them better for our globalized world and globalized labour.
January 17th, 2009 at 6:41 am
If that’s the case, then things in Poland must have been very different from what happened in Germany. Because the “Heimatvertriebenen” (lit.: “those who were expelled from their homeland”) where a strongly right-wing to far-right-wing force in German politics after the war.
But then again, they did not settle in an “empty” part of West Germany, but had to be integrated into the existing society (which caused, ironically enough, a considerable amount of xenophobia among the “natives”).
January 17th, 2009 at 9:50 am
The cities of the former East Germany we visited this summer (Rostock, Warnemunde) look more prosperous than most of the US.
January 17th, 2009 at 11:26 am
FB & Loewe – don’t forget that AUSTRIAN Poland was the most developed and industrialized region of what became post war Poland, not the Prussian or Russian areas. As others have pointed out the “East-West” split reflects the refugee patterns post 1945, not the historical development of Poland to that point.
Du Bois – true. Americans live in denial about how much worse we live on average than Europeans, or maybe since the upper middle class is richer than the European upper middle class, it’s no accident that this fact is not discussed much.
January 17th, 2009 at 11:31 am
Did Philadelphia’s population really plummet between 1776 and 1790? I call foul on that.
An important consideration is that the Erie Canal opened just before the age of mass immigration. This meant that many of the immigrants who might have settled elsewhere, ended up in New York City or in the lands opened up by the Erie Canal.
January 17th, 2009 at 11:50 am
Populations have been displaced throughout human history but today we only “care” about the Palestinians getting the shaft.
January 17th, 2009 at 12:15 pm
Did Philadelphia’s population really plummet between 1776 and 1790? I call foul on that.
Indeed. I assume the 1776 figures include inhabitants of near-suburbs like Northern Liberties and Southwark, while the 1790 figures include only the city proper, between Vine and South Streets. Philadelphia as an urban agglomeration was larger than New York until 1820 or 1830 or so, I think.
What I find weird about the map is that the “German” part of Poland falls into two very different parts. Firstly there are the parts that went to Poland after World War I – Posen, West Prussia (the Polish Corridor), part of Upper Silesia. These areas had a significant German speaking minority, but the vast majority of the population was Polish, and there has been comparatively little uprooting of population in these regions. Then there’s the parts that were taken from Germany after World War II – East Prussia, eastern Pomerania, most of Silesia. These areas were almost entirely German in population. The previous inhabitants fled to West Germany, and the areas was resettled, largely with Poles from the eastern reaches of the old Poland – my understanding is that the faculty of the University of Lwow (modern Lviv) moved en masse to Wroclaw (the previously German city of Breslau) and reformed there.
So you’d think that the parts that retained their old Polish-ruled-by-Germans population would be rather different from the parts resettled with Poles formerly ruled by Austrians and Russians. But no, not really.
January 17th, 2009 at 12:16 pm
FB & Loewe – don’t forget that AUSTRIAN Poland was the most developed and industrialized region of what became post war Poland, not the Prussian or Russian areas.
I don’t think that’s really true. Galicia was the most backwards part of Austria. The Poles there were the happiest with their lot, but I’ve never heard it was particularly well-developed. The part of Austrian Galicia that is now in Ukraine was the most developed part of what is now Ukraine, but that’s different. And notice that the Austrian part of Poland actually has the strongest vote for the populist party.
January 17th, 2009 at 1:55 pm
This is a great post, but Central and Eastern Europe is a complicated place. The southwestern part of Poland, the part that is the deepest blue on the map, was governed from Vienna pre WWI, not Moscow.
I think most liberal bloggers would have preferred to live there than in the Prussian and Russian parts. And in Ukraine, the political divisions fall very neatly along the old Austrian-Russian border that bisects the country, but in Poland for some reason this isnt the case.
January 17th, 2009 at 2:45 pm
This post is not great, it is woefully ignorant of the history of Germany/Poland. It is so woefully ignorant of that history that the post leads me to suspect that MY is woefully ignorant about most other things he writes about, but which I don’t know well enough myself to detect the bullshit.
January 17th, 2009 at 3:38 pm
The map would seem to support the claim that current Polish voting patterns are heavily based on economic factors, not ethnic factors.
The German border shown is pre-1918. The Polish electoral data is from post-1945. Poland did not exist as a nation from about 1793 (Third Partition) until 1918.
Although the eastern sections of Imperial Germany were poorer than the western, they had a greater access to riches than Russia. Silesia has been important economically for 500+ years, which is why Prussia seized it from Austria in 1745. (War of the Austrian Succession.)
The dark blue area in SE Poland was Austrian Galicia- a poor area. The light blue area west of Warsaw and bordering on Prussia/Germany was part of Russia 1815-1918 and was deliberately left poor in railroads by the Tsars as a defensive measure. The key time, based on the map, would have been 1850-1918, when railroads meant economic developement.
January 17th, 2009 at 4:37 pm
Indeed. But the Erie Canal is one of the major reasons it became, and stayed, what it is: the largest, densest city in the country, the richest city in the Americas, the world’s #1 center of finance, and a major center of culture and the arts.
