POLISH QUESTION. OR BELARUSIAN?

In February and March the situation concerning the Union of Poles headed by A. Boris unrecognized by the Belarusian authorities abruptly became more acute. The conflict quickly acquired an international character. Harsh statements of the Polish governing body followed. Appeals to reconsider the policy of a dialogue with the official Minsk conducted by the European Union sounded from the lips of Polish leaders and representatives in international organizations. Head of the European Union diplomatic department C. Ashton and the European Parliament criticized the policy of Belarus regarding the ethnic Polish minority organization.

How was this conflict reflected in the mirror of the Belarusian public opinion? Did it exert any influence upon geopolitical orientations of Belarusians? Results of the IISEPS March opinion poll to some extent answer these questions.

As the data of Table 1 show, only approximately every fifth respondent shares the official version of the conflict broadcast by the state mass media. However, even fewer respondents – a little bit more than 10% – adhere to the interpretation upheld by the members of the UBP headed by A. Boris, by the Belarusian opposition and European institutions. The most widespread positions are the absence of such a position, or the opinion that it is the fault of both conflicting parties.

It is unlikely that the majority of respondents assess the conflict and its character by means of in-depth study of all the details. As it follows from Table 2, assessments of the guilty turn out to be quite closely connected with respondents’ political disposition; they followed from that disposition to a considerable degree. In particular, connection of the assessments of the conflict concerning the Union of Poles proves to be the closest to the attitude towards the policy line and the president. A rather unambiguous and unanimous attitude to the country’s policy as well as to the head of state also turns out to be characteristic of supporters of the diametrically opposed conflict assessments.

It is interesting to note that the attitude to the state mass media and the information spread by them causes diverse vision of the conflict to a slightly lesser extent. To be more exact, distrust in the state mass media is almost total among those who have chosen an explanation according to which seizure of the Polish House in Ivenets and arrests of the UBP activists are a part of the suppression of civil liberties campaign. At the same time, among those who gave preference to the official interpretation, approximately 40% do not have trust in the information mouthpieces either, and among supporters of everybody’s guilt version the share of those who do not trust the state mass media constitutes about 50%.

In other words, no complete automatism of the disposition transformation into an assessment is being observed here – a considerable part of those who believed the reports of the state mass media about the conflict, believed them not because they always trust official mass media information.

Finally, connection of the conflict assessments with geopolitical orientations turned out to be still weaker, although quite noticeable. Among those who chose the variant of answer concerning everybody’s guilt adherents of both geopolitical choices found themselves in approximately equal shares. "Euro-Belarusians" enjoyed obvious preponderance among supporters of the UBP in the conflict and "Belo-Russians" – among adherents of the official version. However, the fact that the mentioned preponderance (with one exception – see Table 2) is not total stands out. Adherents of the dominating preference constitute a little bit more than a half in the corresponding groups.

Thus it is possible to draw a conclusion from the data of Table 2 that respondents’ assessments of the conflict were to a great extent conditioned by their political disposition that the Polish question in Belarus is in fact the Belarusian question.

However, it is also possible to talk about a certain reverse influence: the conflict somewhat intensified and made that disposition actual. In other words, those who considered the UBP guilty began to treat Euro-integration slightly worse than before the conflict and those who blamed the authorities for the conflict – a little bit better. On the basis of the above given analysis of the data of Table 2 it is possible to assume that the effect of the conflict influence on the geopolitical disposition proved to be insignificant, turned to the direction of a decrease in aspiration for Euro-integration.

It was insignificant due to the fact that the groups of the outermost assessments supporters proved to be comparatively small (about two thirds of respondents in total), and preponderance of dominating assessments inside them was slight. On the other hand, it was turned to the direction of a decrease in aspiration for Euro-integration because there proved to be about two times more of the official version adherents than of the opposition one.

This interpretation is confirmed by a comparison with the data of the IISEPS previous opinion poll dated December, 2009 (Table 3).

As it can be seen, decrease in pro-European attitudes constituted about 4 percentage points when the question about the attitude towards Belarus entering the EU was direct and 2 percentage points when it was a dichotomic one. If we take into account the fact that the limit of the coverage error does not exceed 3% then it should be admitted that the conflict concerning the Union of Poles did not exert any influence on the geopolitical preferences structure of Belarusians.

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