Stabilisation of the Polish-German relationship stands out as a remarkable success story of the post-Cold War era. After the collapse of the Soviet dominion in East Central Europe, the two historical adversaries moved to settle their bilateral conflict and develop more cooperative relations within the multilateral framework of the Euro-Atlantic security community. During the 1990s, an unprecedented convergence of their strategic preferences for seeing through the enlargement of the community’s key institutions, NATO and the EU, led many policy analysts and practitioners to follow Poland’s first post-communist Foreign Minister Krzysztof Skubiszewski in dubbing the relationship an ‘interest community’ as not only a statement of fact, but also an expression of an expectation that a special ‘European’ partnership was in the making.1
Rather than serve as a model for closer integration in an ‘undivided’ post-Cold War Europe, however, the Polish-German ‘interest community’ started to underperform as soon as Poland entered NATO and began negotiating the terms of its EU accession. Relations between the two neighbours soon became increasingly characterised by divergence rather than convergence across much of the Euro-Atlantic community’s foreign and security policy agenda. By the mid-2000s, the relationship was often described as a ‘conflict community’ or a ‘community of divergent interests’.2 Given the subsequent virtual breakdown in their bilateral dialogue, some observers raised doubt as to whether the pair could be called a community at all.3 The outlook improved towards the end of the second post-Cold War decade—only to take another dive in the mid-2010s—but despite shifting levels of political will to cooperate, the record of the two states’ interaction in the area of high politics since the late 1990s suggests a surprisingly stubborn pattern of divergence.4
Apart from disappointing numerous well-wishers who had hoped that the post-Cold War Polish-German relationship would act as an important ‘centrepiece’ for the enlarged and more diverse community—that is, that it would play a role akin to that of the Franco-German ‘engine’ in postwar Europe—the oscillating trajectory of rapprochement and integration on the one hand, and mounting differences and at times biting conflict on the other, challenged some of the more optimistic predictions made by much of the ‘security communities’ and the ‘Europeanisation’-inspired literature that was dominant during the 1990s.5 Subsequent attempts to explore the two states’ historically shaped ‘strategic cultures’ or ‘national role concepts’ in order to explain differences that had mounted in their relations since the beginning of the 2000s could not successfully account for the shifting yet durable nature of divergence across key policy issues over time, and under varying domestic-political constellations.
This book offers an alternative explanation of Polish-German foreign and security policy clashes, which occurred during the formative decade when this bilateral relationship became ‘nested’ in the multilateral framework of the Euro-Atlantic security community. Through an empirical examination of four leading policy issues, the inquiry maps and measures the scope and quality of interest and policy divergence between Warsaw and Berlin from the late 1990s until the end of the 2000s. But rather than follow the dominant literature’s lead and look to the causal significance of national identities and ideas, it focuses on the role of structure in conditioning the two states’ differences. With an eye to power and geopolitical asymmetries that have been identified as leading historical determinants of their past struggles, it probes these variables’ relevance under transformed conditions. By the same token, it also unearths new forms of asymmetries that stem from the unequal levels of their respective ‘ownership’ in the community’s institutions—the same institutions that conventional accounts paradoxically expected to assuage the role of power factors, democratise relations among members, and thus reduce the likelihood of intracommunity conflict or lower its intensity over time. The analysis answers the question: which factors best explain Polish-German divergence in the area of high politics during the 2000s?
The main argument advanced here is that structural asymmetries continue to shape the relationship between Poland and Germany as members of joint institutions, NATO and the EU, albeit in markedly different, less conspicuous ways than in the past. Contrary to a common assumption, power and structure do not only inform the two states’ respective abilities to prevail in bargaining situations, but more importantly, they also condition their policy choices and regulate their preferences inside the two regimes. This is not to deny the legacy of their historically evolved identities or national ideas, or their continued significance under the conditions of stable peace. It is rather to posit that they each face distinct costs and opportunities inside the Atlantic Alliance and the European project as a function of their asymmetric structural positions within the two regimes. In other words, although identities and ideas that colour their elites’ worldviews undoubtedly matter, power and structure provide the context within which policymakers in Warsaw and Berlin locate their states’ interests, select the means to pursue them, and ultimately, vie to influence the shape of outcomes.
The Polish-German case illustrates that, rather than becoming increasingly irrelevant or being ‘mitigated’ away, the workings of power and other structural variables become more subtle within a community, where rules and norms, ‘habitus’ or practices, dependable reciprocity and, as some constructivists tell us, nascent forms of a common identity, serve to obscure their significance. But, as power and other structural factors turn less perceptible, they also become more pernicious—which conversely raises the importance of their wider recognition. Against expectations, rather than transcend power, Euro-Atlantic institutions often ‘embed’ and even ‘entrench’ structural asymmetries among their members, thus making their role less easily discernible and hence more difficult to contest. Given its economic and demographic power, its centrality and founding-member status, asymmetries banally describe Germany’s relations with all its immediate and more distant neighbours in NATO and inside the European project. But they have come to define its relationship with the community’s growing, albeit comparatively much weaker and more peripheral novice member Poland.
