by Simon Korner

Poland, which during the 1980s was one of the most powerful wedges used by NATO to weaken Soviet power, is once again proving extremely useful. In NATO’s proxy war against Russia, not only has Poland pushed hard to escalate the conflict, demanding more ­– and more advanced – military aid to Ukraine, but it is also prominent in NATO’s ideological crusade. Poland was the first country to pledge Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine and has since promised MiG-29 fighters. Poland’s Ambassador to France has suggested direct Polish entry into the war if Ukraine looks like losing, a point echoed by former NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen who envisaged Poland going in at the head of the Baltic states.

On the ideological front, soon after the war began Poland’s prime minister called for the “de-Russification of the Polish and European economy”. (1) The vilification reached new heights when Polish president Duda tried to ban Poland’s opposition party led by Donald Tusk from office, accusing it of being pro-Russian. Russia’s former president Medvedev has called Poland “the most vicious, vulgar and shrill critic of Russia”. (2)

Poland is useful to NATO for other reasons too. It is playing a key role in bringing Germany into full alignment with US war aims and in the longer term diminishing German power. Polish rhetoric has been fiercely critical of Germany since the conflict began. It lambasted Germany for its initial hesitation in delivering tanks to Ukraine, while recently Polish diplomats attacked Germany and France for their “rotten response” to the war. (3) The US’s use of Poland to pressure Germany into supplying tanks had the larger aim of forcing Germany to burn its bridges with Russia – to the point where, in January 2023, German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock announced, “we are fighting a war against Russia.”

It’s no coincidence that Poland has also demanded €1.3 trillion from Germany in reparations for the cost of World War 2, a demand refused by Germany. As Russian commentator Ilya Tsukanov observes: “Poland was almost certainly egged on by its overseas allies in Washington and London.” (4) Such provocations predate the war. Jaroslaw Kaczynski, president of the ruling Law and Justice Party, accused Germany in December 2021 of seeking to create a Fourth Reich in Europe through its domination of the EU, in particular through the European Court of Justice, which is being used as an instrument to limit Polish sovereignty over its own laws and to promote euro-federalism. The US ambassador to Poland, Georgette Mosbacher, called EU criticism of Polish democracy “overblown” giving clear encouragement to Poland’s bid to challenge German and EU power. (5)

POLAND AND NATO 

Poland is now the new centre of NATO operations in Europe, and as such its status has risen rapidly. “Poland has become our most important partner in continental Europe,” one senior US Army official said and is the “main hub for supplying arms to Ukraine” (6)  While Germany, the traditional US ally in Europe since World War 2, remains central to NATO, it is Poland that is gaining a large new permanent US military presence with the US Army V Corps Forward Command base in Poland at Camp Kosciuszko (Camp K) the first such garrison in Poland and the eighth in Europe. Stars and Stripes, the US military newspaper, calls the establishment of Camp K a ‘milestone’. The number of US soldiers in Poland is now 10,000, according to the Polish Institute of International Affairs, with a further 4,000 in other eastern European countries. That’s double the number there was before the sharp rise in tensions that led to Russia’s intervention in Ukraine.

In addition, Poland has asked for US nuclear weapons to be stationed on its territory, while a US missile base is being built at Redzikowo to store offensive missiles aimed at Russia. Already US heavy strategic bombers are free to cross Polish airspace towards Russia, as part of NATO’s ‘air policing’ of the Baltics, which involves aircraft that can carry both conventional and nuclear weapons.

POLAND'S EXPANSIONIST AMBITIONS

Poland’s ambitions to become a major power in its own right are useful to the US and Britain. Poland’s army of 150,000 troops is only slightly smaller than Germany’s 170,000. But Poland plans to double its troops numbers to 300,000 by 2035 – making it the largest land army in Europe – and is raising its defence spending from 2.4% to 5% of GDP. Poland is a growing market for US arms manufacturers, paying €4.9 billion for 250 US Abrams tanks to replace the 240 Soviet-era tanks it has sent to Ukraine. It already has F-16 fighter planes and is buying 32 newer F-35s. It has, in addition, bought $10-12 billion worth of arms from South Korea, as well as Italian Leonardo helicopters which will be assembled in Poland.

Poland now has ambitions to expand territorially by annexing the western parts of Ukraine it once owned – known as eastern Lesser Poland or eastern Galicia. Vladmir Kozin of the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies believes Poland will make its move once Ukraine is sufficiently weakened by war. Preparations are in hand. President Duda announced Polish aspirations to remove the “physical border between Poland and Ukraine after the war. Especially when Ukraine becomes a member of the European Union”. (7) Ukrainian ‘patriot’ Zelensky has cleared the ground from Ukraine’s side for the ceding of his country to its northern neighbour. On a recent visit to Poland he announced: “In the future, there will be no borders between our peoples: political, economic and – what is very important – historical”. (8) Such a union of Poland and the rump of Ukraine could become the second-largest country in the EU and a major military power.

As the biggest and wealthiest country in Central and Eastern Europe, Poland seeks regional hegemony through alliances such as the 3 Seas Initiative (3SI). 3SI was established in 2015, in line with a plan drawn up by the US’s Atlantic Council, with the aim of expanding Poland’s sphere of influence. Its model is the post-World War 1 ‘Intermarium’, which Poland’s nationalist leader Jozef Pilsudski envisaged as a federation encompassing Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine, in turn based on the vast seventeenth century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Britain, Europe’s leading warmonger, has made a separate trilateral pact with Poland and Ukraine – outside NATO and the EU in which Germany and France have a voice. The pact’s purpose is to deepen east-European Atlanticism, according to the British-based Council on Geostrategy linked to the MoD, and to act as a counterweight to Germany and France, constraining the two main EU powers.

