No Joke: Poland is our best friend in Europe

WHEN EUROPE THREW a big party in Copenhagen in December, Poland nearly spoiled the fun. Unhappy with the membership terms offered by the European Union, the Poles held out for a few extra billion euros, knowing full well the "historic" enlargement jamboree couldn't take place without the biggest of the Central European candidates. The E.U. caved and put up extra cash, securing the claim to have "reunified Europe" and "buried Yalta." Polish prime minister Leszek Miller, a veteran of one of his country's last Communist governments, thanked native son Pope John Paul II for getting Poland into "Europe."

The theatrics in Copenhagen may be a foretaste of things to come in the expanded Europe. Not since Britain joined in 1973 has the old guard in Paris, Berlin, and Brussels been so uneasy about a new member. Leave aside Poland's stagnant economy, its dangerous populists, and its corruption scandals. Poland is a pain because its heart isn't in Europe but across the Atlantic.

It's a deeply worrying prospect for the euro-nationalists. The E.U.'s constitutional convention, now underway in Brussels, aims to strengthen the common foreign policy after Europe's failure to stand up to America on Iraq, Kyoto, and the international criminal court. On January 14, France and Germany (a.k.a. Old Europe) backed the creation of the post of European president, in part to give the E.U. a stronger voice, and a week later Paris sided with Germany's pacifistic stance on war with Iraq. A European military force will be up and running this year. And while many different camps have a say in the often tedious debate over Europe's future, most are still tempted to define Europe against America, as in de Gaulle's day, and to see their values or interests as divergent.

The coming expansion of the E.U. to 25 countries and 445 million people (up from 15 countries and 378 million people today) might just make Europe better able to stand up to America in world affairs. But there's a hitch. Poland, the most important of the incoming members, with its 40 million people and strategic location on the E.U.'s future eastern frontier, is Washington's closest ally on the Continent. During the drawn-out negotiations over membership, French president Jacques Chirac pointedly warned Polish foreign minister Bronislaw Geremek that Poland better not be the "American Trojan horse in Europe" or Paris might veto its accession (as de Gaulle once did Britain's). Some in the Brussels press corps casually refer to Poland as a "Fifth Column."

Maybe they're right. Only a few weeks after Copenhagen, Warsaw bought 48 F-16 fighters from Lockheed Martin for $3.8 billion, snubbing two European offers. "As a thank-you present for entry into Europe, what a success!" said a scandalized Serge Dassault, whose French concern, Dassault Aviation, lost out. For three days, his newspaper, the Paris daily Le Figaro, ran letters from readers calling the Poles ingrates and bad Europeans.

The pique in Paris, however, was mostly for show. The French, like the Poles, had known all along that the biggest military tender ever in the former Warsaw Pact would go to a U.S. concern. (Congress gave Poland a favorable loan to cover the purchase, and Lockheed Martin threw in more goodies, including about $10 billion of "offset" investments, than either of the European concerns could muster.) While the jets will help Poland take a bigger role in NATO and any other U.S.-led coalition--the Poles, unlike the Germans, say they're ready to serve in Iraq--the planes were meant to send a clear signal. "With Europe, you have to talk and be on good terms," says Tomasz Lis, anchor of Poland's most-watched evening news show, Fakty. "But the relationship with America is sacred."

Polish president Aleksander Kwasniewski didn't seem to care about French feelings. A former sports minister in the Communist era and a savvy politician, Kwasniewski knows polls show the Poles to be among the most pro-American of nations. They're still grateful to Washington for getting Poland into NATO--and ambivalent about the economic costs of joining the E.U. After the jet sale, Kwasniewski went to Washington for the second time in six months. At their White House meeting, President Bush said, "I have got no better friend in Europe today."

From the Polish perspective, the attraction needs no explanation. France and Britain failed Poland in 1939, and again at Yalta (while many Poles rationalize American complicity in the division of Europe, saying Stalin manipulated a frail FDR). Ten million Polish Americans strengthen the bond. The national mythology touts self-sacrifice on behalf of the West against a Barbaric East, going back to the defense of Vienna against the Turks, the Polish army's victory against the Bolsheviks in 1920, and the Polish air force's role in the defense of London in World War II. Less than a year after communism fell, on the eve of the first Gulf War, Polish special forces spirited six U.S. operatives out of Iraq (a story later made into a hit Polish film). Poland's special forces unit, GROM, a standout in an outmoded military, was also deployed in Haiti in 1994.

