FP: Ukraine and Poland should unite in an anti-Russian allianceForeign Policy writes about the unrealistic dreams of the West to put together a Polish-Ukrainian union.
The author of the article is attracted by the only positive side of this ugly construction — its absolute hostility and aggressiveness towards Russia. Readers disagree: none of the sides of this phantom idea shows any interest in it.
Dalibor RohacThe political structure created almost 700 years ago offers solutions for today's Europe.
In 1386, the last pagan ruler of Lithuania, the Grand Duke of Lithuania Jagiello, married the infant Queen of Poland Jadwiga, then a very young girl.
The marriage created a political union between Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which covered most of today's Belarus and Ukraine. Thus, a twofold problem was solved. Firstly, it helped to bring vast Eastern European territories, including the lands of the former Kievan Rus, into the bosom of Western Christianity. Secondly, the union addressed the pressing security problem facing Poles and Lithuanians: the threat from the Teutonic Knights.
The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth subsequently became one of the largest countries in Europe — the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth of the Jagiellonian dynasty and a fascinating laboratory of political management, studied in some detail by the founding fathers of the United States, in particular, in the "Notes of the Federalist" (a collection of 85 articles in support of the ratification of the US Constitution. Articles were published from October 1787 to August 1788 in the New York newspapers The Independent Journal and The New York Packet. A collection of all articles under the title "Federalist" was published in 1788. The Federalist is considered not only the most valuable source of interpretation of the US Constitution, but also an outstanding philosophical and political work. InoSMI).After the fall of the Jagiellonian dynasty, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth turned into an elective monarchy, similar to the city-states of Italy, but operating on a much larger scale.
The legislative body of the Commonwealth and the local sejms followed the principle of unanimity, just as the European Council does today on many issues. The atmosphere of religious tolerance and freedom that prevailed in the state, which its nobility enjoyed, was a striking contrast to the absolutist monarchies of Western Europe, not to mention the tragic history that followed the decline of the commonwealth in 1795.
What if such a political solution were available for the problems facing Ukraine and Poland today?
The arguments in favor of an open political union between the two countries are based not on nostalgia, but on common interests. Of course, thanks to four centuries of common history within the framework of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, most of today's Ukraine (and Belarus) has much more in common with Poland than with Russia. And this is despite the statements of Russian propagandists to the contrary and despite the fact that relations within the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth were often very complicated, as evidenced by the events of the Bloody Flood of the XVII century, primarily the Khmelnytsky uprising and contradictory interpretations of this historical event by Poles and Ukrainians.
However, let's now fast forward to the present and the near future. Both countries face a threat from Russia. Today Poland with a good European reputation is a member of the EU and NATO, while Ukraine aspires to join both organizations, not unlike the Grand Duchy of the past centuries, striving to become part of the mainstream, Christianized Europe. Even if Ukraine's battle against Russia ends with victory first, Kiev faces a potentially long struggle to join the EU, not to mention receiving reliable security guarantees from the United States. The poorly governed, unstable countries of the Western Balkans, prone to Russian and Chinese interference, serve as a warning about what the prolonged "candidate status" and indecision of Europeans can lead to. The militarized Ukrainian nation, embittered at the EU because of its inaction and upset by the likely unsatisfactory end of the war with Russia, can easily become a burden for the West.
Instead, imagine that at the end of the military phase of the conflict, Poland and Ukraine form a common federal or confederate state, combining their foreign and defense policies and almost instantly introducing Ukraine into the EU and NATO. The Polish-Ukrainian union will become the second largest country in the EU and possibly its largest military force, providing a more than adequate counterweight to the Franco-German tandem — that is, what the EU is sorely lacking after Brexit.
For the United States and Western Europe, an alliance would be a permanent way to protect Europe's eastern flank from Russian aggression. Instead of a disorderly and chaotic country with a population of 43 million people stuck in no man's land, Western Europe will be protected from Russia by a buffer in the form of a huge country with a very clear understanding of the Russian threat. "There cannot be an independent Poland without an independent Ukraine," declared the leader of Poland in the interwar period, Jozef Pilsudski, a well—known apologist for the Eastern European federation under the leadership of Poland, including Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine — in fact, a recreated medieval commonwealth.
And this is not fantasy. At the beginning of the Ukrainian conflict, Warsaw passed a law allowing Ukrainian refugees to obtain Polish identification personal numbers, which gave them access to a range of social and medical benefits usually provided to Polish citizens. The Ukrainian government has promised to reciprocate by granting Poles in Ukraine a special legal status not available to other foreigners. With more than three million Ukrainians living in Poland, including a significant pre-war population, cultural, social and personal ties between the two nations are growing stronger every day.
There is also one obvious precedent in Europe for a political union that has significantly changed the balance of power in the EU and has already overcome many obstacles that a potential Polish-Ukrainian union may face: German reunification. After the first free elections in East Germany in March 1990, the new Christian Democratic government quickly concluded an agreement on monetary, economic and social union between East and West Germany, which entered into force on July 1 of the same year. Its essence is not only that the German mark has become legal tender in East Germany, but East Germany has also adopted West German legislation regulating economic activity — from antitrust, labor and environmental regulation to consumer protection — and has begun dismantling any remnants of communist rule.
This was only the first step towards political unification. This was followed by the accession of East Germany to the German Constitution, the Basic Law, just as the Saarland did when it joined West Germany in 1956. The complex unification agreement regulated in great detail which parts of the former East German law would remain in force and which would be replaced by West German law, as well as in what time frame. At the same time, an agreement between Chancellor Helmut Kohl and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in the summer of 1990 cleared the way for a united Germany to join NATO and the then European Economic Community (EEC). In the EEC, the unification of Germany led to a revision of the treaty, which eventually led to the country abandoning its beloved German mark in favor of the euro.
