Playground turned player

IN THE 20TH CENTURY Poland played a central role in international politics on several occasions: in 1920, when it beat back the Red Army; in 1939, when Poles exchanged the first shots of the second world war with Germans in Gdansk; and in 1980, when an organised movement, Solidarity, defied communist rule in the Soviet bloc for the first time.

Yet for most of the 20th century Poland was a playground rather than player in international politics. For much of the time it was occupied by Austrians, Germans, Russians or Soviets. So when it emerged from communism, having known independence for only 20 of the previous 200 years, it was at first focused on itself and its transformation from a dictatorship with a centrally planned economy to a free-market democracy. Poles were poor and prickly, and many of them saw the divide with the West as unbridgeable.

That changed when Poland, together with nine other countries, joined the European Union on May 1st 2004. As Poles became richer and more successful within the EU, their international stature grew, as did their self-confidence and enthusiasm for deeper integration. “Poles are still in love with the EU ten years after accession and believe that together we can move mountains, while Western EU member states are going through a typical mid-life crisis after living several decades in the EU,” said Aleksander Kwasniewski, who presided over Poland’s entry, at the anniversary celebrations in Warsaw’s Lazienki Park on May 1st. Polish politicians across the political spectrum support EU and NATO membership. Among the population at large, 89% say they want Poland to be in the EU, considerably more than voted yes in the referendum on EU entry in 2003.

At home in Europe

When Donald Tusk and his Civic Platform (PO) came to power in 2007, Poland’s foreign policy became more pragmatic and cautious, concentrating on Poland’s role in the EU and its relationship with Germany. Even bilateral relations with Russia, Poland’s other mighty neighbour, improved for a while—until Russia annexed a chunk of Ukraine, which borders both of them, earlier this year.

“The Tusk government is the first Polish government that is very clearly pro-EU and pro-German,” says Josef Janning at the European Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin. The previous Law and Justice (PiS) government was sceptical about the benefits of EU membership for Poland and open in its loathing of both the Germans and the Russians. In this pre-election year PiS politicians are moderating their foreign-policy pronouncements.

Despite the wounds of the past, Germany and Poland today are bound together by shared political and commercial interests. Germany is Poland’s biggest trade partner, and a sizeable chunk of the German export machine is based in Poland. “The relationship benefits both countries,” says Mitchell Orenstein at Harvard University. A personal affinity between Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, and Mr Tusk is helping, as is a good working relationship between Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the German foreign minister, and Mr Sikorski, his opposite number. Mr Tusk is from Gdansk, which was part of the German empire until the end of the first world war, and speaks to Mrs Merkel in German, using the intimate Du. Mrs Merkel is one-quarter Polish: her grandfather, Ludwig Kazmierczak, fought in the Polish army (the family later Germanised the name to Kasner).

Mr Steinmeier and Mr Sikorski are trying to maintain the momentum of the “Weimar” triangle, a loose grouping to promote co-operation between Germany, France and Poland. German foreign-policy pundits reckon this will not work. Relations between Germany and Poland and Germany and France are much closer than those between France and Poland, even though their ties have improved since François Hollande became France’s president in 2012. Yet Poland and Germany do not always see eye to eye either. In particular, the Poles criticise Germany’s dependence on Russian gas and its anti-nuclear policy and, more broadly, the West’s muted response to Russia’s aggression in Ukraine. The Germans, for their part, want Poland to make a clearer commitment to joining the euro.

Opposition politicians say that Mr Tusk tried too hard to improve relations with Germany and Russia and should have paid more attention to the region immediately to its east, from the Baltic to the Black Sea. They argue that the West will find Poland more useful if it concentrates on that region. PO insiders point out that the Polish government is the unofficial leader of the Visegrad group, a central European club that also takes in Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. And it was one of the driving forces of the Eastern Partnership, an EU initiative to foster closer relations with Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine that faltered last year when Ukraine did not sign up to an association agreement with the EU.

Patting the bear

Mr Tusk and Mr Sikorski did try to develop a constructive relationship with Russia. For example, in 2007 they dropped the objection raised by the previous (PiS) government to Russia’s bid to join the OECD, a rich-country club (membership talks are now frozen thanks to the stand-off over Ukraine). In return Russia abandoned a ban on Polish meat imports. Trade relations and cultural exchanges flourished for a while. Even so, Polish-Russian relations in the past seven years were never without hitches. In 2008 the Polish-Russian Group on Difficult Matters, a new government-sponsored forum for intellectuals and historians from both countries, was established to improve dialogue on the tortured history of Polish-Russian relations. Those “difficult matters” include the Polish-Soviet war following the Bolshevik revolution, the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland in September 1939 and, perhaps the most traumatic event, the mass murder of thousands of Polish officers by Soviet security forces at Katyn in 1940. In the new spirit of reconciliation Mr Tusk and Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, agreed in 2010 to hold a joint ceremony to mark the 70th anniversary of Katyn. Three days later a plane carrying the Polish president, Lech Kaczynski, crashed in the fog near Smolensk in Russia. All 96 people on board were killed. Some PiS members still blame the Russians.

Respekt, a Czech liberal weekly, put Mr Sikorski on its cover, with the banner headline “Europe’s new leader”

The biggest setback to relations between the two countries has been the Ukraine crisis. From the start of Mr Putin’s intervention there, Poland has been advocating strong sanctions against Russia and an increased NATO presence on the eastern flank of the alliance. In early February Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, assured Mr Sikorski and Germany’s Mr Steinmeier at a security conference in Munich that Russia wanted the situation in Ukraine to calm down and was seeking a compromise. By the end of that month Russia had, in effect, swallowed Crimea.

“I used to think that the crisis could have been avoided had we signed the agreement [on a closer association with the EU] with Yanukovych [the deposed Ukrainian president] earlier,” says Mr Kwasniewski. But now he feels that Mr Putin is determined to be the founder of a fourth Russian superpower, after Peter the Great, Catherine the Great and Stalin, and that Russia will do everything it can to destabilise Ukraine.

Certainly the events in Ukraine have enhanced Poland’s role within the EU and NATO. Respekt, a Czech liberal weekly, put Mr Sikorski on its cover at the end of March, with the banner headline Novy Lidr Evropy, Europe’s new leader, against the background of a map of central Europe, with Niemcy (Polish for Germany) in the west and Cholera (Polish for damn) in the east. Mr Sikorski is often mentioned as a possible successor to Catherine Ashton, the EU’s foreign-policy supremo.

As the EU and NATO are scrambling to rethink their Ostpolitik, Poland’s long-standing warnings about the need for stronger defence policies and more defence spending seem to have been vindicated. In recent years Poland has felt neglected by America, particularly after Barack Obama, the American president, abandoned the idea of a long-range-missile shield to be based in the Czech Republic and Poland. It was an unfortunate coincidence that Mr Obama made the announcement on September 17th 2009, the 70th anniversary of Poland’s invasion by the Soviet Union. Poles are also miffed that they still need a visa to go to America. When Mr Obama visited Poland in early June he announced a plan to spend an additional $1 billion on America’s military presence in Europe. That was a step in the right direction for Poles, but it still fell short of their high expectations from the world’s sole superpower.