Be Like Poland

One of the first things a visitor notices about Poland is that Poland is not embarrassed to look Polish.

The national flag is everywhere.

Not only outside government buildings or during football tournaments, but hanging from apartment balconies, appearing in shop windows, lining streets during commemorations and sitting naturally among the clutter of ordinary life.

There is something wonderfully uncomplicated about seeing a Polish flag hanging above somebody's washing.

Patriotism has become furniture.

But identity here goes far beyond flags.

It lives in food, language, folk traditions, religious customs, historical anniversaries, local festivals and the names of streets and squares.

All Saints' Day fills cemeteries with candles and sends families travelling across the country to visit graves.

National anniversaries visibly transform cities.

Children encounter Polish history not only in textbooks but in monuments, museums, school trips and ceremonies.

And Polish remains entirely comfortable as the language of modern life.

Banking happens in Polish.

Technology happens in Polish.

Government happens in Polish.

Popular culture happens in Polish.

A country can be deeply integrated into Europe and the global economy while remaining culturally unmistakable.

That matters.

Modernisation is sometimes accompanied by the assumption that successful countries will eventually converge culturally as well as economically.

The brands become similar.

The architecture becomes similar.

The language of business becomes similar.

The habits become similar.

Poland has certainly changed.

Young Poles use the same platforms, technology and global entertainment as their peers elsewhere.

Religious participation has declined, particularly among younger generations.

Family attitudes are changing.

Individualism is increasing.

None of this makes younger Poles lesser Poles.

Prosperity is supposed to give people choices that earlier generations did not have.

The question is not whether Poland should change.

It is whether change requires cultural amnesia.

There is also an important historical qualification.

Modern Poland's unusual degree of ethnic and linguistic homogeneity was partly created by the catastrophic events of the twentieth century: genocide, war, forced migration and shifting borders.

That is tragedy, not a template for anybody else.

The more transferable lesson is cultural confidence.

A society can accept outside ideas without assuming everything foreign is superior.

It can modernise without treating its inheritance as an embarrassment.

It can change without needing to become somewhere else.

And then:

Change without disappearing.

One of my strongest impressions of Polish cities is remarkably mundane.

They are often clean.

Not universally.

Poland has graffiti, neglected courtyards, ugly roads, broken infrastructure and depressing public spaces too.

But I have repeatedly noticed something here.

People seem to notice when the environment around them is being mistreated.

I have watched ordinary people pick up rubbish they did not drop.

Residents maintain spaces they do not personally own.

Parks, playgrounds, courtyards and housing estates often feel as though somebody cares what happens to them.

Perhaps the interesting concept is ownership without ownership.

This is not my private pavement.

But it is my street.

This is not my personal park.

But it is my neighbourhood.

This is not my building.

But it is my city.

Patriotism is not only flags, speeches and monuments.

Sometimes patriotism is simply refusing to leave rubbish on the pavement.

Of course, cleanliness is not proof of some mystical national virtue.

Institutions matter too.

Polish local government has played a major part in the transformation of towns and cities, while European funding has financed enormous amounts of infrastructure and public-space renewal.

Municipal competence matters.

But Poland also has an extraordinary ecosystem outside the formal state.

Volunteer fire brigades remain central to many smaller communities.

WOŚP — the Great Orchestra of Christmas Charity — mobilises huge numbers of people every year.

Schools, churches, clubs, charities, rescue organisations and informal networks provide another layer of society between the individual and government.

And then came 2022.

When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Poland received an extraordinary number of displaced Ukrainians in a very short period.

Government mattered.

But ordinary people mattered too.

Homes were opened.

Volunteers appeared at railway stations.

Food, clothing, transport, beds and information were organised at extraordinary speed.

The welcome was not simple forever. Fatigue, political arguments and tensions inevitably followed as a short-term emergency became a long-term social reality.

But the initial mobilisation demonstrated something important.

A society can be cautious about strangers and still feel a powerful obligation to act when people around it need help.

That apparent contradiction appears elsewhere in Polish life.

Poles do not necessarily trust quickly.

Compared with Britain, everyday interaction can feel strikingly direct.

There is less automatic smiling.

