Can Poland Keep the Club From Flying Apart?

The current center-left government, meanwhile, which won a major parliamentary victory four years ago, is now facing the prospect of political oblivion in a welter of accusations of corruption and mismanagement. But it is trying to tap into the popular support for the E.U. that the opinion polls are showing. Knowing that the provinces are looking to the E.U. for local development funds, the present government, led by Prime Minister Marek Belka, is seeking to turn the E.U. budget crisis to its advantage. Recently, it undertook to help repair the rift over the budget between President Jacques Chirac of France and British Prime Minister Tony Blair by arranging meetings between the French, German and British foreign ministers in Warsaw. The attempt didn't come to much; the row is too fresh, and Warsaw doesn't have the political clout to actually bang heads together and force the French and British to come to any agreement soon.

But it underlined how much Poland needs an integrated E.U. moving ahead rather than one paralyzed by internal strife. And this is not least because we need the E.U. to have a common policy toward Poland's eastern neighbors -- such as Ukraine, Belarus and Russia -- that would secure democracy and stability in this part of the world. Poles saw entry into the E.U. as entry into a safe harbor, but now the harbor walls are in danger of being dismantled and the sea has become decidedly choppy. This means that Poland will have to hone new diplomatic skills for the effort to help keep the E.U. together.

In the 1950s, when the two Frenchmen Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman crafted their vision of a European Union -- a community that would help former enemies become friends and allies -- the memory of wars in Europe was still fresh. The wartime memories that inspired Monnet and Schuman's sense of urgency have now faded in Western Europe. But in Poland and the other Eastern European member states, the memory of Soviet occupation and of the more recent strife in the Balkans is very much alive.

Which means, it seems to me, that the new member states of the Union are now closer to the E.U.'s roots than their partners in the West -- in "old" Europe. And it may well be that the future of the E.U. depends on the ability of the new members to remind the old of what the original, essential mission of the European Union was.

Author's e-mail: bobinski@it.com.pl

Krzysztof Bobinski, former Warsaw correspondent for the London Financial Times, now works with the Warsaw-based think tank Unia & Polska (The Union & Poland).