The German-Polish relationship 15 years after the neighbourly treaty

The German-Polish treaty of June 17, 1991 was a consequence of the collapse of Communism during the ‘People’s Autumn’ of 1989, the unification of Germany on October 3, 1990, and the final recognition of the Oder-Neiße border by the German Federal Republic in December 1990. Today the treaty for neighbourliness and amicable co-operation between Poland and Germany is one of the cornerstones of the European order. For without this reconciliation with its Western neighbour, Poland would have joined neither the European Union nor Nato.

At the same time the treaty documents the fundamental change in the German-Polish relationship that has taken place since more than half a century in the minds of +. In the beginning it affected only individual intellectuals; then influential groups, in both ecclesiastical and secular circles; then politicians; and finally entire social movements – to recall only the massive and spontaneous German response of concrete solidarity with the Poles during the state of martial law, or the solidarity of the Polish Solidarnosc with East German endeavours for unification in 1989.

The treaty was not a tactical manoeuvre in the eternal game of national egotisms, but sprang rather from the will of a great part of the political class in both states genuinely to surmount the ‘fatalism of enmity’ (Stanislaw Stomma – journalist, politician and Nestor of the German-Polish reconciliation. Editor’s note) that has been deeply rooted in the consciousness of Poles and Germans since at least the time of Bismarck. When the then Polish Foreign Minister Krzysztof Skubiszewski spoke of a German-Polish community of interests, he deliberately replaced the confrontational idea of the German-Polish relationship as a ‘millennial struggle’ with a co-operative vision of collaboration, neighbourliness and osmotic symbiosis, which is also deeply rooted in history: beginning with the German wives of the first Polish kings, through the German settlers of the Middle Ages and the intellectuals of the Renaissance like Nikolaus Copernicus and Veit Stoß, to the Polish-Saxon union in the 18th century.

The German-Polish community of interests, however, did not appeal to sentiment but rather to concrete facts. It attested that the removal of Communism and the unification of Germany was in Polish as well as in German interest, since it gave Poland a neighbour on its western border that was already a stable democracy and a strong market economy. This was a complete reversal of the previous Polish doctrine that saw an advantage in the division of Germany because it weakened German revisionism – even if it also meant having a German-Stalinist neighbour. Unlike France and Great Britain, Poland undertook no manoeuvres in 1989/1990 to delay the unification of Germany, although there were then differences about the time for the recognition of the Oder-Neiße border and the manner of the withdrawal of the Soviet Army from the GDR. Poland could not of course have blocked the unification, yet it could have braked the process, thrown a spanner into the works, and so burdened relations with Germany for a long time to come. But Poland did not do this.

The treaty of 1991 enabled Poland and Germany to build up and strengthen a net of institutional, political, economic, cultural and social connections. It was generally said that Germany had become the advocate of Polish interests in the EU, a perhaps not particularly apt formulation since it suggests a certain protectionism; moreover, there are various advocates, they do not always take their client seriously, and the private ones demand steep fees for their services.

An overwhelming parliamentary majority in both Germany and Poland passed the treaty, although in both countries it provoked opposition because of an imputed sell-out of national interests. In Germany, political representatives of refugee associations opposed the recognition of the Oder-Neiße border and the bracketing of compensation for lost property. In Poland, right-wing MPs were outraged at the bracketing of the question of German war reparations and the alleged privileges enjoyed by the German minority in Poland by comparison with the hundreds of thousands of Poles who live in Germany.

No treaty is valid forever. Some are already only a scrap of paper at their signing, because the one side sees in them only a ruse. Others, however, in spite of criticism, last for centuries. So it was with the Polish-Lithuanian union that was sealed in the 14th century, deepened in the 16th century, and still lingered in the minds of its members a 100 years after the formal abolition of the Polish-Lithuanian res publica in 1795. It was only the nationalism of the 19th century that separated Poland and Lithuania irrevocably.

The German-Polish treaty of 1991, however, was no scrap of paper, and its spirit could prove to be long-lived, even if its main goal – to integrate Poland into the Euro-Atlantic structures – was achieved with Poland’s entry into Nato in 2000 and the enlargement of the EU to include the eastern central European states in 2004. And just then, of all times, a conservative-national group had their say, whose ideologues openly denounced Skubiszewski’s ‘community of interests’ and began replacing it with a ‘community of conflict’. They had fallen for Carl Schmitt’s political theology and now trumpeted again differences of interest in accordance with the primacy of a paradigm of confrontation rather than co-operation. A similar ‘re-nationalisation’ of thought appeared to be spreading also in Germany. The Red-Green government began to stress more strongly ‘German interests’, and at the same time erstwhile leftist intellectuals (like Martin Walser) called upon the Germans to spend less time beating their breasts over the Second World War and give more attention to the German victims of that war.

