Charlemagne: Of wars and weighted votes

Date: 03/01/04

The history and future of the German-Polish relationship

THE European Union was founded in reaction to the second world war. In many ways, its greatest triumph is that European leaders now spend their time arguing about fish quotas, not disputed frontiers. Yet occasionally memories of war bubble back to the surface. The recent deadlocked European Union summit in Brussels was just such an occasion.

That the central confrontation came between Germany and Poland was bound to stir up memories. But despite the tension, the EU could still claim to be exercising its civilising influence. This was not, after all, an argument about national survival. Rather it was a dispute between two democratic governments over voting rights, one to be settled by multilateral negotiations, not force of arms. The Germans want EU votes to reflect population size, giving them twice as much weight as the Poles. The Poles are leading the defence of the current system, which gives them almost as much clout as the Germans.

Poles usually make a point of not mentioning the war explicitly in any dealings with Germany. But they barely need to. It is implicit in their insistence that they will not be intimidated by demands from their bigger and more powerful neighbour. Asked by the BBC whether he was worried that Germany might make his country suffer for its obduracy, President Alexander Kwasniewski of Poland exploded that his country was not afraid of suffering: Polish history was about suffering.

These days, the German approach to Poland seems slightly less weighed down by memories of the war. This is new. In the tortuous negotiations over the enlargement of the EU, which took up much of the 1990s, Germany championed the Polish cause, making much of its need for an historic reconciliation with its eastern neighbour. When other countries mused that Poland might not be ready to join the first wave of new entrants, the Germans were always the first to insist that any EU expansion without Poland was not worth having.

Now that Poland's entry is secure, though, the Germans seem to feel that past debts have been settled in full. Indeed the new German refrain is that the Poles are being unreasonable and arrogant in blocking the adoption of a new constitution, even before they are officially inside the Union's pearly gates. (Poland, along with nine other countries, mostly from central and eastern Europe, will formally join the EU only in May, but all have been included in the constitutional debate as they will be full members when any new constitution comes into force.) Gunter Verheugen, a European commissioner from Germany who handled the enlargement negotiations, recently fumed to the European Parliament that he now almost regrets all the efforts that he made on Poland's behalf. In the corridors of the Brussels summit one German diplomat was even heard to say, without apparent irony: “How can the Poles behave like this, after everything we have done for them?”

It is not just the Poles who are acutely aware of the weight of history. There was a distinct whiff of 1939 and all that in the reaction of British Conservatives to the way the plucky Poles had scuppered the EU constitution and “stood up to the Germans”. Perhaps the most tasteless comment in the summit's corridors came from a Swedish diplomat, who remarked: “Maybe the Poles could claim equal voting weight with Germany, by counting all the Poles that the Germans killed in the war.”

Not terribly funny, perhaps - but not entirely frivolous, either. Consider the reconciliation between France and Germany on which the EU was founded. The principle of absolute equality between aggressor and victim was clearly fundamental to the bargain. For over a decade after German reunification had boosted that country's population well beyond France's, the French continued to insist that the two should retain precisely equal voting weights. France formally abandoned this position only in 2002. “In the end you have to accommodate yourself to reality,” explains a French diplomat. “The Poles will have to do the same, eventually.”

Think national, speak Europe

The closeness of today's Franco-German relationship is often cited as a model for the future of German-Polish relations. But, whereas France and Germany have now had 50 years of working together in which to overcome old fears and hatreds, for most of that time Poland was locked away behind the Iron Curtain. The French and German leaderships like to argue that, partly as a result, Polish politicians are still fixated on old ideas of national sovereignty, while their two countries have moved on to a new sort of relationship, based on a fresh way of thinking that transcends such old categories as the “national interest” or “national security”.

To make the point that Germany is thinking of European rather than national interests in pressing for the new constitution, German diplomats are now recounting a key moment in the Brussels summit. Searching for a compromise, Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister who was chairing the talks, suggested to Gerhard Schröder, the German chancellor, that rather than moving to a voting system linked to population, Germany could simply have more votes within the current system: perhaps three more votes, giving Germany 32 votes, against 29 each for France, Britain and Italy, and 27 each for Poland and Spain. Mr Schröder dismissed this angrily: the point, he said, was not to increase German power, but to give the EU a more rational system of government.

Maybe so. But then a population-based voting system is even more advantageous to Germany. And, as one distinguished German chancellor, Bismarck, once put it: “I have always found the word Europe in the mouth of those politicians who were demanding from other powers something that they did not dare demand in their own name.”

The history and the future of the German-Polish relationship, in the context of the tensions between the two countries over the question of voting rights in the Council of the European Union.