Horse power to horsepower, time to change sterotype view on Poland

Stereotypes about Poland have a very long history. One of the most famous story about this is when Jan Karski - an emissary of Polish government in year 1943 was reporting to president Franklin Delano Roosevelt of USA about situation of Jews in Poland under German Nazi occupation , suddenly Roosevelt moved and asked whether it is truth that horse carriages are still used in Poland.

On the one hand at the beginning of 90's there were many polish jokes in Germany one of the most famous sounded like a travel agency advertisement: "Go to Poland - your car is already there!"

On the other hand, at the same time in Poland very popular opinion was that most of the Western media have only one picture of Poland showing horse carriage and use this picture whenever they want to say something about Poland.

Recently during crisis Poland was treated like whole central Europe as growing unstable market, so many foreign investments in Poland were stopped.

But last year it turned out that in fact we are in the same central Europe, but when polish GDP is growing about +1% our neighbor Latvia is going down -18 %.

So finally something has changed and as The Economist announced: "It is time to rethink old notions about Poland!" article

This article is also mentioned in Polish at tvn 24 website.

source: www.economist.com


Pawel Mrozowicz