Tearing Poland apart

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12 ways to divide Poland.

2 ways to divide Poland

Below is the map of the 2010 Polish presidential election. The result of votes approximately lines up with the old border between Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires.

The boundaries used to divide Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires have disappeared from world maps, but still split Poland.

These old boundaries show the legacy of diverse 19th-century developing ways. Western Poland was a part of a fast industrializing empire and now has a dense railroad network. While, most of eastern Poland belonged to Tsarist Russian Empire, where serfdom persisted legally until 1861. By 1900 earnings in what is today western Poland were five times higher than in the east.

Another possible explanation of the surviving political divide was population shifts following WWII. USSR controlled eastern Poland, while Germany was obliged to relinquish its eastern territories to Poland. The Polish administration reacted by just relocating millions of people from the land it lost to the areas it obtained. Segregated from their families’ fields and settlements, later, they formed a more free and cosmopolitan identity and developed less responsive to fist-thumping nationalism. At the same time, Catholicism continued most robust in eastern Poland, which produced a passionate feeling of pride and suspiciousness of change.

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