The man who told you so

« Woe to those who are right too early! » is what the Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime Minister of Poland, Radosław Sikorski (1963) wrote back in 1997. And as it turns out: that’s him! He called for building an EU defense force way before the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. He warned about Putin’s threat to European security long before others did. His new book Z okopu do Europy (meaning « from the trenches to Europe », which rhymes in Polish), could be read as one very elaborate way to say « I told you so! », and if it is, it’s hard to blame him for bragging. 

In the past, Sikorski worked as a journalist for mostly British newspapers. His book — a retrospective of Sikorski’s articles since the 1980s, most of them translated from English — is customized for the Polish market: most articles are translated from English. Few Poles could read his articles in the British media during the pre-Internet 1980s and early 1990s. He’s published books like it before: Polska. Stan państwa (« Poland. The State of the Country ») from 2022, which was a collection of his articles for the Polish magazine Polityka and his personal blog from the period when he was a member of the European Parliament. And Polska może być lepsza (« Poland Can Be Better ») from 2018. They can viewed as a series.

Why republish one’s old journalism? Some pieces are forty years old, from when Sikorski had just started his career as a reporter in Britain. I know a few authors (me included) who would be horrified by the idea of having their first writing scrutinized by contemporary standards. But Sikorski’s old articles are mostly well written and witty. What might cause embarrassment are some of his former political convictions, such as his fierce critique of Adam Michnik, the prominent dissident and chief editor of the major left-liberal newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza. The articles on Michnik are brutal and at times too personal and tasteless, and in his foreword to these articles Sikorski now admits that Michnik, an old-school anti-Communist leftie and a prominent figure of the Solidarność movement, was right to warn about a coming triumph of the radicals, but his warning was « premature ». Sikorski writes about his longtime relations with Michnik: « First he was my hero, later he stopped being one, and now he is my hero again. »