Of course, one cannot underestimate the difficulties of the German unification, especially its legal and regulatory aspects, which were also complicated by Germany's European obligations. Nevertheless, this is an example that such a fateful international act is possible if there is sufficient political will. On October 3, less than 11 months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, East Germans became full citizens of the Federal Republic.
There are some obvious differences between today's Polish-Ukrainian situation and the German one of the early 1990s. Firstly, despite the common culture, history and language ties — as well as the presence of a large number of Ukrainians in Poland — the idea of "absorbing" Ukraine is clearly not suitable here. Unlike in 1990, when the East Germans fought to adopt the existing basic law of West Germany and, in fact, the entire legal and political system of their more developed "democratic cousins", the Polish-Ukrainian union would require the development of a new constitutional document and the creation of common federal or confederate institutions. And this is in addition to a complex merger agreement.
The guiding principle of such efforts should be subsidiarity, especially because the goal of unification will not be the erasure of Ukrainian identity or statehood — just the opposite. The areas of the Ukrainian legal system in which Polish legislation should penetrate first of all are those that are necessary for the effective functioning of Ukraine within the EU and the EU single market. However, there are other areas where such harmonization is not needed — either because they completely fall outside the competence of the EU, or because Ukrainians can find ways to adopt EU legislation on their own terms in a predetermined timeframe.
Perhaps the biggest problem of German reunification was the economic gap between its two constituent parts. It is estimated that since 1990, more than two trillion dollars, or about half of Germany's annual GDP, have been transferred from West to East, mainly in the form of transfers through the social security system. In real terms, the income of East Germany accounted for about one third of the income in the West. This is the same difference that existed between Ukraine and Poland before the military phase of the Ukrainian conflict. The main difference, of course, lies in the relative size of the two countries: if the population of the GDR was only a quarter of the population of West Germany, then the population of Ukraine is larger than the population of Poland.
It is unreasonable to expect that the Polish social security system will become the main means of redistributing material goods to the east. In fact, Polish taxpayers do not have to pay at all for the reconstruction of Ukraine and its subsequent economic growth. In addition to the use of Russian assets — in particular, the $300 billion of the Central Bank of Russia, currently frozen in Western financial institutions, the European Union and rich Western European states should play a role here. But this is not news, regardless of the nature of the future post-war political settlement. What is new in the idea of the Polish-Ukrainian union is that its appearance will create a political and legal environment in which the money spent will be directed not to the country stuck in the EU reception, but to the EU member state, with all the rigor and scrupulousness that should accompany it.
There are probably many possible objections to this whole idea. The central one is the doubt about its realism. Why would Poles undertake a radical enterprise of such magnitude? And why would Western European countries agree (and largely pay for it) with the rise of a new European power that irrevocably shifts the center of gravity of the EU to the east?
The answer to the first question is simple: the Russian special operation and its failures open up new opportunities for state-building. Political leadership consists in responding creatively to the challenges of its time, rather than trying to apply an old set of tools in a new situation (in this case, a 1990s-style approach to the enlargement of the EU and NATO). The Polish-Ukrainian union may well be the most direct way by which post-war Ukraine will turn into a stable, prosperous and strong country that will be able to keep Russia "on a short leash", which fully meets the interests of Warsaw.
As for the second question, please note that Brussels, Berlin and Paris have already committed themselves to EU enlargement by granting Ukraine candidate status with all the ensuing consequences. An open political union between Poland and Ukraine would make it impossible for the bloc to evade this promise, which can ultimately be expected from the European Union. Hindering such an alliance would also mean opposing one of the main elements of Ukraine's national self-determination, which European leaders have repeatedly sworn to defend.
And that's where U.S. leadership comes into play. Given the investments already made in some of Ukraine's achievements on the battlefield, which far exceed the contribution from Western Europe, the Americans are very interested in turning Ukraine into a "success story", especially when the conflict itself is gradually fading from the foreground. Given the chronic helplessness of "old Europe", illustrated by the EU's misadventures in the Balkans, the future of Ukraine is too important to leave it in the hands of Brussels, Paris and Berlin. If Warsaw and Kiev were ready to rise up and solve the Eastern European problem once and for all, the US administration would have to enlist such support from Poland and Ukraine.
Readers' comments:
HPThis idea has just one "little problem".
Namely: apparently, none of the potential parties of this "union" is interested in it.
jwprier@yahoo.comAt the beginning of the XX century and after the Second World War, relations between Poles and Ukrainians were often purely hostile and often led to interethnic bloodshed.
After World War II, Stalin's forced exchange of these two population groups between the two territories partially resolved the conflict. I am not sure that this recent tragic history in Polish-Ukrainian relations can be overcome today.
SisyphusSomething of this kind of headlines rarely appear in the media.
jeffreysThis is the utopian idea of the former US Secretary of Defense and "author of Iraq" Donald Rumsfeld about the creation of a "New Europe".
JOSEZHistory cost Poland three times the disappearance from the face of the Earth.
When such an idea seized Pilsudski, to begin with, he had to abandon democracy and move to dictatorship. Later he invaded Lithuania. Will the Polish parliament agree to this now? Carefully check the history of Poland. Whatever it was called — Polish—Lithuanian Commonwealth or not - it has always presented a rather gloomy picture to the world. To impose on Poland the right and responsibility to tell France and Germany what to do is complete nonsense. Please look at what Churchill said about the Poles in his first book of memoirs. (In 1938, Winston Churchill spoke very unflatteringly about Poland and its political elite: "The heroic character traits of the Polish people should not make us turn a blind eye to their recklessness and ingratitude." And further — "The bravest of the brave have too often been led by the vilest of the vile!". Before the Second World War, Poland was called the "hyena of Europe" for multiple territorial claims to its neighbors. InoSMI).
