From the series European news
In July, the strategic triangle of London-Paris-Berlin was strengthened with the Northwood Declaration, in which the United Kingdom and France signalled the possibility of coordinating the use of their nuclear weapons through the creation of a “Nuclear Steering Group”, and with the Kensington Treaty, an Anglo-German defence pact. These agreements complement the Franco-British agreements of Lancaster House and the Franco-German Treaty of Aachen.
Although Poland signed the Treaty of Nancy with France in May 2025, it was excluded from the recent “E3” consultations, in which only the United Kingdom, France, and Germany participated. Nevertheless, the establishment of the new government led by Donald Tusk, the Civic Platform (PO) leader, in the October 2023 elections, after eight years of antagonism with Brussels under the Law and Justice Party (PiS)-dominated government, had fuelled expectations of greater Polish influence in Europe.
In his book Pologne, histoire d’une ambition [February 2025], Pierre Buhler discusses the “long-awaited ‘Polish moment’”. For the French diplomat, a former ambassador to Warsaw, with “Russia’s renewed aggression”, Poland’s vocation is to be “the new cornerstone of European security”. However, he adds, the lack of an advanced defence industry and the politically-motivated inability to join the euro limit its potential. On the other hand, the victory in the June presidential elections of Karol Nawrocki, a candidate supported by the nationalist-populist PiS party, raises questions about the scope of this “Polish moment”. While “the far-right opposition has emerged stronger and galvanised from the presidential elections”, Tusk’s coalition is showing signs of division and “risks paralysis”, warned Le Monde [July 23rd].
The weight of history
Poland, with 38 million inhabitants, has seen its GDP per capita rise from 51% to 80% of the European average since joining the EU in 2004. However, Buhler warns that the effects of the profound transformation the country has undergone also include the “awakening of ghosts from the past, these conflicts of memory that weigh heavily [ ... ] on Poland’s relations with its neighbours”. This is particularly true of the PiS’s “historical politics”, an ideological exploitation of the past driven by “collective narcissism”, of which the nationalist-populist party’s fiercely anti-German rhetoric is an expression. In Poland, history has “left a much deeper mark than in most other countries”, says Buhler. In his book, he summarises the constants of the Polish moral factor shaped over the centuries in three key points: “Firstly, the guiding principle of Catholicism, then Poland’s role as a bulwark against repeated assaults from the East, and finally, the indomitability of a nation that has constantly rebelled against the yokes imposed from outside”.
After facing Mongol invasions, the advance of the Ottomans, and occupation by Protestant Prussians and Orthodox Russians, Catholicism, adopted at the end of the 10th century as a “defensive posture”, evolved over the course of history to become the foundation of Polish national identity. Poland experienced its Golden Age in the 16th century, in the form of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the culmination of the union between the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania under King Jogaila (founder of the Jagiellonian dinasty), at the end of the 14th century. At its peak, the elective monarchy dominated Central Europe and its territory stretched from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea.
The distinctive feature of Poland compared to other medieval European States, according to Buhler, was that a minority of “magnates” had formed a “real oligarchy that held effective power”. In addition, the liberum veto, which from 1652 guaranteed all members of the Sejm (legislative assembly) the power to block a vote, paralysed the political system. In the “transactional” logic of electing the king in exchange for new privileges, central power was constantly weakened, which encouraged corruption and interference by foreign powers. The country then fell into a period of decline: “The triumph of the Counter-Reformation” - accompanied by the destruction of Protestant churches and pogroms “instigated by the clergy” - isolated it “from the intellectual currents of Western Europe, relegating the nobility, with few exceptions, to growing obscurantism”. Living in “gilded freedom” at the expense of increasingly severe exploitation of the peasants, the nobility nurtured “a feeling of superiority over the rest of society and a xenophobic attitude”. After the disappearance of Poland, following three successive partitions between Russia, Prussia, and Austria-Hungary in 1772, 1793, and 1795, the Church became “the soul of a dismembered nation and a refuge in the hope of better days”.
Conflictual neighbourhood
Meanwhile, the animosity of Lithuanian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian peasants towards the “Polish lords” occasionally erupted in revolts. Thus, writes Buhler, in 1648, during the Ukrainian peasant uprising, the Catholic clergy, Polish nobles, “and even Jews, accused of serving the lords”, were massacred. Similar clashes occurred during the 17th and 19th centuries. After regaining independence in 1918, confirming with its resurrection the image of Poland as the “Christ of the Nations”, Warsaw waged six wars against its neighbours to establish its borders. On one hand, Roman Dmowski’s national-democratic movement favoured a “centralising and integrating State” and the “forced Polonisation” of minorities; on the other, Józef Pilsudski’s movement defended the vision of a Jagiellonian Poland, “uniting Belarusians, Ukrainians, and Lithuanians within the pre-partition borders, between the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea (Intermarium)".
