WORLD VIEW: Groucho Marx once famously declared he was not interested in belonging to any club that would accept him as a member. The more normal human psychology, however, is to recoil not at a welcome but at a perceived slight: "So I'm not wanted. Well in that case I don't want you either. And what's more, you know what you can do with your club!"
We have been paying a lot of attention of late to the question of our willingness (or otherwise) to admit the gaggle of chiefly central and eastern European aspirants to membership of the EU. It might also, however, be an idea to check from time to time to see if they are still interested.
For the moment it seems they still are, though in some cases in a more qualified and hesitant way than before. A survey conducted in May in Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic found 84 per cent of Hungarians, but only 66 per cent of Poles and 63 per cent of Czechs ready to vote Yes to EU membership. (For purposes of comparison, 83 per cent of the Irish electorate approved EEC entry in our referendum in 1972.)
One of the main unifying themes of the diverse group of intellectuals - which spearheaded the opposition movement in the people's democracies in the 1980s - was the necessary return to a democratic, western, civilised order. Such an order, these intellectuals believed, was a natural part of their cultural inheritance from which they had been excluded by Soviet power since 1945.
Poland signed an association agreement with the European Community in 1992, just a few months after its first fully democratic elections.
In 1994, it launched a formal application for membership. And just a week ago, eight years after that application, Pope John Paul, on what may have been his final visit home, again affirmed his personal support for the Polish government's efforts to secure adhesion, during a meeting with President Alexander Kwasniewski and Prime Minister Leszek Miller.
The photographic image, so familiar in recent years, of the Pope bowed down by age, illness and physical frailty yet continuing to travel, to preach, to speak out for justice and his vision of the truth, has a particular resonance in Poland. It is not just that John Paul is a Polish pope; in a sense, he is much more than that, a human emblem of the Polish nation in its suffering and perseverance.
In the 19th century, when the Polish state was swallowed up by its neighbours and disappeared from the map, it was a common trope of patriotic literature to compare the nation to the crucified Christ. Certainly Poland's progress through the last century - when its lands were the main eastern front battlefield in the first World War and it lost six million of its people in the second - could well be called a via dolorosa.
Many Poles, or indeed Czechs, Hungarians or east Germans, may have thought their troubles were largely over when they rid themselves of communism in 1989/90. But in fact their economies were for the most part in such a parlous state that many more years of hardship awaited them before the prospect of any improvement. And bitterly, when that improvement did arrive it was very likely to be unequally distributed.
The first and most obvious beneficiaries of the transition to a market economy in the former communist states were elements of the old bureaucracy or nomenklatura, which quietly took over newly privatised enterprises.
The blind eye that was turned to this powerful class's self-transformation into new capitalists may well have been part of the price to be paid for a peaceful transition to democracy.
Meanwhile, under democratic Poland's first finance minister, Leszek Balcerowicz, the country was to experience a more severe austerity programme than anything the communists would have dared introduce.
However cruel this economic strategy may have been in its effects, it is doubtful there was any better alternative. That which was unsustainable - whether economically or environmentally - had to be shut down, and that which might have a future given the lion's share of resources. This of course is not just, but no one has claimed recently that a market economy is just.
A TRANSITION such as Poland is engaged in can create considerable human suffering, suffering to which Pope John Paul movingly referred last Sunday in Krakow. It is also - as another Marx said - during a period when the old is dying but the new is not yet born that certain morbid symptoms appear.
And such symptoms are indeed to be found in Poland today in the substantial electoral support enjoyed by the nationalist (and anti-Semitic) Catholic party, the League of Polish Families, and the populist, demagogic farmers' group, Self-Defence, both of which campaign on an anti-European platform. The Pope's endorsement of the government's goal of early EU membership and his emphasis on the contribution his country can make to the European future is a clear rebuke to the politics of opportunism and extremism - even when pursued in the name of nation and religion.
On a recent visit to Poland the American journalist and novelist Joe Klein remarked on the nervousness and pessimism he found almost everywhere.
Certainly such negative feelings are understandable in a society which has seen so much turbulence and where unemployment stands at 18 per cent. And in the tedious gap - while waiting for Europe - extremism can temporarily carve out a political space.
Yet a sense of perspective is required, a sense which perhaps comes most easily to members of the Solidarity generation, who have seen their society come so far in just 20 years and can see all the positive as well as the negative. Men such as former foreign minister Bronislaw Geremek, who marvels at Poland's friendship with Germany and refuses pessimism. Or Adam Michnik, a veteran Solidarity intellectual who served six years in jail and is now editor-in-chief of Poland's leading newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza. Michnik put it to Klein in a parable.
"There are problems in Poland, but it's the same everywhere in Europe. I sometimes tell this story which comes from my prison years. It's about how you tell the difference between the good guards and the bad. The good ones were those who accepted a bribe and gave us in exchange longer visits, more coffee, bigger parcels. The bad ones were the ones who were honest, who didn't accept bribes. Well, today Poland is run by the good guards."