The first scene of Alfred Jarry's parody of "Macbeth" is set in Poland — a place the play's stage directions describe as "nowhere." ("Pologne, c'est a dire, nulle part.") "Ubu Roi" was spectacularly unsuccessful. It closed after an opening night that shocked its audience with its absurdism and obscenity. Its scene setting, though, is more tragic than comic. When Jarry's play opened in 1896, Poland was indeed "nowhere," a people without a state, divided since 1795 among Russia, Austria and Prussia.

Poland has long been a victim of the greater powers around it. The nation regained nationhood after World War I, only to lose it again to the Nazi and Soviet invasions at the start of World War II. When the Red Army liberated the country at the end of the war, Moscow brusquely enfolded it into the Soviet Union.

Poland was liberated again in 1989 — this time by the Solidarity trade union, the most dynamic driver of freedom from Soviet rule. Solidarity's most prominent intellectual, the former dissident, historian and Foreign Minister Bronislaw Geremek, subsequently hailed Poland's accession to the European Union as "the 'end of the division of Europe.' " But Geremek, who died in a car accident in 2008, was wrong. It's Poland that has become one of the leaders — along with Hungary — in dividing Europe.