The work of Professor Norman Davies is that of filling in the blanks in our historical consciousness. He writes about vanished kingdoms, the memories of which are often not preserved in national narratives. He tries to give Ireland, Scotland and Wales their due place in the typically Anglo-centric history of our isles. But above all, he reveals the absurdities of the division into Eastern and Western Europe, according to which Copernicus and Jan Hus belong to a different cultural circle than Galileo and Martin Luther. God’s Playground, his authoritative history of Poland, does precisely that. As we spoke at St Antony’s College, Oxford, this May, I asked him about perceptions and misperceptions of the East and West in Europe.

“The simple answer is that people don’t think about Eastern Europe at all”, he replied without hesitation. This is a mentality with a long tradition. “Neville Chamberlain talked about Czechoslovakia as a far-away country of which we know nothing. Prague is only a hop, skip and a jump from here.” He explains, however, that during the Cold War there really was an Eastern and a Western Europe with an Iron Curtain down the middle. In the '60s he was one of few people in Kraków who could speak English, and had to show his passport to read a foreign newspaper in a press room – Poles were not allowed to do so. “When I was a young man I would take Marks & Spencer underwear for brothers and sisters of my Polish relatives. You couldn’t get them [in Poland].”

Davies is keen to alleviate the ignorance many hold towards the histories of Eastern European countries. “The disproportion in knowledge about some parts of Europe, in particular Germany and France, is horrifying.” He adds that despite the existence of many departments of European Studies at top British universities, very few teach their undergraduates about Poland. In this respect Cambridge stands out among British universities: Polish has been offered in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages for four years now, and last year the Polish Studies Programme received a permanent endowment from the University of Warsaw.

“The disproportion in knowledge about some parts of Europe, in particular Germany and France, is horrifying”

The outlook on Ukraine especially still leaves a lot to hope for. According to Professor Davies, many in the West believe the traditional Russian narrative that Ukraine is just Mala Rossiya – ‘little Russia’ – and that Putin has merely entered his back garden. Most worryingly, this view is common among academics. “Just as you have great powers in politics, you have great powers in education who project their power into academia.” Even when such power is not malign, as in the case of Germany’s generous research scholarships, it dictates research interests which distort the overall picture.

I pointed out that his approach runs parallel to the current debate concerning the decolonisation of syllabi. “One of the perceptions that is very unfortunate is that imperialism only affected countries outside Europe.” Meanwhile, the sultans’ rule over the Balkans, the tsars’ over Poland and the British monarchs’ over Ireland also can be taken as examples of imperial domination. He expands upon it in his latest book, Beneath Another Sky, which he published last year as visiting scholar at Pembroke College, Cambridge.

“Just as you have great powers in politics, you have great powers in education who project their power into academia”

The long history of being ignored has seeped into the psychology of the East. “The recent [political] developments in Hungary and Poland are based on this feeling that the Eastern countries are not respected as they should be, they don’t have their place under the sun; that the big boys that run the European Union look down on the East – which is not necessarily the case, but sometimes happens.” As a result, “there is a longing for strong rule, which is interesting because Poland hasn’t been notably chaotic or unstable. Poland has never experienced a couple of decades of prosperity and stability as they did in the 90s and 2000s.” In fact, Professor Davies suggests that this success might underpin Polish populism by directing attention away from economic matters.

As with all populist governments, “the idea is that there are malevolent forces in the world who are taking away the substance of our country.” He argues that despite the ruling party’s fiercely anti-communist rhetoric, it doesn’t actually persecute ex-communists but liberals. “I think that the Catholic Church is behind all this: by condemning both atheistic communism and decadent Western secularism, it makes the communist and the liberal the same enemy.” The active engagement of religious figures in politics has set an atmosphere of “disgruntlement”. As the Professor also points out, the presence of religion lessons in schools might partly explain the right-wing sympathies of young Poles, over 70% of whom declare support either for the ruling party or for the parties to its right, according to a recent poll.

“It looked as though the autostrada (motorway) was just running into the future without any end. And suddenly we come across these roboty (roadworks) and everybody is held up.” One election transformed Poland from the EU’s poster child to its black sheep, to the astonishment of its entire establishment. Yet perhaps the heart of the matter is that the previous government was too busy sourcing EU money to connect large cities with motorways to notice that they wouldn't be much use for those without cars. Professor Davies may well be right that Poland’s prosperity lies at the root of its populism, but the fact is that not everyone has had the opportunity to participate in that prosperity. 28 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Poland is firmly bound to Western Europe. Now it has Western problems.

Note: this article was amended to highlight that the interview took place in May 2018.