Public Opinion and the Making of Foreign Policy in the 'New Europe'

A Comparative Study of Poland and Ukraine

Nathaniel Copsey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754678984
• eBook ISBN: 9781317073505
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

By drawing a new boundary between the EU and its eastern neighbours, the European Union has since 1989 created a frontier that has been popularly described in the frontier states as the new 'Berlin Wall'. This book is the first comparative study of the impact of public opinion on the making of foreign policy in two Eastern European states on either side of the divide: Poland and Ukraine. Focusing on the vocal, informed segment of public opinion and drawing on results of both opinion polls and a series of innovative focus groups gathered since the Orange Revolution, Nathaniel Copsey unravels the mystery of how this crucial segment of the public impacts on foreign policy makers in both states. He also takes a closer look at the business community and the importance of economic factors in forming public opinion. The book presents a fresh approach to our understanding of how the public's view of the past influences contemporary politics.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Since the unveiling of the European Union’s Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) immediately after the May 2004 enlargement, the spotlight has been cast on the Union’s eastern borders.1 The essential aim of the ENP is to provide a framework for relations between the European Union and its neighbours, and to ‘Europeanise’ those states on its periphery without the prospect of membership. Since 2008, it has been bolstered by the launch of the Eastern Partnership, which envisages deep integration in the single market and other domains between the EU and its eastern neighbours, to be regulated through a series of Association Agreements, which are currently being negotiated.2 Yet these new agreements between the Union and its neighbours do not envisage further enlargement. Thus for all the talk of ‘reuniting Europe’ or states ‘returning to Europe’ since 1989, by drawing a new boundary between the EU and its eastern neighbours, the Union has created a frontier that has been popularly described in the frontier states as the ‘new Berlin Wall’. This is a book about the borderland communities that live on either side of the new European divide and how successful or otherwise they are in influencing the foreign policies of their respective nation-states.

The two countries that form the focus of this book, Poland and Ukraine, were chosen primarily because the contrasting political, economic and social positions of these two states capture the essence of the new east-central Europe. Poland symbolises the success of many post-communist states in this region: its path to liberal democracy and the market economy is more or less complete, and it is a member of both NATO and the European Union. Ukraine, despite the flurry of excitement that followed the Orange Revolution, remains the borderland that its name implies – a geopolitical no man’s land with little immediate prospect of membership of either the EU or NATO,3 and has some way yet to travel on the road towards liberal democracy and the free market economy. Every border is to a greater or lesser extent artificial and the EU border that runs between Poland and Ukraine is no exception. Poland and the western part of Ukraine were part of the same state(s) for most of their history. Despite an exceptionally bloody shared history in the first half of the twentieth century, since 1990, many of the links that bound these two communities together have been restored. At the official level, bilateral relations between Poland and Ukraine are closer than between any other two states lying on either side of the European Union’s new eastern border and since the mid-1990s they have forged a dynamic strategic partnership.4 Ukraine is widely perceived across the EU as the principal testing ground for the success of ENP, and for Poland it is the most important of the EU’s neighbours. In its first few years of EU membership at least, Poland has presented itself as the Member State best equipped to draw Ukraine into a ‘ring of friendship’ and security around the European Union. Given the severe political and economic instability that bedevils the states that lie to the east of Europe’s hard Schengen frontier,5 the successful outcome of the European Neighbourhood Policy is not just an issue of importance for Ukraine or Poland, but also to a certain extent for the security and prosperity of the whole EU. The success or failure of the ENP and the Eastern Partnership will reveal both the extent to which the Union is able to stabilise the countries that lie immediately beyond its present frontiers and the limits to its much-vaunted ‘soft’ power and influence. Poland has acted as an advocate of Ukrainian integration within the European Union over the past few years; therefore what the Union eventually offers to Ukraine will also shed light on the extent of Polish influence on the EU’s foreign policy towards the east. How Poland and Ukraine interact is of crucial importance because their bilateral partnership is probably the only one of its kind to span the distance between the former Soviet Union and the West. That Poland and Ukraine can bridge this divide is made possible by virtue of the fact that they treat each other as equals, and in terms of the relations between EU states and their poorer neighbours, this is exceptional. Consequently, the relationship between Poland and Ukraine is a vitally important one for the European Union as a whole.

That the focus of this study is on the role of informed public opinion in the borderlands in the making of foreign policy in Poland and Ukraine springs from the observation that for the EU’s transformative ambitions vis-à-vis its eastern neighbours to bear fruit, or indeed for bi-lateral Polish-Ukrainian relations to be harmonious, it is necessary that local communities feel a sense of ownership of the policy – or at the very least that they feel that the policy is not being carried out against their interests. As will be seen in Chapter 4 of this book, this was not always the case in Poland and Ukraine. In essence, this book finds that whilst informed public opinion as a whole in both states is highly sensitive with regard to the commemoration of the shared Polish-Ukrainian past and public reconciliation, it does not have a particularly strong influence on foreign policy in either state. In contrast to this – and demonstrating that foreign policy-making is far from immune to domestic pressures in both Poland and Ukraine – the study finds that the influence of the business community segment of informed public opinion on foreign policy-making in both states is high.

The remainder of this introduction is structured in two parts. First, it reviews the approaches taken by other scholars in the study of Polish-Ukrainian relations, and the investigation of the relationship between foreign policy-making and public opinion. No apology is made for including a summary of the work of other scholars on this theme; it is not only important to acknowledge the contribution of other academics to our understanding of the relationship between foreign policy and public opinion – when setting out in this area one does not begin with a tabula rasa – but essential to situate this research monograph in the literature. Second, it outlines the content of the rest of the chapters that constitute this monograph.