In the 1990s it had already sometimes come to ill-feeling between the Germans and the Poles; in 1995, for instance, when Chancellor Kohl invited representatives of the victors of the Second World War to Berlin for the anniversary of VE Day, including the President of France, a country whose contribution to the overthrow of the Third Reich had not exactly been overwhelming, but not the President of Poland, the country that had been the first to resist an armed attack by the Wehrmacht. Yet it was only in the new decade that the quarrel over the politics of history brought about a distinct chill in the climate of the German-Polish relationship. Since 2003 the disputes over the Centre Against Expulsions, compensations and war reparations have been thrust into the foreground and compete with other bones of contention between Poland and Germany: the German-Russian co-operation and ostentatiously demonstrated friendship without regard to Poland, the German-Polish dissonance brought about by differing options in the Iraqi War, and finally the accentuation of the economic egotisms on the part of both countries at the time of Poland’s entry into the EU.

Has in fact the ‘community of interests’ been replaced by a ‘community of conflict’ ten years after the signing of the treaty?

Though this thesis was constantly reiterated in the Polish election campaign that dragged on from 2003 to 2005, it is not so. It is just as little sound to make Gerhard Schröder the black sheep of the German-Polish relationship. The Social-Democrat Chancellor had after all finally taken up the question of compensations for forced labourers under the Third Reich. Moreover, in Nice in 2000 he supported, in spite of French resistance, a distribution of votes in the European Council favourable to Poland, in 2004 confirmed the legal untenability of the claims of German refugees, and in the autumn of 2004 exerted himself, at the emphatic request of the Polish President, on behalf of the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine.

Notwithstanding the degree to which the question of the Baltic Sea pipeline and his taking a seat on the supervisory board of a firm dominated by Gasprom has discredited Schröder in Poland, even the dissonances of the past years have shown that, in spite of appreciable differences of interest in individual questions, the higher-level German-Polish community (as it was laid down in the treaty of 1991) has passed the test.

A closer examination, incidentally, shows that these quarrels affected the atmosphere rather than the substance of the relationship. For example, the Presidents of both states, Aleksander Kwasniewski and Johannes Rau, took in the end a similar position in the dispute over the Centre Against Expulsions and together initiated what they called a ‘network of memory and solidarity’, within the context of which the evacuation of Germans was also to be commemorated. And the exhibition in Bonn entitled Flight, Expulsion, Integration was well reviewed in the Polish media.

If we consider the German-Polish tensions of recent years with a view to the election campaigns in both countries, we shall see that their substance is far slighter than the echo in the media would give us think. This does not mean that there are no problems. There are, but they are mainly psychological, concerning views of history, and are not evidence of a fundamental difference of interest.

One problem on the Polish side is that in September 2005 a political grouping came to power which has to a great extent put in question the achievement of the last 15 years, including the Polish policy towards Germany. In this grouping there are opponents not only of the treaty of 1991 but also above all of its authors. This grouping ties up with two political tendencies of the pre-War period which have a strong place in the historical consciousness of Poles, but which are hardly suitable to Poland’s present situation in Europe: Roman Dmowski’s National Democracy and Józef Pilsudski’s sanacja. The National Democrats were vehemently anti-German and xenophobic, attitudes that were adopted by the Communists after the war. Pilsudski, on the other hand, advocated maintaining an equidistance to Poland’s neighbours. Both camps were authoritarian and mistrusted the idea of civil society.

The grouping that governs Poland today does not have much administrative experience; it therefore emphasises ideology and reactivates traumas and complexes which in the past were not infrequently cloaked by rah-rah patriotism. Still, precisely the main effect of the strategic and stable German-Polish community of interests and the spirit of the treat of 1991 has been to bring about intense German-Polish meetings that could uncramp this grouping within the context of Europe. Evidence for this was the surprise of the new Polish President Lech Kaczynski, who in the election campaign made no secret of his antipathy towards Germany, at the atmosphere during his first visit to Berlin, and his declaration that after the settlement of the question of the Baltic Sea pipeline relations between the two states would ‘flourish’. The same was evident in the cordial welcome given in Poland to the German Pope as the Polish Pope’s successor.

For the rest, all polls in Poland indicate a growing liking for Germany and Germans. The western neighbour finds itself in the top group of preferred economic, political and even military partners, though it is understandable that Poles would also like to have the Americans on their side in the two last-mentioned areas. The fact that German polls show far greater reservations on the part of Germans towards their eastern neighbour suggests that the spirit of 1991 could perhaps be distributed somewhat more evenly.