This eagerness to prove themselves good allies no doubt helped the Poles' cause at NATO and served their narrow national interest. But it also serves America. Through NATO and in many other ways, the United States is a European power. The Europeans aren't the easiest allies; but in the Balkans and Afghanistan, they run the peacekeeping operations. And in a wider Europe, Poland will have potentially broad influence. Inside NATO, the Poles are staunch defenders of the alliance and generally support military engagements abroad. And they sit on a still fragile frontier. Their eastern neighbors include Ukraine, which allegedly sells radar systems to Saddam Hussein, and Belarus, whose president is Europe's last dictator and another Saddam pal. The Poles can be a westward bridge and a good example for these and other former Soviet countries toward which the E.U. has no coherent policy.

AND THERE'S A BETTER REASON to welcome not only the Poles but the other East Europeans into the E.U. For half a century, building Europe was about burying World War II and nudging France and Germany to get along. The current crop of Western European leaders don't have the war to guide them: Gerhard Schröder, ousting Helmut Kohl in 1998, said Germany needed to free itself from its past. Germany's foreign minister Joschka Fischer and the E.U.'s foreign policy chief Javier Solana spent their youth protesting against America rather than feeling grateful for its role in ending the war and rebuilding Europe.

The incoming members had markedly different formative years. Soviet tyranny ended only a dozen years ago. These countries know it wasn't Germany or France that brought down the Soviet empire or that championed their entry into NATO and the E.U. A decade ago, the Europeans stood by as the Balkans descended into war, less than an hour's flight from Vienna. The Balkans aren't that different from Bulgaria or Poland. The Bosnian war remains a useful reminder that Brussels, Paris, and even London haven't yet proven themselves mature enough to look after their messy continent without U.S. help.

So the debate over a divergence in "values" between Europe and America sounds baffling from Warsaw. There, America's "values" aren't rejected. The E.U. may hold the ticket to First World living standards, but America's "moralistic" foreign policy has more appeal to Poles than European realpolitik. And of the 10 incoming E.U. members, only Poland--the most pro-American of the lot--has any strategic weight. Its support for NATO and for U.S. intervention against "rogue regimes," as well as its skepticism about a common European foreign policy and the E.U.'s military ambitions, will have an impact.

Far from widening the trans-Atlantic gulf, the enlargement of the E.U. should change the tenor and substance of relations for the better--as long as the United States retains its leadership role in NATO, and the newcomers master the rules of the E.U.'s sometimes bizarre political game. To succeed in doing this after its accession to the E.U. in 2004, Warsaw will need savvy diplomacy. The link with the United States can help. American diplomats and visiting congressmen, for their part, hope Poland, once inside the E.U., can assist in resolving nasty trade disputes.

For now, the biggest question mark is whether Poland can get its domestic house in order. The recession is hurting. An early post-Communist dose of "shock therapy" sparked an economic boom in the 1990s, but reform has stalled. The farmers are hungry for subsidies that Brussels doesn't want to give. Fringe parties are growing more popular. Poland needs to be a success story to matter in Europe. At the moment, the most encouraging sign is an ambiguous one: No country has provoked so much grumbling in Brussels since Margaret Thatcher lived at 10 Downing Street.

Matthew Kaminski is an editorial page writer for the Wall Street Journal Europe.

"They helped the nazis identify all the Jews in Poland better than any other country. 90% of the Jews in Poland were killed in the holocaust."

That is post-war rhetoric written by Jews. Many of the Jews who were identified were done by their own fellow Jews. That was the case in the area of my family.

My own spouse is a descendantt of Judah and we have spent enough to get Russian Jews back to Israel so don't give me the old anti-semetic line. It is tired and very like what I hear from the Jesse Jackson/Al Sharpton group wresting privilege out of someone elses' pain. It is time to stand up and insist on truth not whining for or trading for privileged treatment.

Please take revisionist history surmised by those who were not there with grains of salt.

