The answer is domestic and, to a lesser extent, European politics.
“We were dependent on Russia, but today we are cutting this dependence,” Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said last week while inaugurating a new canal to the Baltic Sea. The canal’s contribution to this goal is dubious, but it will enable vessels to reach or depart the Polish port of Elblag without needing to traverse Russian territorial waters around Kaliningrad. More interesting was Morawiecki’s next statement: “We are cutting our dependence on both Russia and Germany.” This comes just a few weeks after Poland demanded $1.3 trillion in World War II reparations from Germany.
Warsaw’s reasons for distancing itself from Moscow – a hostile power with a proven history of invading its neighbors – are clear, but Berlin’s offenses are less obvious. Germany is Central Europe’s strongest country, with a latent capability to dominate most of the Continent. The Western powers’ strategy toward Germany since World War II has been to smother it with friendship – integrating its military into a U.S.-dominated alliance with its neighbors and, beginning with the European Coal and Steel Community, giving its economy the keys to a market of more than 450 million consumers and their countries’ resources.
Germany’s docility today in the face of Russia’s attack on the NATO-Russian buffer shows that the Western strategy was, if anything, too successful. When it comes to the immediate threat to Poland, Berlin is a friend to Warsaw. Why, then, is the head of Poland’s government trumpeting cryptic plans to reduce ties with Germany? The answer is domestic and, to a lesser extent, European politics.
The German Question
The roots of the European Union lie in predominantly U.S. efforts to find a way to unleash German economic potential while calming German anxieties about potential encirclement. For reasons having to do with geography, climate, culture, history and probably countless lesser factors, the Germans are experts at producing complex industrial goods – far more than the German population could possibly consume. This raises two problems: First, the resources necessary to produce all these unparalleled goods exceed Germany’s own resource pool. The German economy has to get them from somewhere else, whether via cheap trade and investment or conquest.
Second, a population of approximately 80 million couldn’t possibly consume all the vehicles, machinery, etc. that German industry can produce. The German economy needs easy access to foreign consumers – again, through preferential trade arrangements or conquest – to offload the excess. The U.S. strategy, which Washington advanced through deft diplomacy, economic incentives and security guarantees despite the reluctance of France and Britain, successfully resolved both German problems peacefully. The European common market was born, nestled in a political framework that had to grow with economic integration.
The resulting union is what Poland and other newly independent Soviet satellites and republics were desperate to join as the Soviet Union started to disintegrate. The EU all but guaranteed explosive economic growth and could open the door to NATO membership – that is, American military protection. Poland applied for EU membership in 1994 and joined in 2004 alongside nine of its neighbors. As expected, NATO invited Warsaw into its ranks in 1997, and the marriage was sealed less than two years later. The Polish economy saw 28 years of economic growth – even through the 2008 recession and Europe’s own subsequent crisis – before shrinking briefly in 2020.
But while this was happening, the post-Cold War world was taking shape. Politically, economically and militarily peerless on the world stage, the United States scrambled to capitalize on its advantage. It pushed for a more globalized world, with more and stronger political and economic bindings. Militarily, it enlarged the trans-Atlantic alliance and, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, embarked on an ill-fated campaign to spread democracy by force in the Muslim world.
The shock of the 2008 Great Recession gravely wounded social cohesion, not only in the U.S., and raised serious questions about the attractiveness and viability of the U.S.-led economic order and leadership. At the same time, America’s disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and its chaotic interventions in Libya and elsewhere undermined domestic support for military adventurism. By 2022, after some three decades of U.S. preponderance, the world is riddled with crises, and Americans’ willingness to pay the cost of being the world’s policeman has receded. (By how much is an open question. U.S. assistance to Ukraine and sanctions on Russia suggest it’s still higher than some observers believed.)
The Sovereignty Question
Where do Polish-German relations fit into this well-known history? Just as the Americans had their phase of overexuberance after the Cold War, so did the Europeans, including the Poles and other newly independent peoples. EU enlargement wasn’t an especially difficult sell. Incorporating much poorer ex-Soviet satellites and vulnerable states would be expensive, but the potential payoff was irresistible. Western European investors could snatch up cheap land, resources and companies, yielding a healthy profit, while Eastern European workers could flood the EU with cheap labor. Bureaucrats in Brussels gave considerable thought to how best to politically integrate the former communist states. It was not enough to make them see European integration in the same light as the founding members.
From the world wars, many Europeans and most Germans learned that European nationalism must be contained in the name of peace. During the Cold War, the early members of what would become the European Union got decades of practice trusting one another and cooperating for mutual benefit. But across the Iron Curtain, Moscow was stamping out European nationalism in its own way: using brutal covert and overt repression. While Western Europeans were discussing deeper political, economic and monetary integration in the late 1980s, the Soviets’ dire economic situation was depriving them of the ability to contain nationalism in Eastern Europe. By 1990, nationalism and democracy had won out in Central and Eastern Europe.
But democracy alone is not enough. Whereas Western Europe’s collective identity over decades had focused on multilateralism and compromise, its liberated neighbors to the east had been learning the value of cohesiveness, national pride and sovereignty. Without those things, they would not have regained their autonomy. Where a West German saw the loss of some national sovereignty to Brussels as the price of prosperity and peace – and thus a net positive for Bonn’s sovereignty overall – a Pole was mistrustful of any appeals to share decision-making power.
National identities form over generations, and changing them is hard. Poland’s current leadership, the Law and Justice Party (PiS), is particularly committed to Polish nationalism and conservative values. Its largest political opponents are pro-European liberals and centrists, closer to the prevailing politics in Western Europe, where the bulk of EU decision-making power lies.
Drawing on their cultural and historical memory, Polish national-conservatives are xenophobic, especially Islamophobic, and generally intolerant of social diversity. (The Western European experience, despite its imperfections, is simply different.) The prevailing ideology in Poland, while reserving its most intense disdain for the Kremlin, is highly mistrustful of Germany’s relative social liberalism.
More important, PiS wants to make fundamental changes to the Polish judicial system, but it has failed to convince most of the EU that its intentions are good and its concerns legitimate. Brussels and most Western European capitals suspect PiS is working to weaken or eradicate Polish political and social liberalism, a challenge to their own regimes but also to the EU, which is founded on liberal ideas like compromise, diversity, civil rights and the rule of law.
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