This strategy of pitting Europe’s east versus west was one developed first by Donald Rumsfeld in 2003 when he condemned France and Germany as “old Europe” for refusing to join the US “Coalition of the Willing” in Iraq and hailed the “new Europe” of the post-Socialist countries, enfeebled and more amenable to US control.

GERMAN POWER 

While Germany has been forced by the US to sabotage its own economy during the course of the Ukraine war, as the price of staying within the privileged US imperialist bloc on whose power it depends, Germany remains the leading European country, with eastern European countries like Poland economically subordinate to it and integrated into its economy. Poland produces washing machines for Bosch-Siemens, engines for Daimler and cars for VW. Bilateral trade grew 14% last year, according to Michał Baranowski, director of the German Marshall Fund’s office in Warsaw. Recently, Mercedes-Benz announced the construction of a €1bn plant to make electric vans in Jawor, southwestern Poland. One third of all Polish exports go to Germany.

The often touted success story of Poland in the EU overlooks the fact that it is still only 22nd among the 27 EU member states in terms of GDP per capita in purchasing power parity terms, despite having risen from 50% to 73% of the European average between 1990 and 2019 and despite overtaking Greece in 2015. Polish wages are well under half the average European wage, with labour costs in Poland €10 per hour, compared to €27 per hour as an average across the EU. Even though wages are rising, Poland will remain a “rather poorer country by EU standards”, according to Aleksander Laszek, chief economist at the Civil Development Forum thinktank in Warsaw. It is these low wages that attracted firms like Google, Samsung and others to invest in Poland in 2022. The final quarter of 2022 saw a 2.4% slump in Polish GDP, far worse than other European countries, according to Notes from Poland. If the German economic slowdown continues, Poland will face still greater difficulties. It has already lost hundreds of thousands of people of working age to emigration to higher wage countries and relies on its €600 billion in EU funding, which is far from guaranteed.

Cheap labour and manufacture from Poland and other east European countries has underpinned German imperialism’s growth since the defeat of Socialism and the unification of Germany. That unequal relationship persists.

GERMANY DOMINATES THE EU 

Germany is visiting the pain it has received at the hands of the USA on the other EU countries, especially the poorer east-European ones, by acting as the Union’s “economic policeman”. It continues to drive the very strict debt-reduction plan of the European Commission, based on the 1997 Stability and Growth Pact, which forces EU member countries to impose austerity if their deficit to GDP ratio rises above 3%. Such economic bullying is now exacerbated by the funnelling of funds towards the Ukraine war and away from welfare and productive investment, to the huge detriment of European working class living standards.

Germany is also pushing to end the unanimity required to decide EU foreign policy, in favour of majority voting. This would enable it to impose its will by whipping a bloc of dependent EU countries into line. According to Polish prime minister Morawiecki discussing the EU, “the political reality shows that the weight of the German and French voices is dominant. We are dealing with a formal democracy but a de-facto oligarchy where the power is held by those who are the strongest,” (9)

Moreover, the EU is tightening its grip on national courts within the Union as a way of achieving tighter EU integration through law rather than through treaties which are far harder to achieve. This latter, more political approach, is favoured by France. Germany wants to maintain its leading edge through the EU’s “aggressive attempts to impose its integrationist and socially progressive values across Central and Eastern Europe” as Thomas Fazi puts it. (10) From Poland’s point of view, “the threat to [it’s] sovereignty from the west [ie Germany and the EU] is greater than from the east” as one Polish MEP asserted. (11)

In order to push back, Poland is leveraging its developing partnership with the USA and Britain. Its ambitions clearly align with the US aim of shifting Europe’s balance of power towards the “new Europe” which is more responsive to US control and more unambiguously warlike against Russia.

POPULAR DISAFFECTION 

There are signs of public disaffection in Poland and Germany with both the war in Ukraine and the EU. Polish farmers forced their government to shut off imports of Ukrainian grain – supposedly transiting Poland – which flooded the market. Polish opinion polls also show growing doubts as to a Ukrainian military victory. There is also a ten point rise since 2022 (up from 33% to 45%) in those who believe EU membership limits Polish sovereignty too much.

In Germany war scepticism has been expressed in a number of ways, including the 800,000 signatories to the petition launched by Die Linke MPs Sahra Wagenknecht and Selim Dagdelen and in the booing of Scholz at an SPD public meeting. Support for the far-right AfD is growing and now stands at 19% in the polls. The AfD is reactionary in the Farage mould, it is Eurosceptic and also sceptical about arming Ukraine. Many AfD voters, particularly in eastern Germany retain residual cultural empathy with Russia. The changing mood extends well beyond the AfD – 55% of Germans now favour negotiations to end the war, while 56% say they are Eurosceptic. With real wages in Germany having fallen for the past two years, support is waning for the Ukraine war and EU austerity.

(1) Newsweek, 21/3/22

(2) Newsweek, 22/3/22

(3) Daily Express, 3/6/23 & 4/6/23

(4) The Intel Drop, 4/1/23

(5) Reuters, 18/7/20),

(6) Politico, 21/11/22 & CNN, 10/6/23

(7) Eastern Herald, 5/4/23

(8) Ukrainian News, 5/4/23

(9) DW, 16/8/22

(10) Unherd, 17/4/23

(11) deliberatio, 19/1/23

Polish President Andrzej Duda in Ukraine photo by Jakub Szymczuk

Unveiling ceremony for Camp Kosciuszko. On left Polish Defence Minister Mariusz Blaszczak and second left, Darryl Williams, Commanding General US Army Europe and Africa Photo by Garrison Waites