Less compulsory small talk.

Less of the wonderfully British ritual in which two people with absolutely no intention of meeting again tell each other:

"We really must get a drink sometime."

Polish warmth often feels earned.

But once trust develops, relationships can feel extremely genuine.

That suggests a distinction worth exploring.

Poland is not a Scandinavian-style high-generalised-trust society.

That actually makes the civic behaviour more interesting.

Perhaps you do not need to believe every stranger is trustworthy to believe that the place you share with strangers deserves looking after.

Britain has parallels of its own.

The RNLI, community organisations, charities and voluntary societies represent another extraordinary tradition of citizens accepting responsibilities that do not begin and end with themselves.

Different cultures organise civic responsibility differently.

The larger principle travels well:

Poland is surrounded by history.

Sometimes literally.

A bullet scar in a wall.

A small plaque recording where people were executed.

A cemetery hidden behind trees.

A monument in a village where something terrible happened eighty years ago.

Warsaw may be the clearest expression of this.

More than 85 percent of its historic centre was destroyed during the Second World War.

What followed was one of the most remarkable reconstruction programmes in Europe.

Citizens did not merely build somewhere new to live.

They reconstructed historical continuity.

UNESCO describes the rebuilding of Warsaw's Old Town as an exceptional example of near-total reconstruction and as an expression of national determination to preserve Polish culture.

That tells us something important.

When almost everything had been taken away, people still believed that restoring memory mattered.

Not only:

Where will we live?

But:

Who are we?

That instinct appears repeatedly in Polish history.

When Poland disappeared from the map during the partitions, Polish language and identity survived.

During German occupation, clandestine education continued.

The Polish Underground State maintained parallel structures.

Books and newspapers were printed illegally.

Under communism, underground publishing returned.

Solidarność became more than a trade union. It formed part of a wider ecosystem of independent organisation beyond official structures.

Again and again, when institutions were captured or destroyed, society found another way.

Today those memories fill museums.

And Poland is exceptionally good at museums.

Not simply rooms containing old objects.

Many Polish museums actively communicate.

Sound.

Film.

Recreated environments.

Interactive displays.

Personal testimony.

Documents placed in context.

Stories designed to be understood rather than merely stored.

A museum does not need to be boring simply because the subject is serious.

History becomes civic education.

That may also explain why museums and historical institutions can become political battlegrounds.

Memory is powerful.

The story a society tells about itself affects how it understands the present.

Poland therefore argues fiercely about history.

Heroism matters.

Victimhood matters.

But uncomfortable chapters matter too.

Memory without self-criticism can become mythology.

That does not make forgetting preferable.

Germany demonstrates why.

Modern Poland works closely with Germany.

Poles work there, study there, trade there and form relationships there.

Younger generations did not experience German occupation and have no reason to inherit personal hatred.

But reconciliation does not require amnesia.

Likewise, Polish distrust of Russia cannot be understood only through nineteenth-century uprisings or Soviet domination.

Russia's war against Ukraine made the issue immediate again.

So Poland's relationship with history might be reduced to three ideas:

History does not repeat mechanically.

But power, vulnerability, propaganda and strategic interests do not disappear simply because people become accustomed to peace.

Poland remembers.

But it also observes.

Culture did not build modern Poland by itself.

That point matters.

It would be easy to tell a flattering story in which Poland succeeded because Poles were simply patriotic, resilient and hard-working.

Economies are more complicated.

The post-communist transition was painful.

Industries collapsed.

Unemployment became severe.

People lost security.

Millions of Poles eventually left the country looking for work elsewhere.

Then came European integration.

Poland joined the European Union in 2004.

Access to the single market mattered.

Foreign investment mattered.

EU funding mattered enormously.

Infrastructure did not materialise because somebody waved a Polish flag hard enough.

But opportunity still has to be used.

Polish institutions planned, co-financed, built and maintained projects on an enormous scale.

The results are visible everywhere.

Motorways.

Expressways.

Railways.

Stations.

Trams.

Airports.

Public squares.

Parks.

Cycling infrastructure.

Museums.

Digital networks.

Cities that sometimes seem permanently under construction.

There is psychological power in visible progress.