Difficult Neighbours: a Short History
Given the legacy of their turbulent 1,000-year-long neighbourship and a particularly violent record of the last 200 years, relations between Poles and Germans are frequently treated as being synonymous with Europe’s self-destructive past. In light of the historically demonstrated geostrategic vulnerability of the region between present-day Germany and Russia, the Polish-German relationship stands out as one of four main sources of conflict and war in modern Europe.6 It was not until the end of the Cold War that Poland and Germany encountered conditions that made stable peace possible. It would perhaps not be an exaggeration to argue that few other European dyads are as heavily burdened by hatred and violence as this neighbouring couple at the heart of the continent.7
Since 1989, relations between this previously warring pair improved markedly, leading some observers to conclude that old rivalry had given way to cooperation in a process not dissimilar to the Franco-German community-building exercise in postwar Europe.8 Indicators of a paradigm shift were many. First came the German elites’ belated recognition that the quest for Polish freedom and German unity—or ‘the resolution of Europe’s two Jahrhundertsfragen’ as Heinrich Winkler described them—are two sides of the same coin.9 The two states went on to conclude a border treaty that removed the key structural determinant of their bilateral conflict after the war.10 This was followed by the signing of a friendship treaty that closed several painful chapters and oriented their relationship towards a common European future: Germany’s support for Poland’s ambition to eventually join the European Community was written explicitly into the document. Shortly thereafter, their bilateral treaty framework was supplemented with a breakthrough agreement on defence and military cooperation—Poland’s first with a NATO member country. Later, it was German politicians who spearheaded the charge to successfully upload the question of NATO’s eastern enlargement onto the organisation’s post-Cold War agenda.11 It was this confluence of their strategic goals to widen the Euro-Atlantic community’s institutions that led Poland’s Foreign Minister Krzysztof Skubiszewski to posit the birth of an ‘interest community’ between the two states—a maxim meant to explain the present, but also to orient their relationship towards a shared future.12
The move away from a ‘frozen’ conflict towards cooperation was accompanied by efforts to bring about reconciliation between the two peoples, building on a process started by Polish Bishops already in the mid-1960s.13 Perhaps the most striking feature of the Polish-German rapprochement was that in political discourse in the two countries, this nascent bilateral project was often framed as an end in itself. In keeping with the ‘interest community’ motto, politicians and policymakers in both states assigned the emergent special relationship between Poland and Germany the role of an anchor for the greater task of reintegrating the two halves of Europe. As Roland Freudenstein, the then Director of the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung’s Warsaw office, put it:
And although a decisive turn towards cooperation did not preclude a rise of differences over short-term interests and policy choices, the paradigmatic shift in the quality of relations between Poland and Germany that has taken place in less than half a decade since the demise of Soviet hegemony in East Central Europe was nothing short of extraordinary.While Europe’s future may not hinge on this relationship alone, it is certainly the case that, first, the way things work out between these two states is highly relevant to everything else that happens in Europe in the decades to come; and second, this relationship encompasses many of the east-west problems that Europe as a whole faces.14
Given these optimistic post-Cold War beginnings, it came as a surprise that, starting in the second half of the 1990s, relations between the two actors encountered some unexpectedly severe turbulence. On the one hand, economic exchange and political cooperation flourished. In 1995, for the first time Poland superseded Russia as Germany’s most important trade partner in the east. In 1997, the two governments held their first high-level intergovernmental consultations in Bonn—an institution reserved for the Federal Republic’s closest of partners. That same year, Poland’s membership in NATO was sealed at the Madrid North Atlantic Council (NAC) in July and in December the EU vowed to open accession negotiations with the first batch, or the so-called Luxembourg group of candidates. The future looked brighter for the Polish-German couple than perhaps at any previous point in history. Yet, something was amiss.
First, the process of national reconciliation suffered a setback, when the past resurfaced again, ending an era of politicians from both countries seemingly out-competing each another’s conciliatory gestures across the Oder River.15 Strains surfaced as early as 1995, when the Polish President Lech Wałes̨a’s name was left off the list of invitees to the ceremonies commemorating the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II. A more acute conflict erupted in mid-1998, when the German Bundestag passed a resolution that welcomed the EU’s enlargement to the east as an opportunity to address ‘open questions’ stemming from the flight and expulsion of ethnic Germans from postwar Poland following the border changes mandated by the Allies at Potsdam. Subsequently, quarrels over historical interpretations and commemoration recurred intermittently. They included differences with regard to the founding of a controversial Berlin-based centre against expulsions sponsored by the historically re...