Publications

Polish–Lithuanian relations have been rather tense recently, and in 2012, when the Polish minister of foreign affairs implied that he was only waiting for a change of government in Vilnius, they practically came to a standstill. This is why in summer last year, the Institute of Public Affairs and the Bronisław Geremek Foundation began work on a report describing the mutual perception between Poles and Lithuanians. Our diagnosis was as follows: first, Poles and Lithuanians lack mutual understanding – the understanding of each other’s positions, fears and interests – which our research confirmed. The report entitled Side by side. How the Poles and the Lithuanians see one another shows how little Poles know about Lithuanians and how little Lithuanians know about Poles, which only perpetuates the stereotypes. It shows how media reports and political disputes affect the general climate of Polish-Lithuanian relations and the mutual perception of the two societies. 

The report is the result of comprehensive research. It is based on four surveys carried out in summer 2012 – two of them addressed to the general public, where a representative group of Poles and Lithuanians were asked to respond, and the other two, carried out among the ethnic minorities – the Polish minority in Lithuania and the Lithuanian minority in Poland. To complete the picture, an analysis of the way in which Polish-Lithuanian relations are perceived by experts from both countries is presented in the second part of the report. This article is an English language summary of the main conclusions of the report, which we present in the hope that it will provide the foreign reader with a tool to make it easier to understand the complexity of Polish-Lithuanian disputes.