Poland is situated in the region of Central and Eastern Europe. It is a member of the European Union, NATO, the Council of Europe, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and of many other international organizations and institutions. During the Cold War, Poland was part of the Eastern Bloc—a member of the Warsaw Pact and COMECON—and its security policy depended on East-West relations, as well as on Poland’s position of subjectivity with regard to the USSR. The end of the Cold War had a great impact on Poland’s security policy and it profoundly changed its internal and external determinants.
This chapter analyzes the post-Cold War determinants of Poland’s security policy in the context of the theoretical concept of middle powers in the international order. Poland is a middle power in terms of an international hierarchy reflecting such quantifiable attributes as area, population, economic strength, military capability and other similar factors. Poland is also a middle power in terms of its geographic location, as the country is located ‘in the middle’—between Germany and Russia and between East and West. Since every state is an axiological project, this chapter also examines the influence of history and identity on Poland’s contemporary external security policy. It also addresses, in a comparative manner, various strategies and concepts related to Poland’s security policy, as advocated by the largest Polish political parties.
1 Geopolitical Location: Advantage or Curse?
It is difficult to speak of Poland’s geopolitical location in unequivocal terms. Some see it as ‘the heart of Europe’, 1 some as a bridge between East and West, 2 while others consider it as a disadvantageous ‘cursed location’. 3 ‘Historical experience shows that Poland’s geopolitical location between East and West was the factor that most strongly influenced the rise of Polish statehood and the shaping of the Polish national identity. It also defined the fundamental nature of Poland’s national interests and strategic objectives related to security.’ 4 From the partitions in the late 18th century (in 1772, 1793 and 1795), to the catastrophe of 1939, Poland’s fate was to a high degree a function of Russo–German relations. After the Second World War, Poland’s politics were determined by the East–West divide: Like other countries of Central and Eastern Europe, Poland found itself within the orbit of the USSR. When the Cold War ended, Poland’s geopolitical circumstances became more favorable than ever in the country’s history. There was talk of historical changes enabling Poland to overcome its seemingly fatal location between Germany and Russia—of a ‘new quality’ in Polish security policy. Fears connected with Poland’s geopolitical location did not disappear, but attempts were made to surmount them. As Polish foreign affairs minister Krzysztof Skubiszewski pointed out in November 1992:
Since the moment of the breakthrough in Poland, the government has been guided by the imperative of reversing the former bad role and function of our position between the powers of the East and the West – a position boiling down mainly to domination from the East. As early as the second half of the eighteenth century this position always had disastrous effects. For the past three years we have been striving to ensure that this position is to our advantage. [...] Poland has a geostrategic location that makes its position militarily significant. That has a bearing on the whole region. 5
Poland is a middle power located in the region of Central and Eastern Europe. Its total area (including internal waters) amounts to 312,685 km², which makes it the ninth largest country in Europe. Poland has a relatively long coastline on the Baltic Sea (440 km) and boundaries with seven countries: The Czech Republic (796 km), Slovakia (541 km), Ukraine (535 km), Germany (467 km), Belarus (418 km), Russia (210 km) and Lithuania (104 km). The longest section of Poland’s border is with the Czech Republic (22%) and the shortest with Lithuania (3%). 6 Poland’s present territory is half the size it was in the past, however. Under the Jagiellonian Dynasty—whose first representative, Władysław Jagiełło, ascended the Polish throne in 1386—Poland grew in strength and became a major European power whose golden age lasted through the 15th and 16th centuries. During this period, the Polish kings ruled over a realm whose area ranged from about 700,000 to over 900,000 km². 7 Growing internal crises in conjunction with the rising power of Poland’s neighbors ultimately led to the collapse of Polish statehood. Poland was carved up between Russia, Austria and Prussia in three partitions and, in 1795, disappeared from the political map of Europe for 123 years. Poland regained its independence in 1918 and after its borders were finally delimitated in 1922, it occupied a territory of about 388,000 km². This was about half of Poland’s territory before the partitions. The Second Polish Republic (1918–1939) also had unfavorably shaped boundaries. Its Baltic Sea coastline was only 140 km long. Its 1912 km border with Germany ran through disputed territory and was devoid of any natural defensive attributes like rivers and mountains, and its relations with Germany were tense. Moreover, the German minority in Poland often sought protection for its rights at the League of Nations on the basis of the so-called Little Treaty of Versailles, and received support from the German state. Gdańsk, which was a free city, was the object of many Polish–German disputes. The border with the USSR, Poland’s second-longest (1412 km), ran through territories inhabited by Ukrainians and Byelorussians, whose attitude toward Poles and the Polish state was hostile. This was particularly the case with the Ukrainians, of which there were about 5 million—approximately 16% of Poland’s population at the time. 8 The Polish–Lithuanian border (507 km) was not a peaceful one because Poland and Lithuania were in dispute over Vilnius and the Vilnius region. Although Poland’s border with Czechoslovakia (the third longest, with 984 km), ran along the Carpathian Mountain range and was largely an ethnic and natural one, Poland’s relations with its neighbor to the south were cool. Disputes over border areas (Trans-Olza, Spis and Orava), which were settled in July 1920, left feelings of injustice and mutual animosity on both sides of the border. 9 Only the border with Romania (349 km) and Latvia (109 km) were relatively peaceful. These were the short borders, however.