A new tram line is not merely a tram line.

It is physical evidence that improvement is possible.

The economic transformation beneath this has been extraordinary.

The OECD says the Polish economy doubled in size over roughly two decades, with real GDP per person growing much faster than the OECD average and productivity doing much of the heavy lifting.

But successful catch-up produces another problem.

Eventually, you begin to catch up.

For years one part of Poland's proposition was straightforward:

Skilled workers.

Lower costs.

EU access.

Come here and build.

Then:

Come here and develop.

Now the third phase increasingly has to be:

Create here. Own here. Innovate here.

Wages rise.

The cheap-labour advantage weakens.

The OECD expects productivity convergence gradually to slow and identifies innovation, skills shortages, population ageing and moving firms further up the value chain as major challenges for the next stage.

Poland therefore has to become good at something different.

Not merely catching up.

Being close to the front.

That is harder.

Britain remains a richer economy with deep financial markets, major research institutions and global networks.

But travelling around Poland often provides something psychologically powerful:

the feeling of acceleration.

A country visibly under construction can sometimes feel more optimistic than one whose greatest infrastructure achievements were inherited.

That feeling should not be romanticised.

Progress is easier to see when starting from a lower base.

Megaprojects can waste money.

Warsaw is not all of Poland.

Regional inequality remains.

Successful cities have become increasingly expensive.

Some rural transport remains poor.

Still, the underlying principle is powerful.

Public transport belongs here too.

Trams, buses, metro systems and railways are not glamorous political abstractions when people use them every day.

They connect workers to jobs.

Students to universities.

Small towns to cities.

Tourists to regions they would otherwise never visit.

Good infrastructure should not feel remarkable.

It should feel ordinary.

Some of Poland's most interesting innovations are almost comically mundane.

Collecting a parcel.

Paying a friend.

Showing identification.

Collecting medicine.

Borrowing a book.

Buying flowers after the shop closes.

None of this sounds like science fiction.

That may be precisely why it matters.

Take BLIK.

During the first half of 2026, the system processed 1.6 billion transactions worth PLN 244.8 billion and had 21.6 million active users.

The important thing is not really the number.

It is what the number represents.

Something mildly irritating became extremely easy.

Paczkomaty follow the same principle.

Order something.

Walk to a locker.

Open the door.

Done.

Once you start noticing that philosophy, it appears everywhere.

Książkomaty for library books.

Kwiatomaty for flowers.

Automated retail.

Żabka Nano.

Self-service systems.

Some examples are genuinely significant technological systems.

Some are amusing little conveniences.

The mentality connecting them is more interesting:

Government increasingly asks the same question.

By May 2026, mObywatel had reached 12 million users, with around 1.5 million logins every day.

The state is increasingly designing digital services around ordinary life events rather than expecting citizens to understand the internal structure of government departments.

Again, Poland did not invent digital government.

Britain's Government Digital Service was internationally influential.

Britain has major fintech companies.

Its games industry is larger.

Poland's strength is often something slightly different.

Making useful technology ordinary.

Innovation does not always mean inventing something first.

Sometimes it means adopting technology rapidly and integrating it so well that people stop thinking about it.

And then there is gaming.

The Witcher may be one of the best examples in the whole story.

Polish literature drawing on Slavic and Central European traditions became the foundation for globally successful intellectual property created by Polish developers.

Culture became technology.

Technology became export.

And the product became globally recognisable without disguising its origins.

That captures the larger Polish paradox rather beautifully.

A library still lends books.

A pharmacy still dispenses medicine.

A railway still moves people.

A country still tells stories.

Modernisation changes the method.

It does not always have to destroy the purpose.

Migration is one of the areas where Poland's recent experience differs sharply from parts of Western Europe.

But the reality is more complicated than slogans from either side suggest.

Poland is not a country without immigration.

Quite the opposite.

The Polish government estimated when adopting its 2025–2030 migration strategy that roughly 2.5 million foreigners were residing in Poland with an intention of staying long-term.

Foreign labour has become important to the economy.

Ukrainians and Belarusians in particular have become part of everyday Polish society, while Russia's invasion of Ukraine brought very large numbers of displaced Ukrainians across the border.

