The train was
trundling through the Warsaw suburbs towards the north-west. It was Easter
weekend, and many travellers were on their way to family gatherings in the
provinces. I shared the carriage with an elegantly dressed young Polish woman,
who had studied in Birmingham and spoke fluent English. She now worked in
Warsaw as a translator of Polish films. When I mentioned to her that in 2018 Poland would celebrate the centenary of its independence, she smiled
hesitantly and said: “Yes … maybe we will get there.”
Nothing paints
as poignant a picture of Europe’s history as a journey across this country,
whose borders have shifted so many times and lands have been carved up so
ruthlessly that it nearly disappeared from the map. It was a key battleground
for two world wars, the scene of horrendous crimes, then became trapped for
four decades behind the iron curtain.
Today, Poland is the continent’s economic
growth champion, a genuine success story of post-communist transition. But
understandably, it is not free of anxieties.
Russia’s
aggression against neighbouring Ukraine has changed almost everything. Poland is deeply concerned about its
national security and about the degree of solidarity its western allies are
able – and willing – to demonstrate. This anxiety is not limited to the ruling
class, or politicians. It is deeply felt by the population. On 10 April, Poland
will commemorate the fifth anniversary of the plane crash in
Smolensk that killed its then president and 95 other.
Poles, many of whom belonged to the military and defence elite – a traumatic
episode that was made worse by Russia’s refusal to authorise the return of the
wreckage. All this explains why the woman on the train made nervous jokes about
Poland making it to that anniversary unscathed.
From afar – from
London, Paris or Berlin – there is still a tendency to see Poland as something
of a backwater, a place of rich culture but essentially an economic hinterland
for Germany’s powerful industry, a country of low salaries whose youth stream
out in search of better paid jobs (2.2 million Poles live in other EU
countries, some 600,000 of them in the UK).
One hears western officials comment off the record that the Poles, along with the Baltic people, are a bit paranoid about Russian aggression and too obsessed with their historic grievances. It’s crazy to think Vladimir Putin would attack Poland, say these westerners.
But Poland got
one thing right: it never believed in “the end of history”,
Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 formula proclaiming the inevitable triumph of
liberal democracy over ideology. This scepticism led Poland to push extremely
hard for admittance to Nato and the EU, both seen as virtual life insurance
policies for the nation.
The profound transformation Poland has undergone,
sometimes through painful shock therapy, has not only been a matter of
improving living standards, but comes from a desire to cement its national
security. In 1989, its GDP per capita was around 5% of the western European
average. Today it’s 70%.
“Poland is a
fundamentally vulnerable country because it has no natural barriers against
more powerful countries in the east and west, which was a curse in our
history,” says former foreign minister Radek Sikorski. Now president of the
Polish parliament, he describes the profound shifts that have occured in his
country as follows: “In 1989, all of our neighbours changed, and we found
ourselves with benign neighbours”.
Russia withdrew its troops and didn’t oppose Poland’s integration with the
west. Germany became a friend. In the last 25 years, we have used this
historical window rather well – to modernise, integrate with the west and build
a new society. But this was predicated on international circumstances that are
now being challenged by the first forceful changing of borders on the European
continent since the second world war.”
Nato has tried to send reassuring signals, for example
by, for the first time, conducting military exercises in Poland, or by making
plans for a new“rapid reaction” force. A column of American troops recently travelled across Poland in a show of
solidarity. But doubts remain whether article 5 of the North
Atlantic treaty, the
“all for one, one for all” security guarantee the alliance provides, is
sufficient to discourage Putin from more war-mongering.
Poland would much prefer to have two US
brigades under Nato command stationed on its territory. This was opposed by
Germany on the grounds that it would violate the Nato-Russia agreement of 1997.
Polish officials have a point when they say privately that the German position
is questionable, because the agreement explicitly rested on the notion that
strategic circumstances would remain unchanged in Europe, which is no longer the case. A Polish diplomat put
it to me this way: “In 2014, with the Russian annexation of Crimea and the
Russian assault in the Donbass, the unthinkable became reality.”
Poland was equally irritated about being
left out of the Franco-German efforts to negotiate a ceasefire between Russia
and Ukraine. It saw that as another German concession to Putin. Events in
Ukraine are closely watched by Warsaw, as a test of Europe’s capacity to defend
its principles and interests. “If Putin is undeterred in Ukraine, he may go
further and stir trouble, for example in the Baltic states. If he is not met
with a sufficient response, it will open an era of Nato weakness that would be
very undermining,” says Marcin Zaborowski, who heads the Polish Institute of
International Affairs.
Polish anxiety is only enhanced by the
feeling that, as Zaborowski puts it, “we are lonely in the region”. The Baltic
states may share Poland’s perspective. But Hungary is seen as a client-state of
Russia, and the Czech Republic and Slovakia have failed to put brakes on the
penetration of Russian capital and influence, which is felt in their criticism
of European sanctions against Russia. Central Europe has become geopolitically
fragmented.
So how is Poland reacting to all this?
First, it is planning to modernise its armed forces. It intends to spend a
whopping €40 billion over the next 10 years on a missile defence system, attack
helicopters, submarines, armed vehicles and drones. American, French and German
defence industries are all lining up to compete. Whether Poland chooses to buy
European or American equipment will be an indicator of where it believes its
best security guarantees lie, and also of what hopes remain for a common
European defence policy.
Second, Poland is pushing for maximum
western solidarity towards Ukraine, hoping for the equivalent of a Marshall
plan. If Ukraine manages to save itself from economic collapse, Poland will
feel safer.
Third, Poland wants to revive the
diplomatic alliance of the “Weimar triangle” (comprising France, Germany and
Poland), whose foreign ministers recently met in the western Polish city of
Wrocław. The feeling in Warsaw is that even if the German chancellor Angela
Merkel rightly has no illusions about Putin, Germany has tended to monopolise
European foreign policy in dealing with Russia.
Before she got off the train, my young
Polish travel companion said that after war broke out in Ukraine, her family
discussed emigrating to New Zealand. “You see,” she explained, “we agreed that
if the worst were to happen, we weren’t the type of people who would take up
arms. Other Poles would though.” I realised what a huge gap remains between my
western European mindset and that of central Europeans. History
can change much more quickly here.
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