Poland Antagonizes Germany While Aspiring for Regional Leadership

Friday, September 16, 2022

Uriel Araujo, researcher with a focus on international and ethnic conflicts

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, in his recent exclusive interview to Spiegel, has criticized Berlin quite harshly, particularly on its energy policies, while boasting of his own country’s support to Kiev. There is a rising Polish-German rivalry and Warsaw is clearly antagonizing Berlin while trying to project its own influence within the bloc, with American support. Its ongoing attempts to absorb Ukraine in a confederacy should be seen as part of this agenda. In a way, the American elite is “fed up” with Germany.

In 2020, during the “Defender Europe 2020” military exercises, it had already become quite clear that Poland aspired to be the main stronghold of the US military presence in Eastern Europe – and the current conflict in Ukraine serves such ambitions quite well: in fact, Warsaw has made of Kiev a kind of top priority in its foreign policy. Washington in turn campaigned intensely against the (now abandoned) Nord Stream 2 Russian-German project, which could have avoided or at least minimized today’s energy crisis in Europe, and Warsaw has echoed this campaign. It seems the US now wants to promote Polish ambitions towards regional hegemony as a means to counter Berlin. An example of this are the ongoing projects for a Polish-Ukrainian confederacy.

Throughout its history Poland has often been the object of Great Power’s policies and plans. Even today Warsaw is largely isolated within the European bloc, as a kind of an outcast. Such an idea has become a kind of commonplace in the West amongst the educated. There is of course some truth to that, particularly pertaining to the twentieth century, from Versailles to Yalta and onwards. Polish history, including its relations with Kiev, however, is far more complicated – and so is its present.

In fact, a large part of today’s Ukraine was once part of the then Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. After 1569, most of today’s Western Ukraine became Polish territory. However, the pressures for Polonization (which included converting to Roman Catholicism and the persecution of the Orthodox Church) gradually alienated peasants and Cossacks. These were Christian Orthodox Eastern Slavs being oppressed by Roman Catholic Western Slavs. Thus, in 1648, the Cossack leader Bohdan Khmelnytsky led an uprising against the Polish monarch, and founded the Cossack Hetmanate, which, in 1654, by the Pereyaslav agreement, pledged its loyalty to the Russian Tsar. Khmelnytsky has been hailed to this day as a Ukrainian national hero and liberator, and a precursor of  nationalism because of his fight against Polish domination.

More recently, in the beginning of the twentieth century, Warsaw saw Ukraine as a potential buffer zone against Bolshevism, and after the 1921 Riga peace treaty, Poland ruled once again over Western Ukrainian territories, a fact that is often forgotten in the West. The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and other similar groups opposed this rule by employing terrorist tactics which were met with harsh repression. In this context, during the 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union, many such nationalist Ukrainians sided with the Nazis, thereby hoping to gain German support for their independence. Some even took part in anti-Polish counter-insurgency operations under the Waffen-SS: the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) in fact committed several war crimes against Poles. These actions are considered genocide by many Western and Polish historians today – and even by respected Ukrainian historians such as Yaroslav Hrytsak.

In a way, the past remains present, and the legacy of this anti-Polish West Ukrainian nationalism’s entanglement with fascism has left its marks, which have been hampering Polish-Ukrainian bilateral relations, and which are visible to this day in such key political-military actors as the infamous neo-Nazi Azov Regiment.

Back to today, Poland has indeed been quite isolated within Europe, being the target of condemnations by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), for instance – which made Warsaw seek a closer alliance with Ankara. Due to its ruling Law & Justice Party (PiS) supposed “authoritarian turn”, Poland did enter on a collusion route with Brussels on a number of issues and PiS leaders are vocal critics of the EU and Berlin to this day.

Even so, Warsaw kept courting the West, urging Washington to support the Three Seas Initiative (3SI) as a Western “counterweight” to Chinese investments in “critical infrastructure” – as  Polish Foreign Minister Zbigniew Rau and his Romanian counterpart, Bogdan Aurescu, wrote in a June 2021 article published in Francis Fukuyama’s “American Purpose”. As mentioned, Poland also actively opposed Russian-German Nord Stream 2.

The irony is that while Warsaw seeks to achieve regional hegemony and to regain a certain importance as a political actor in Europe, it is in fact being “played” by the US. Polish ongoing projects pertaining to a Ukrainian-Polish confederacy are bound to face immense challenges regarding Ukrainian’s own nationalist far-right and the complicated Ukrainian-Polish history. This can only escalate Polish-Ukrainian tensions dramatically, not to mention the current migration crisis. 

It remains to be seen whether Europe can even survive the coming winter and the European bloc seems to be silently abandoning Ukraine while the US itself, currently overburdened and overextended in its efforts to contain both Beijing and Moscow at once, has no choice but to exercise restraint. Thus, a local actor such as Poland may allow itself to act as a proxy for American interests, but it will bear itself the greatest costs amid the coming recession and growing popular dissatisfaction with war expenses and European elites.

Source: InfoBrics