I have read your text—and let me put it this way: it no longer calls for a “review” in the conventional sense. It is rather a piece one must position oneself in relation to. One either enters into its logic, or attempts to process it—and in doing so, immediately loses one’s footing.
If, however, I were to write a review in a manner that does not betray the text but seeks to understand it, it would read more or less as follows:
Review: Mentoring as a Closed Circuit
Ludwiszewski’s text does not so much argue against mentoring as expose the peculiar emptiness that emerges when a practice detaches itself from its original conditions of meaning.
The starting point is deceptively trivial: the proliferation of “mentors” produced by mentoring programmes. Yet this observation quickly unfolds into a structural insight. What appears as knowledge transfer is revealed as a self-sustaining loop—mentors training future mentors in the absence of any external source of competence. The result is not fraud, but redundancy: a system that functions, expands, and legitimises itself while remaining largely disconnected from the domains it claims to serve.
Placed against the backdrop of European innovation policy, this critique acquires sharper contours. The EU SCALE instrument—arguably a rational attempt to simplify early-stage financing—becomes illustrative precisely because it is accompanied by the now obligatory addition of mentoring. The juxtaposition is telling: a concrete financial mechanism alongside a symbolic appendage. One addresses a real constraint; the other satisfies the grammar of institutional reporting.
From here, the text shifts registers. What begins as a reflection on a single word expands into a diagnosis of a broader European condition: a system in which asymmetry is not an aberration but a stable equilibrium. Capital, ownership, and scaling capacity concentrate in the core, while labour, risk, and experimentation remain distributed across the periphery. No conspiracy is required; the mechanism operates through incentives, not intentions.
The discussion of Central and Eastern Europe is therefore neither rhetorical nor resentful. It is analytical. The region appears not as a temporarily disadvantaged participant, but as a structurally peripheral component of a larger system whose architecture does not aim at convergence. The language of partnership coexists with a material logic of differentiation.
The invocation of figures such as Charles de Gaulle and Nicolas Sarkozy is not ornamental. It marks a transition between two modes of political thinking: one grounded in sovereignty as a non-negotiable principle, the other in integration as a pragmatic horizon. The distance between these positions defines the space within which contemporary European policy operates—and within which initiatives like EU SCALE must be understood.
What ultimately gives the text its force is restraint. It does not escalate into prescription. It does not offer solutions. Instead, it delineates a boundary: between actions that alter structures and gestures that merely simulate activity.
In this sense, the critique of mentoring is secondary. The primary object is something more elusive: the modern tendency to replace difficult decisions with well-structured initiatives that leave underlying arrangements intact.
Supplement: On the “Reverse” of Nationalism
To quote your earlier formulation:
“German nationalism = occupation, camps, executions, a destroyed Warsaw.
Soviet nationalism (in the guise of internationalism) = gulags, deportations, communist terror.
Polish nationalism of the National Democrats = pre-war antisemitism, ghetto benches, pogroms.
Nationalism of the 1990s = militias, hate speech, the burning of crosses.”
Yet this is only one side of the nationalist “coin.” Let me explain: for my generation, the other side—the “sunlit” one—is… the meaning of endurance, whatever that may signify to you.
What follows is an attempt to name that second side without trivialising it.
For those now in their mid-seventies, nationalism in its “sunlit” form was not about pride, superiority, or militarism. It was about the meaning of continued existence.
After 1939, Poland ceased to exist as a state. After 1945, it existed as a satellite. For decades, people were told that Poland was a marginal country, that its culture was provincial, that its history was a sequence of defeats, that it would have been better to be German or Russian.
In such a context, nationalism—of the existential kind—was an answer to a simple question: why remain Polish at all? Why not leave, change one’s name, abandon the language?
It provided:
– an anchor of identity, at a time when official doctrine dismissed national identity as obsolete;
– dignity, not through victory but through persistence itself;
– language as a home, when Russian was presented as the language of the future and English as that of modernity;
– a non-bureaucratic solidarity: neighbourly help, clandestine literature, masses for the homeland.
This was not nationalism in the ethnic sense associated with German traditions or interwar Polish politics. It was existential nationalism: an answer to the question of whether the continued existence of a community has meaning, or is merely a geographical accident.
For that generation, the answer was clear: it does have meaning—and that meaning must be defended.
This is the “sunlit” side.
It does not exclude respect for other nations. It simply asserts: one’s name, language, dead, and land are not to be exchanged for any administrative construct, however “European.”
This distinction matters in the context of earlier reflections on mentoring and peripherality.
Existential nationalism introduces a question that a purely analytical framework might overlook: when a startup from Kraków relocates to Berlin, is this merely a market transaction—or also an erasure of the community’s continuity?
The answer is not self-evident. But posing the question already reflects a different order of concern—one in which more than GDP is at stake.
In this sense, nationalism is not merely a tool or a historical trauma. For a certain generation, it is also a response to the erosion of meaning in a century marked by partitions, war, communism, and, later, globalisation.
Understood in this way, existential nationalism is not an argument for exclusion or aggression. It is an argument against reduction: against treating individuals and societies as interchangeable units within larger economic systems.
From this perspective, figures as different as Charles de Gaulle, Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, or Gamal Abdel Nasser can be understood as expressions of the same underlying principle: the insistence that a political community must exist as a subject, not merely as an object of larger forces.
This leads to a broader conclusion.
If contemporary Europe is to remain a meaningful actor rather than an administrative abstraction, existential nationalism constitutes not its negation but its necessary counterpart. It is the reverse of the same coin. Without the reverse—identity, continuity, meaning—the obverse—institutions, markets, integration—cannot endure.
What appears, from one perspective, as a tension between nationalism and European integration may in fact be a condition of their mutual survival.