After the Second World War, Polish territory was reduced by nearly 20% (from 388,000 km² to 312,000 km²) and the number of countries with which it shared a border fell to three: The USSR (a border of 1321 km), Czechoslovakia (1292 km) and the German Democratic Republic (GDR) (467 km). In contrast with the pre-war period, Poland now had largely natural borders, most of which followed rivers (the Oder, Western Neisse, and Bug) and mountains (the Sudety and Carpathians). Poland’s population also became homogenous, because Poland’s eastern boundary was based on ethnic factors (the Curzon line), and because the inhabitants of former German territories ceded to Poland were expelled by virtue of the Potsdam Agreement of 1945. Poland’s coastline also grew to 497 km, and this made it possible for Poland to operate several seaports. Relations between the People’s Republic of Poland and its neighbors were formally friendly, but in practice Poland’s membership of the Eastern Bloc meant Warsaw’s freedom to shape its relations with other countries was limited. 10
The Autumn of Nations, which began in 1989, did not affect Poland’s borders, but transformed the countries which lay beyond them. Upon the unification of the two German states (1990), the collapse of the Soviet Union (1991) and the ‘velvet divorce’ in Czecholovakia (1993), the number of Poland’s neighbors grew from three to seven: Germany, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, and Russia. No territorial claims were raised by Poland’s neighbors after these peaceful changes and all of them recognized their border with Poland. 11 Poland signed friendship and cooperation agreements with each of its neighbors in the early 1990s.
Over the centuries, Poland’s changing international environment determined the fate of the country in different ways. During the first period of its history (10–14th centuries), the Polish state found itself isolated from the great historical processes of Medieval Europe and this was a time of consolidation and stabilization. In the 14th century, Poland became the principal force driving integration processes in the region. The Polish–Lithuanian dynastic union of 1385 brought a period of greatness and peaceful stability, which lasted until the death in 1572 of King Zygmunt August—the last monarch of the Jagiellonian dynasty. Within a few decades, however, the Polish Commonwealth began drifting toward the periphery of European politics, a process that was hastened by the country’s severance from the south-east due to the rise of Turkey and by the rise of trans-Atlantic trade. These developments produced long-lasting negative economic consequences as well as threats of a political and military nature. The 17th and 18th centuries in Polish history were a period of numerous wars and conflicts with Russia, Sweden and Turkey. 12 By the second half of the 18th century, unfavorable external conditions and ongoing internal crises had proved Poland unable to defend itself against the encroachments of neighboring Austria, Prussia, and Russia. 13 As a result of the three partitions, Polish identity became associated with the view that the greatest threat to Poland’s independence lies in its unfortunate geopolitical location between Germany and Russia.
It was only with the First World War that conditions favoring the re-establishment of Polish independence arose. The collapse of the three partitioning powers as a result of the war allowed Poland to re-emerge on the political map of Europe. Its independence, recovered in November 1918, was short-lived, however, because in September 1939 it was again invaded by Germany and the USSR. The Secret Protocol appended to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 provided for the division of Central and Eastern Europe between the two countries and its provisions as related to Poland came to be known as the country’s fourth partition. The Second World War also laid bare the weakness of Poland’s treaties of alliance with France and the United Kingdom. The memory of the failure of those treaties continues to exert a strong influence on Poland’s security policy today. The post-war realignment of forces in the world thrust Poland into the Soviet sphere of influence, where it remained until the end of the 1980s. During the Cold War, Poland’s geopolitical situation was also highly unfavorable.
The end of the Cold War bipolar order created new opportunities for Poland’s security policy. Polish–German relations were evolving in a promising direction; united Germany became a member of the Western community, and the West—whose ally and member Poland is today—rose to global dominance; and Russia was internally weak at the time and its international position was also at a low point. Geopolitical factors didn’t disappear for these reasons, but began to play a lesser role in Poland’s policy, just as they had in the distant past. But as the multipolar world order began to emerge at the beginning of the 21st century, as the position of the West weakened somewhat and that of Russia grew, Poland reverted to thinking in geopolitical terms. In the second decade of the 21st century, however, Poland’s unfavorable geopolitical situation is no longer defined in terms o...