Pilsudski started his political career in the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) and later became head of State; he declared that “I took the tram of socialism, but I got off at the Independence stop”. After the coup d’état of 1926, which put an end to the “democratic chapter”, he led Poland towards a policy of balance between the USSR and Germany, signing a non-aggression pact with Moscow in 1932 and another with Berlin in 1934. After his death in 1935, Poland, which now considered itself a great power, “blinded by arrogance”, turned inwards towards “narrow nationalism, in search of a phantom ‘Polish Poland’, while almost a third of the population was made up of minorities, Ukrainians, Jews, Belarusians, and Germans”. Thus, Warsaw, which made no secret of “its sympathy for Franco in the Spanish Civil War” and approved “Mussolini’s aggression against Ethiopia”, participated alongside Nazi Germany in the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia following the Munich Agreement of 1938, occupying part of Silesia. A year later, Poland itself fell prey to Nazi Germany and the USSR, which invaded the country.
The German occupation of Ukraine, initially welcomed “as a harbinger of the imminent creation of an independent Ukrainian State”, had the effect of unleashing violence by radical factions of Ukrainian nationalists against Poles, using methods of ethnic cleansing learned from the Germans during their participation in the killing of some 200,000 Jews. The Poles responded with the same level of violence. In Lithuania, too, the Nazi invasion “gave the Lithuanians the opportunity to take revenge on the Poles of Wilno [now Vilnius] [ ... ] and to collaborate with the Nazi regime in the extermination of over 60,000 Jews”.
Europe and Polish Catholicism
During the Second World War, Poland was devastated and lost more than a sixth of its population: six million people died, including three million Jews. The extermination of the latter, the shifting of borders to the west, and the transfer of around seven million individuals meant that, after the war, the State was populated by over 90% Catholic Poles, something which, according to Buhler, had probably not happened since the Polish conquest of Galicia in 1349. Under Moscow’s rule, the Church found itself “once again at the forefront, the only organised force with the right to exist outside the government, but independent of it”. The historian emphasises the invigorating effect of the election of a Polish pope in 1978, as well as the role of the Church - in its alliance with the secular intelligentsia and the working class organised in the Solidarność trade union - in the resistance to Russian rule. Added to “an insurrectional tradition forged in the adversity of occupation”, the “cement of Catholicism”, he writes, “preserved the nation from assimilation during some I20 years of Russian occupation”.
Having regained its independence after the collapse of Moscow’s false socialism, Poland pursued a foreign policy in the 1990s, under the leadership of Foreign Minister Krzysztof Skubiszewski, inspired by the “Giedroyć Doctrine”, which Buhler saw as a “break with nationalism”. Taking its name from the Polish intellectual Jerzy Giedroyć, who founded the magazine Kultura in exile in France, this “doctrine” called on Poland to accept the territorial status quo of 1945 and to consider Ukraine, Lithuania, and Belarus as nations equal to Poland. Giedroyć advocated abandoning the myth of “Jagiellonian” Poland and the prewar model of independence politics. Buhler also acknowledges the impact of Karol Wojtyla’s commitment to EU membership. However, he suggests that the pope saw Poland as an agent of the re-evangelisation of the Old Continent. Buhler believes that the “cultural counter-revolution”, sought by the PiS, “draws inspiration from the body of doctrine forged by John Paul II to offer an alternative to the ‘civilisation of death’ that he constantly denounced in Western Europe”. The irony is that the Catholic Church, which worked tirelessly to anchor Poland to the EU, finds itself in a situation where the Polish clergy has given “open support” to PiS policies, in contradiction to the Euro-Vatican line promoted by Rome.
At a time when American protection has become more uncertain than ever, the Polish bourgeoisie, which contributed to the division of Europe by supporting the war in Iraq in 2003, is faced with the need to find the right balance between Atlanticism, nationalism, and Europeanism. It is a search for a balance that can achieve electoral success but also allow for a transformation of the transatlantic relationship, which goes hand in hand with the attempt to strengthen European imperialism. An arduous challenge.