At the same time, Poland's current migration strategy explicitly places security and state control at its centre.

It calls for migration to be regulated according to purpose, scale and countries of origin, and explicitly describes a selective approach to migration policy.

That creates a distinction worth examining.

Migration is not one phenomenon.

Who arrives matters.

Why they arrive matters.

Age matters.

Sex matters.

Employment matters.

Education matters.

Integration matters.

A Belarusian software engineer, a Ukrainian mother fleeing war, a seasonal agricultural worker, an international student and an undocumented young man are all migrants.

They do not create identical economic or social outcomes.

Official crime statistics from several Western and Nordic countries show that some immigrant-origin groups are disproportionately represented in particular types of violent and gang offending, while other migrant populations are not.

Socioeconomic differences explain part — but not always all — of those gaps.

Poland's recent migrant mix has been substantially different from some of those Western European migration patterns.

Much of Poland's immigration has come from neighbouring Ukraine and Belarus, through work, temporary protection and cultural proximity rather than through the same asylum routes seen elsewhere.

So far, official Polish figures do not show foreigners driving overall crime.

That does not mean Poland's migration model can automatically claim responsibility for Poland's relative safety.

Poland already had low homicide rates before the recent immigration era.

And Poland has not yet gone through every demographic test that countries with longer histories of large-scale migration have experienced.

In particular, it has not yet developed a large second generation from some of the origin groups associated with higher suspect rates in Nordic statistics.

The test is incomplete.

That matters.

One should not congratulate a country for successfully passing an experiment it has not yet run.

The Belarus border raises another issue.

Since 2021, Poland and other governments have accused Belarus — with Russian support — of deliberately facilitating migration toward the EU border as a form of political pressure.

Poland treats that route primarily as a security challenge rather than ordinary spontaneous asylum migration.

The response has included barriers, surveillance, military involvement and tighter limits on asylum claims.

Those policies have had humanitarian consequences and have been strongly criticised by humanitarian organisations.

The security context is real.

The human cost is real too.

Both belong in an honest account.

There is another claim I would not make.

Living in Warsaw, I have often had the impression that women seem unusually comfortable travelling alone at night.

When I looked for comparable evidence, however, the picture was not nearly so straightforward.

A recent international survey of adults actually recorded a higher share of people in Britain than Poland saying they felt safe walking alone at night.

It was not a women-only comparison, so it does not answer the precise question behind my observation.

But it is enough to stop an impression becoming a fact.

That is useful in itself.

Personal experience can identify a question.

It should not overrule evidence simply because the answer is inconvenient.

The more defensible conclusion is narrower.

Poland has so far combined very substantial immigration with a migrant population whose composition differs from that of several Western European countries.

It has also maintained a hard approach toward irregular migration on its eastern frontier and explicitly incorporated security, labour-market needs and integration into its migration strategy.

Whether that model remains successful will depend heavily on who settles permanently, whether employment remains high, whether integration works, and what happens in the next generation.

Migration policy is not simply about numbers.

It is about outcomes.

Security does not feel theoretical in Poland.

Geography has not changed.

Poland sits on the North European Plain.

Its history contains partitions, invasion, occupation, deportations and long periods when decisions affecting Polish sovereignty were made elsewhere.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine made territorial war contemporary again just beyond Poland's border.

Modern Polish defence policy cannot really be understood without that context.

For 2026, Poland allocated around PLN 200 billion to defence — about 4.81 percent of projected GDP.

That is an enormous commitment.

It has opportunity costs.

Money spent on defence is money that cannot simultaneously fund something else.

Military procurement can be inefficient.

Weapons become obsolete.

But the underlying Polish calculation is obvious.

The cost of preparedness is visible.

The cost of discovering too late that preparedness was inadequate can be catastrophic.

Poland also invests heavily in alliances.

NATO.

The European Union.

A close strategic relationship with the United States.

There is no contradiction between alliances and national capability.

An alliance is strongest when its members possess useful strength of their own.

Britain provides a useful comparison.

The United Kingdom possesses capabilities Poland does not: nuclear deterrence, global intelligence networks and naval power.

Different geography produces different strategic priorities.