When did I ever say anything about demanding privileged treatment or call anyone anti-semetic? I merely replied to a post that was talking about how brave the poles were in fighting the nazis with some facts that suggest otherwise.

Actually, Hitlers plans for extermination also included the Poles. His plan called for the elimination of the Polish people by 1975. Not only that, Hitlers first visible racism occurred when he saw the slavic Poles living in Austria. That was documented in the book Hitler and Stalin. Obviously Hitler was an idiot. Little did he know that the King of Poland had saved Austria from the Turks a few centuries before. But then again, Old Europe has a history of stabbing New Europe in the back. Germanies invasion of Poland in 1939 took the Poles by complete surprise. You see the Old Europian country Germany had just signed a treaty. And when the Russians invaded Poland from the east about 2 weeks later, the Poles at first thought the Russians had come to help them fight the Germans. Stabbed in the back twice in two weeks by Old Europe. Never trust an Old Europian signature or for that matter their new champion, Saddam Hussien's.

We would all do well to remember that when the German Enigma code was broken in Britain in 1940, it was done on the back of some mathematical work done by Poles and smuggled out of Poland by those same mathematicians in September 1939.

Anyone telling Polish jokes should be asked to sit down with slide rule and pencil and break the Enigma code.

Poland knows better than to rely on the French, who didn't do a damn thing to help Poland in her hour of need even after the French declared war on Nazi Germany.

Well, Poland didn't deserve any help. They saided with the Nazis them selfs and where very happy to help Hitler destroy Czechoslovakia 38. They got exactly what they deserved.

I pointedly excluded them.

Go throw your cold water on another post.

This post is celebrating good friends, which the KLA and Bosnians are NOT.

Most of those spoke out to try to save the Jews but the Jews have almost nothing to say about them.

What a lie and I'm not Jewish.

There is very much the tradition of speaking about them.

They are deemed "Righteous Gentiles". There is a grove of trees and a monument to them in Israel.

The Eastern block knows how to take orders and fall in line. It is a story of uniformity in both cases.

Huh?

Your answer shows your knowledge of history is short. The Poles and Eastern Europeans were part of the "eastern Bloc" for a very short time in terms of their history.

Quips aren't a substitute for knowledge.

Well, Poland didn't deserve any help. They saided with the Nazis them selfs and where very happy to help Hitler destroy Czechoslovakia 38. They got exactly what they deserved.

Czechoslovakia stole Teschen (Cieszyn) back in 1919, the Poles rightfully stole it back in 1938. Don't play the Czechs as being completely innocent here.

"What a lie and I'm not Jewish.

There is very much the tradition of speaking about them."

Then you can assure me that those who know the current meaning of holocaust also know of and about the righteous gentiles, too, or that holocaust applies to gentiles at all. Does holocaust these days apply to other than Jews who were "holocausted"?

I very well know about the grove of trees memorial. I know of very few Americans, English, Polish, or others globablly who do. Nor do I think it matters except that some can get the idea that goyim can only be righteous if they relate to certain people in a specific way.

Happygirl, the fact that you are not Jewish is of no consequence to me. People I respect,love and serve include Jewish, goyim, heathen, religious, etc.

They have something in common, however, truth is vitally important to them. They do not have one standard for the Jew, another for gentile, another for heathen, another for Republicans, etc. Truth is rarely used these days as a touchstone so it makes for a unique filter. Society's lack of it has brought us to the degradation, harm and the confusion we see all about us.

"Actually, Hitlers plans for extermination also included the Poles. His plan called for the elimination of the Polish people by 1975. Not only that, Hitlers first visible racism occurred when he saw the slavic Poles living in Austria."

Thank you for that. I did not know it. The Austrian border changed so often that without moving one's family could have had a houseful of children born in various countries depending on the date.

Czechoslovakia stole Teschen (Cieszyn) back in 1919, the Poles rightfully stole it back in 1938. Don't play the Czechs as being completely innocent here.

I don't, not least since my knowledge of history in that area is not that good, impressive to find an American? T that knows the pre WW2 history this well. But in the case of Poland, the lessons learned should be that if you sleep with a serpent you should expect to get bitten. I don’t like the modern history teaching that constantly display Poland as an innocent victim of an aggressive Germany. The Poles played the same game, but they lost much earlier.

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