It’s irresistibly funny to appoint somebody to improve your national image and then see the appointment turn into a national image issue in no time. That’s precisely what has happened in Poland. On 29 July, when Prime Minister Donald Tusk appointed Barbara Mróz-Gorgoń, a professor of marketing, as the government’s new plenipotentiary for promoting the Polish brand, everybody thought that the position was a step towards defining Poland’s national identity.
Imagine an official Cabinet Office report on British society claiming that nearly all the teenagers in Leeds are fluent in French
Then someone read one of her reports.
The Poles’ Self-Portrait, published last year by a think tank chaired by Mróz-Gorgoń, was supposed to uncover some interesting facts about the national character. In reality, it revealed the potential dangers of letting PowerPoint, AI, and the language of marketing spend too much time on their own. There were some geographical blunders, unclear statistics, and passages that somehow seemed acquainted with neither Polish nor English. We learned that 95 per cent of young Poles speak fluent English. This is quite impressive, but it would also mean that Poland could be considered the most linguistically accomplished country in Europe.
