Polish foreign policy: Frosty for the French

Date: 01/03/03

Poles love America but want to be at the heart of Europe too

THEY have a new nickname in Warsaw for the French president: Jacques Brezhnev. Mr Chirac's rebuke to Poland and other central European countries for signing a pro-American letter in the midst of the Iraq crisis has not - to put it mildly - gone down well. Wladyslaw Serafin, head of the main farmers' union, says that the emergence of a “western Brezhnev” has made it harder to campaign in favour of Poland joining the EU when the country votes in a referendum in June. Even Bronislaw Geremek, a francophile former foreign minister, has scolded the Polish government for not rebutting Mr Chirac more vigorously.

It is hard to gauge how enduring the impact of the French president's comments will be. Roza Thun, who runs the pro-European Robert Schuman Foundation in Warsaw, says his remarks have not caused too much of a stir among the population at large. So she hopes their effects will be limited.

Ironically, many Polish intellectuals think that Mr Chirac's fears about the impact of the Poles and other central Europeans pushing an American agenda once they join are misplaced. Lena Kolarska-Bobinska, director of the Institute for Public Affairs in Warsaw, points out that opinion polls show that Poles put a higher priority on cultivating relations with the EU than on improving ties with the Americans. She also doubts whether central Europeans will promote a highly individualistic, free-market vision of society that is closer to the American model than to the EU's. On the contrary, she says, Poles like the communitarianism of today's French and Germans.

Even when it comes to the issue of the day - Iraq - the gap between western and central European views can be exaggerated. Opinion polls across the “new Europe” show big majorities of Poles, Czechs and Hungarians also against a war on Iraq. But their opposition is a lot more muted - and many Poles are delighted by reports that the Americans may move some of their military bases from Germany to Poland. While anti-war demonstrations in western European capitals drew hundreds of thousands of protesters, a crowd of barely 2,000 attended a similar one in Warsaw.

That reflects the emotional gap between western and central Europeans in attitudes to the United States. As the Schuman Foundation's Mrs Thun exclaimed to a crowd of stony-faced journalists visiting from Brussels: “Here in Poland we love the United States. We feel European, but we love America.”