January 17th, 2009 at 6:09 pm
I assume the 1776 figures include inhabitants of near-suburbs like Northern Liberties and Southwark, while the 1790 figures include only the city proper, between Vine and South Streets. Philadelphia as an urban agglomeration was larger than New York until 1820 or 1830 or so, I think.]
Indeed – here’s the list of the top 10 urban areas in 1790 and 1800 from the Census website
1 New York city, NY ………………… 33,131
2 Philadelphia city, PA …………….. 28,522
3 Boston town, MA ………………….. 18,320
4 Charleston city, SC………………… 16,359
5 Baltimore town, MD…………………. 13,503
6 Northern Liberties township, PA ……. 9,913
7 Salem town, MA…………………….. 7,921
8 Newport town, RI…………………… 6,716
9 Providence town, RI ………………. 6,380
10t Marblehead town, MA………………… 5,661
10t Southwark district, PA ……………. 5,661
1 New York city, NY ………………… 60,515
2 Philadelphia city, PA …………….. 41,220
3 Baltimore city, MD…………………. 26,514
4 Boston town, MA ………………….. 24,937
5 Charleston city, SC………………… 18,824
6 Northern Liberties township, PA ……. 10,718
7 Southwark district, PA ……………. 9,621
8 Salem town, MA…………………….. 9,457
9 Providence town, RI ………………. 7,614
10 Norfolk borough, VA………………… 6,926
Southwark and Northern Liberties were separate from Philadelphia until 1854. However, by 1800 New York City was just about equal in population to the combined Philadelphia region
January 17th, 2009 at 6:39 pm
I add: As the Polish people in the New West of Poland were mainly refugees, they were uprooted – their traditions were broken … maybe that fate qualifies them better for our globalized world and globalized labour.
As the commenter who mentioned the University of Lwow (Lviv) reconstituting itself in Wroclaw pointed out, this is most likely untrue. I can only speak to the displaced Lwowians, but there traditions, history, dishes, giant paintings, etc, accompanied them to now-western Poland. I think the general philosophy, such as it was, was that they were still Poles, and still living in Poland. Bitter about moving, of course, but that simply provided more motivation to honor the old ways.
January 19th, 2009 at 4:52 am
Also a lot of the Euro problems between France/Germany/Poland were ironed out after WW2 with mass people movements, basically non-violent ethnic cleansing.
January 19th, 2009 at 2:22 pm
One historical reason for this map is the fact that on territory gained on Germany, the farmland belong to the state, so there is few farmer, only big farming (maybe kolkhoze like).
On the East and southern part of Poland farmer were independant (they were the only one in the communist bloc) so I think the the blue color means that a lot of farmer vote for this party.
Remenber that in EU half of farmer came from 3 country : Poland, Romania, Bulgaria.
March 2nd, 2009 at 5:11 am
levitraIf you have to do it, you might as well do it right
March 20th, 2009 at 2:34 pm
Super,its a very good
==
http://www.vinyladdiction.tv/sitemap.xml
March 24th, 2009 at 11:34 am
I live in Polish part of former East Prussia, and in fact, amongst 1,2 mln people living here, there are natives still here: 30.000 Germans, 16.000 Masurians, 6.000 Varmians and a couple of thousand of Poles, whose grandfathers lived in East Prussia before 1945. Other Poles fled here in 1945-1955 from 2 parts: Central Poland (Masovia, Kujawy, Kurpie) and from North-Eastern side of pre-WWII Poland, Vilnius Region. Others are: 100.000 Ukrainians (deported from Ukraine in 1947), 5.000 Belarusians, some Lithuanians, Tatars, Russians, Gypsies. Although area is not industrialized and is mostly touristic and agriculture region, the “orange” option (pro-EU liberal Civic Party) is the most popular. We have 5.000.000 tourists from whole world visiting Varmia & Masuria region which still develops. That makes us naturally multicultural and globalised.
Just to add you 1 thing: since Teutonic Knights conquered the Old Prussians lands, for almost 500-600 years Germans, Poles and Lithuanians (along with immigrants from Czech Rep, Silesia, France, Flandres, Holland, Denmark, Sweden) together with assimilated Old Prussians, lived here in peace and co-operation. The greatest development of East Prussia was sonce Teutonic Knights settlements until 19th century. Tolerance was reduced during Bismarck era (”kulturkampf”) and Nazi Germany. Political end of East Prussia came in 1945 with Yalta Conference.
Yet still former East Prussia is multicultural and liberal region, based on fundamental cooperation with Kaliningrad Oblast’ and present Germany.
Thank you.
April 2nd, 2009 at 5:21 am
It is the coolest site,keep so!
buy cheap viagra
April 3rd, 2009 at 4:13 am
Excellent site. It was pleasant to me.
cheap brand pfizer viagra
April 9th, 2009 at 6:06 am
I rarely comment on blogs but yours I had to stop and say Great Blog!! viagra