An island state and a continental frontline state do not face identical threats.

The wider lesson is not that every country should copy Poland's military budget.

It is that security assumptions should match actual circumstances.

Energy belongs in the same discussion.

For years Poland argued that dependence on Russian energy created strategic vulnerability.

That concern produced infrastructure.

LNG.

Interconnectors.

Baltic Pipe.

A deliberate diversification of supply.

But Poland's energy story contains a major contradiction.

The country reduced dependence on Russian gas while retaining one of Europe's most coal-heavy electricity systems.

That legacy is environmentally costly.

Air pollution remains a serious health problem.

Coal also represents jobs, communities and decades of infrastructure, particularly in Silesia.

You cannot simply switch off a social and industrial system overnight.

But once again, Poland is now attempting to rebuild.

On 10 July 2026, electricity from a Polish offshore wind farm entered the national grid for the first time.

Baltic Power is intended eventually to generate electricity equivalent to the needs of around 1.5 million households.

At the same time, Poland is investing in nuclear power, further offshore wind, transmission infrastructure and modernisation of the grid. The 2026 budget specifically included financing for the country's first nuclear plant alongside wind and rail investment.

This exposes an important distinction.

Where does your energy come from?

And:

What produces it?

Poland moved aggressively on the first question when it identified dependence on Russia as a strategic risk.

The second question is harder.

Replacing coal while maintaining affordable, reliable electricity for a large industrial economy is an enormous engineering and political challenge.

But there is something characteristically Polish about the scale of the response.

Build the motorway network.

Rebuild the railways.

Digitalise the state.

Modernise the military.

Now rebuild the energy system.

Not because the previous system never worked.

Because yesterday's solution has become tomorrow's constraint.

Poland's transformation is impressive partly because it remains incomplete.

Healthcare demonstrates that clearly.

The country has become richer.

Its infrastructure has improved dramatically.

Its cities often look modern and increasingly prosperous.

But health outcomes have not caught up at the same speed.

The OECD reports Polish life expectancy at 78.4 years, 2.7 years below its average.

Preventable and treatable mortality also remain substantially higher than the OECD average.

The system also faces staff shortages and long waits for some forms of treatment.

The OECD specifically identifies healthcare workforce shortages — particularly among nurses and outside the largest cities — as a continuing barrier to access.

Anyone who has lived in Poland will also recognise the parallel healthcare world that has developed around these weaknesses.

Private medical packages are a common employee benefit.

MultiSport makes gyms, swimming pools and recreational facilities easy to access for millions of workers.

Private clinics can provide extremely convenient access to specialists and diagnostics.

This ecosystem has real value.

But a parallel private system is not the same thing as solving the public one.

Poland therefore offers no simple healthcare lesson of triumph.

Instead, healthcare illustrates a different principle.

Modernisation can occur unevenly.

A country can digitise government, rebuild railways and develop impressive urban infrastructure while still carrying difficult social systems inherited from another era.

And there has been progress.

Waiting times for some procedures have improved significantly following targeted reforms and funding.

That matters because it demonstrates that poor performance need not simply be accepted as permanent.

But ultimately the success of healthcare is not measured by how modern the clinic looks.

It is measured by whether people live longer and healthier lives.

On that test Poland still has substantial work ahead.

Perhaps this is the more useful principle:

And then we reach the hardest question.

Perhaps the greatest challenge to Poland's success is not external.

Perhaps it is success itself.

Poland spent decades catching up.

What happens when a generation grows up with little memory of what the country was catching up from?

The generation shaped by communism, shortages and difficult economic transition is gradually giving way to one raised with smartphones, cheap flights, international careers and modern cities.

That is not a criticism.

Prosperity is supposed to change people.

If hardship produces discipline, conformity and sacrifice, escaping hardship should create more room for freedom and individuality.

Some old habits deserve to disappear.

The mistake would be assuming that every tradition is good simply because it is old.

But neither should we assume prosperity automatically reproduces the conditions that created it.

Nowhere is that clearer than demographics.

Poland's fertility rate remains extraordinarily low.

Births continue falling.

Large family-support programmes have not produced a lasting demographic reversal.

Housing sits directly beside that problem.

