ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Poland during its Golden Age, and the flow of events leading to the construction of its usable past in the form of geopolitical vision. It explains how the memory of what Poland was during the 16th century informed the attempt to advance within international society after 1918. The example of the interwar period shows how and why the past turned out to be misused in the process. The chapter shows how the official policy of forgetting the territorial questions, and the less official discourse of national mission in respect to Eastern neighbors conditioned, in a positive way, the integration with European and Atlantic structures. The partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth marked the beginning of the time when Poland ceased to exist in reality and started to be constructed as the memoir. The program of Kultura magazine, published by the Instytut Literacki between 1947–2000 in Paris was the most influential one concerning the problem of the Eastern Borderlands.
