Pologne : un "pont des soupirs"

Deux mois après s’être enthousiasmés du rôle joué par leur pays lors de la « révolution » ukrainienne, les Polonais sont quelque peu désabusés devant les orientations actuelles de la politique étrangère menée par Varsovie, écrit Jakub Jedras  dans Transitions Online.

Aleksander Kwasniewski received a very warm welcome when he visited Washington in early February. There were smiles and bonhomie. There was talk of the “strategic, lasting character” of Polish-U.S. cooperation and a promise from President George Bush to try and squeeze $100 million from Congress to help modernize the Polish military, an offer that seems to have defused a Polish threat to scale back its presence in Iraq. The only thing marring the public performance was that Kwasniewski suddenly discovered that, to Bush, he was “Prime Minister Kwasniewski,” not President Kwasniewski. 

This might, of course, have been a slip of the memory, rather than ignorance. President Bush has done the same before, mixing up Slovakia and Slovenia, for example. That will not stop Bush meeting Russia’s Prime Minister–sorry, President—Vladimir Putin in Bratislava on 24 February. Nonetheless, it was an embarrassment for a country labeled a “fantastic ally” by Bush when the presidents met on 9 February and, for some political commentators, further evidence that Washington does not take Warsaw seriously on issues other than Iraq.

And Poland certainly wants to be taken seriously, very seriously. On 17 February, the foreign ministry won parliament’s approval for a set of ambitious foreign policy goals for 2005. The policy may not explicitly say that Poland wants to be a great power, but that is what the four main aims all suggest. They are: to support the democratic changes in Ukraine, to strengthen Poland’s “privileged” relations with United States, to find a new formula for Polish engagement in Iraq after January’s elections, and to secure a favorable deal from the EU’s budget for 2007-2013. 

In effect, Poland sees itself as a bridge between the EU and the “Wider Europe” beyond the EU’s borders, and a bridge between Europe and the United States. These are grand aims and are the issues most animating discussion about Poland’s foreign policy, not Iraq or winning extra money from the EU.

Poland and the United States

But it would have been hard to guess that Poland’s aims are quite so lofty from Kwasniewski’s visit to Washington. It has become something of a tradition that the debate ahead of every Polish-American state visit is dominated by an issue of marginal importance compared to these great geopolitical visions: the demand for Poles to be able to enter the United States without a visa. It was the same this time.

The visa issue riles Poles. They have been going to America in large numbers for almost two centuries. To be forced to apply for a visa seems wrong to them, even discriminatory, since, for example, the Irish—another nation with a large U.S. diaspora—do not have to stand in 100 meter-long lines at an embassy and pay $100 to talk with a consular official. Every Polish president and prime minister feels obliged to discuss the problem with George Bush personally.

This time the meeting partly succeeded, at least officially. Bush and Kwasniewski announced a “road map” that will lead, first, to a liberalization of visa regulations and, ultimately, to Poles being able to travel without visas. But Polish public opinion simply took this as the leaders pulling the wool over its eyes. The road map “is a diplomatic record of excuses rather than a plan to repair this bad foreign policy of the United States,” wrote Tomasz Wroblewski, editor-in-chief of the Polish edition of Newsweek. “The United States should abolish visas as proof of its political respect for Poland”—which, in his eyes, primarily means respect for Poland’s role in Iraq, where it is one of the mainstays of the U.S.-led coalition. 

But Wroblewski also touched on a nagging Polish concern raised by the visa problem: that the Polish diaspora in the United States is less interested in Polish matters than it used to be and that its influence on Capitol Hill is waning. Such fears were, for example, a refrain (albeit muted) in coverage of the death of Jan Nowak-Jezioranski in late January. A wartime hero who relayed to London information about the activities of the Polish resistance and who later became the head of the Polish service of Radio Free Europe, Nowak-Jezioranski had used his retirement to push Poland up the U.S. agenda, eventually becoming a National Security Advisor. His personal relationship with residents of the White House and Capitol Hill was seen as critical in convincing Washington to take seriously the anti-communist Solidarity movement and Poland’s accession to NATO. 

To read the article in full, visit the Transitions Online website.