Successful cities attract people.

Demand pushes up prices.

Investment makes neighbourhoods more desirable.

The city becomes wealthier and simultaneously harder for young adults to afford.

You cannot discuss why people delay families while ignoring whether they can afford somewhere stable to live.

And then comes the economic challenge.

For decades Poland could grow partly by adopting established technology, attracting investment, providing skilled labour and integrating into richer European value chains.

That delivered extraordinary results.

But eventually the distance closes.

The OECD expects productivity convergence to slow as ageing, skills shortages and the need for higher innovation become more important.

Poland spent thirty years becoming exceptionally good at catching up.

Now it must become good at being close to the front.

That is a different skill.

And Britain becomes useful here not as a defeated opponent, but as an older economy demonstrating some of the problems mature societies encounter.

Housing becomes expensive.

Infrastructure becomes more difficult to replace.

Productivity can stagnate.

Public services accumulate expectations faster than resources.

Political frustration rises when improvement no longer feels automatic.

National identity becomes more contested.

Poland is not destined to reproduce Britain's experience.

Britain itself remains highly successful in numerous areas.

But mature economies face problems that rapidly converging economies can temporarily outrun.

Eventually the race changes.

A country spends decades building the future.

Then one day people wake up inside that future and begin assuming it will maintain itself.

It will not.

Infrastructure ages.

Technology changes.

Military equipment becomes obsolete.

Institutions weaken.

Companies become comfortable.

Skills lose value.

Culture changes.

Success changes the people who inherit it.

The challenge is not preserving hardship because hardship supposedly builds character.

It is preserving the useful habits hardship sometimes produced after the hardship itself has thankfully disappeared.

That may be Poland's greatest test of the next thirty years.

So should another country literally become Poland?

Obviously not.

Britain cannot copy Polish history.

France cannot copy Polish geography.

Germany cannot copy the experiences that shaped Polish society.

But that is not the point.

Countries learn from one another constantly.

They copy technologies.

Military doctrine.

Tax structures.

Rail systems.

Healthcare reforms.

Planning rules.

Digital services.

Education programmes.

Business models.

Why should national habits and priorities be exempt from the same curiosity?

The point of Be Like Poland is not:

Become Polish.

It is:

There are lessons here.

Know who you are.

Care about the place you live.

Build a society where people feel responsibility beyond themselves.

Keep history alive without turning it into mythology.

Reconcile without forgetting.

Build infrastructure for the country you want tomorrow.

Make ordinary life easier.

Adopt useful technology quickly.

Treat migration as something whose composition and integration matter, not merely as a number.

Build alliances while retaining meaningful national capability.

Understand which systems are too important to neglect.

Replace yesterday's infrastructure when it becomes tomorrow's constraint.

Do not mistake prosperity for permanence.

And do not mistake visible modernity for a finished job.

Different countries will apply those principles differently.

They should.

Their history is different.

Their geography is different.

Their resources are different.

Their societies are different.

But the underlying questions travel extremely well.

What happens when a country stops knowing what it is?

What happens when citizens stop caring about shared space?

What happens when history becomes something nobody bothers to teach?

What happens when infrastructure becomes something inherited rather than built?

What happens when everyday systems become unnecessarily difficult?

What happens when governments lose control over strategically important dependencies?

What happens when prosperity convinces people that progress has become automatic?

Living in Poland has made me think about those questions differently.

Not because Poland has solved everything.

It clearly has not.

But because Poland still frequently behaves like a country expecting something better to exist tomorrow.

You see it in a tram line under construction.

A railway station being rebuilt.

A museum full of schoolchildren.

A BLIK payment completed in seconds.

A library book waiting inside a locker.

The first offshore electricity arriving from the Baltic.

A flag hanging from an ordinary balcony.

A reconstructed Old Town beside a glass tower.

Tradition and technology occupying the same street.

Memory and ambition occupying the same country.

Other countries do not need to become Poland.

But they can look at what Poland does well and be confident enough to admit when somebody else may have found a useful answer.

No country owns every good idea.

And sometimes the most valuable thing another country can teach you is not how to become more like them.

It is how to reconsider what you may have stopped valuing in yourself.