Well, no joke either, but, while the Thatcher government supported Solidarity, the British trade union movement went on supporting their brothers in the official Polish trade union movement for several years.Last month, the country elected a new center-right Parliament that will hold to what is pretty much both conviction and emotion here: that you stick to the Americans for security, support for your still great notions of freedom emphasis on the place of religion in society, and Polish independence.
You back neighboring Ukraineâs break from dictatorship to democracy to the hilt, and you wish insistently and out loud for democratic change in Belarus, another neighbour still under authoritarian rule.
The EU, rather more coolly, is associated mostly here with both caution and aspirations for prosperity â specifically the cash subsidies that are needed to sustain the Polish voyage to higher living standards.
As for freedom, the Polish mind-set on Western Europe had been indelibly marked by considerable hesitation there to openly support the Solidarity trade unionâs rebellion against Communist rule in 1981.
No joke, an Austrian speaker recalled, but his countryâs labor officials didnât recognize Solidarity until 1989!
Poland, as our readers will recall, led the East European ârebellionâ against the Franco-German attempt to dominate the European foreign policy agenda and, in lâescroc Chiracâs famous words, lost a great opportunity âto shut upâ. With that one phrase the man wiped out the entire long and expensive French attempt to line the new members up behind France within the EU.
Most East European countries have troops or police in Iraq and Afghanistan. Poland, in particular, has been uncompromisingly Atlanticist in its foreign policy. Successive governments and presidents have made it clear that a European identity in foreign policy was non-existent and not to be relied on.
Furthermore, as we have commented in numerous postings, the EU played very little part in the Ukrainian development last year, and has refused to get involved in Polandâs problems with Russia and Belarus. All these were dismissed as âbilateral mattersâ, though some of us had assumed that such a concept would not survive the creation of the common foreign and security policy.
As we have pointed out before, however, a common policy requires common interests and there are none. So, the EU continues to create foreign policy structures, make large and meaningless proclamations and promise to send troops (or something) round the world to sort other peopleâs problems out. Its own backyard, on the other hand, it cannot deal with.
Professor Bronislaw Geremek, member of the European Parliament, former Polish foreign minister and, before that, a courageous dissident, the man who ought to have become President of the European Parliament, told John Vinocur:
Or as the old Russian slogan enunciated by the few radicals that actually believed in freedom had it: â?? ???? ? ???? ???????.â For your freedom and ours.The EU is not seen as a valid reference for the security of the country. Weâre very sensitive to it at a time when Putin regards the new countries in the EU raising the possibility that Europe will be more hostile to Russia. The EU needs an ostpolitik which it hasnât yet defined. We know the situation well and can help define a policy in terms of fundamental Western notions.