Existing Approaches

Literature on Polish-Ukrainian Relations

The principal categories into which most studies of Polish-Ukrainian relations fall are as follows: history, geopolitics, EU enlargement related issues, and popular relations. In all these areas there is a considerable overlap in the material covered by each of these studies.

Historical studies form by far the largest group of literature in this field. There are relatively few wide ranging general histories of Polish-Ukrainian relations, apart from Stanisław Stepięn’s Polska i Ukraina: 1000 lat sąsiedstwa. 6 The bulk of histories tend to deal with the events of the twentieth century that continue to exercise a certain influence on the present. Broadly speaking, such histories consider the Polish-Ukrainian struggle for the borderland between the break-up of the central European Empires in 1918, and the final ethnic cleansing of south-eastern Poland and Western Ukraine in 1947. The considerable literature relating to this aspect of Polish-Ukrainian relations is reviewed in the following chapter of this book. What these studies fail to achieve is an analysis of how the past influences the present in Polish-Ukrainian relations.

Geopolitics as an academic discipline has enjoyed a revival since the end of the Cold War. Prior to the 1990s, with the exception of some French scholars, it was not considered a particularly serious topic for academic research. The highly controversial and popular Clash of Civilizations by Samuel Huntington7 illustrates how easy it is for geopolitics to be dismissed for being overly simplistic. Huntington’s idea is a close reflection of some more extremist Russian populist thinking with regard to Ukraine and Russia. The essence of this book is that as the strains between different cultures increase, Ukraine will eventually split into two halves. The western, Catholic (Greek or Latin rite) segment will either form a separate state, or merge with Poland [sic], and the eastern and southern Orthodox segments will be reincorporated into a revived Russian empire. The essential problem with Huntington’s book is that, because it covers such a wide area: the clash of seven civilisations across the world, it inevitably deals with each of the issues it addresses superficially. It introduces the idea of Ukraine’s importance as a bridge between east and west, but does not sufficiently unpack this idea.

Perhaps more credible geopolitical studies of Polish-Ukrainian relations have been produced by other American strategists, such as Zbigniew Brzeziński, author of The Grand Chessboard,8 or French academics, such as Gilles Lepesant.9 Brzeziński argues that Poland and Ukraine stand at the centre of the Eurasian chessboard, consequently whoever controls Ukraine holds the key to Eurasia. Much of this thinking follows on from the highly important works of émigré intellectuals: from the Polish side, Jerzy Giedroyc, Juliusz Mieroszewski and the rest of the Paris Kultura circle10 from the 1940s and 1950s onwards; from the Ukrainian side, Bohdan Osadchuk.11 Writing at a time of Soviet dominance in Europe, their central idea was that there could be no independent Poland without an independent Ukraine. In common with Zbigniew Brzeziński, they believed that Poland and Ukraine needed to work together not only to preserve their independence from resurgent Russian imperialism, but also for the sake of Russia itself. With Ukraine, Russia becomes an empire, but for Russia to prosper as a democracy, it must shed its empire. The role of the Kultura circle was crucial: contemporary Polish politicians, especially Aleksander Kwaśniewski,12 make frequent reference to how émigré writers influenced their view of Ukraine. These works provide an excellent basis for understanding how the Polish foreign policy community views Ukraine.

Important as geopolitics and the work of the Kultura circle is to the study of Polish-Ukrainian relations, much of this work is in need of updating. A generation after the end of the Cold War, external threats to Polish and Ukrainian independence have perhaps diminished, or in the case of Ukraine, become more ambiguous. Russia’s policy of increasing its economic control over Ukraine during the last years of the Kuchma presidency may or may not have been designed as a first step towards re-establishing political control. Russia’s attitude towards the 2004 Presidential Elections in Ukraine certainly gave that impression.13 Poland’s accession to NATO and the EU has arguably closed the issue of its sovereignty being challenged by Moscow, even in the medium or longer term. Nonetheless, the Polish-Ukrainian special relationship is still about security, but security of a different sort: secure borders, political stability, and long-term prosperity. Russian interests in Ukraine, economic or political, currently undermine security in all three of these areas. Of equal importance is the European angle: the Polish-Ukrainian strategic partnership needs to be viewed in the context of the European Neighbourhood Policy, which offers the most direct path for Ukraine as well as Poland and the other 26 states of the European Union to achieve mutual benefits in terms of both increased security and greater prosperity.

The EU-enlargement related literature in Polish-Ukrainian relations received a considerable degree of attention in the run up to the May 2004 enlargement. The most visible English-language work is probably that of Kataryna Wolczuk and Roman Wolczuk: Poland and Ukraine: A Strategic Partnership in a Changing Europe?14 The book has four sections. First, a description of Poland and Ukraine’s relations since 1991, which follows the argument of Roman Wolczuk’s earlier article ‘Ukrainian-Polish Relations between 1991 and 1998: From the Declarative to the Substantive’.15 Roman Wolczuk divides Polish-Ukrainian relations into two periods, an initial period of caution on the part of Poland as a result of its unwillingness to be grouped in the same category of post-communist state as Ukraine, prior to its invitation to join NATO, followed by a much more productive partnership from the mid-1990s onwards, albeit dominated by the relationship between Presidents Kuchma and Kwaśniewski...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Investigating the Relationship Between Public Opinion and Foreign Policy-Making
• 3 The Foreign Policy Systems of Poland and Ukraine
• 4 The Impact of the Past on the Present in Polish-Ukrainian Relations
• 5 The Economic Dimension of Polish-Ukrainian Relations
• 6 Conclusion
• Appendix: Focus Group Participants
• Bibliography
• Index