| Submit your comments on this article |
| Europe |
| EU reform leaves Poland with a choice between second-class Europe and poverty |
| 2023-10-07 |
| Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Stanislav Stremidlovsky [REGNUM] Today, October 6, the leaders of the European Union member countries are holding their informal summit in the Spanish city of Granada. In addition to solving operational problems, they will have to discuss a strategic issue: reform of the EU and its potential enlargement. “The outcome of our reflection process over the next few months will shape the Strategic Agenda 2024–2029,” European Council President Charles Michel said in an invitation letter to meeting participants. And although many Western publications saw the informal summit and the meeting of the European Political Community that took place on the eve of it primarily as a discussion of the problem of “how and when to accept a debt-ridden and exhausted Ukraine into the EU,” we are talking about deeper problems of transforming the European Union. As German Chancellor Olaf Scholz once said, it is necessary to clearly establish the connection between enlargement and reform so that the European Union does not ultimately turn into an ungovernable club with 35 countries with veto power. In mid-September this year, a report by a German-French working group entitled “Navigation on the high seas: EU reform and enlargement in the 21st century” was published. It proposes, among other things, to abandon in the future unanimity when making decisions in favor of a qualified majority, to maintain the same number of members of the European Parliament and to move away from forming the European Commission on the principle of “one country, one commissioner.” If the European Union expands to 35 members, this means that some EU member countries will lose part of the current quota of deputies and will not be represented in the European Commission. This development of events is feared not only by “small” countries, but also by larger ones that oppose Brussels. First of all, Poland. As the chairman of the Polish ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, recently said, “there is a plan in the EU to deprive nation states of all powers,” after which Poles “will cease to be citizens of Poland.” PiS also consistently opposes the deprivation of EU member states' veto power. Given the unpreparedness of the Polish authorities for negotiations on EU reform, the Rzeczpospolita newspaper writes, citing its high-ranking diplomatic sources in Berlin, Germany for the first time began to lean toward accepting the traditional French concept of a multi-speed Europe. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, European Council President Charles Michel, French President Emmanuel Macron during a meeting on the sidelines of the European Political Community summit in Granada. “We will not wait for Poland, we need to prepare for Trump’s return to the White House, then Europe will have to take more care of its own security,” we hear,” the publication reports. This is a concept that French President Emmanuel Macron presented shortly after being elected head of the republic in 2017. It was this that was updated in the aforementioned report on the EU reform “Navigation on the High Seas”. Experts from the German-French group propose to consider the option of creating four circles of integration. The core is the eurozone and the Schengen countries. The second circle is the EU in its current form. The third will include countries associated with the European Union. Finally, the fourth is the European Political Community as an association of European leaders “meeting twice a year to communicate with each other.” In this case, Poland cannot get into the first integration circle, since it is not part of the euro area and is not politically motivated to abandon the zloty. Warsaw will join the club of seven EU member countries that still maintain national currencies. Five of them belong to Central and Eastern Europe, in addition to Poland itself: Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and the Czech Republic. Together with them, Warsaw will find itself in the role of a “second-class” member of the European Union, whose voice in the EU will be “ weakly heard.” Some Polish experts suggest that Warsaw, in this regard, go beyond the current models of action, which involve either “ following the mainstream of European politics or empty obstructionism .” But what can she do and will she want to? If the opposition comes to power in the upcoming parliamentary elections in Poland, then most likely it will not oppose the transformation of the European Union into a centralized superstate. If Law and Justice wins for the third time, on the principle of the lesser evil, it may tacitly agree with the concept of the four circles of integration. It seems that PiS is confident in its abilities. The pro-government publication wPolityce believes that for Poland, which has “ already outgrown the period of dependency and poverty,” involvement “in deeper integration will be clearly unprofitable.” Especially given its current "intermediate status from an insignificant country following Germany to a regional power" and the "ambitions and challenges" ahead. Hints of Law and Justice’s intention to follow the course of strategic autonomy can be seen in its decision to build several large nuclear power plants and active rearmament with the goal of creating the “ most powerful army ” in Europe. But the economic basis of this lies in the EU’s pull towards Poland, both in the grants allocated to Warsaw over the years and in the provision of equal competitive opportunities in European markets. Poland will no longer have such advantages in the second round of integration. Moreover, it will have to compete with a core of incomparably more developed and rich countries of the first circle, which will begin to suck Polish labor, financial and industrial resources. This threatens a setback for Poland and the impoverishment of its society. For the current ruling party, the choice between turning the country into one of the provinces of a centralized European superstate and maintaining strategic autonomy with an accompanying decline in living standards is obvious. But for many Poles, no. So, if opposition forces come to power, the projects started by PiS, after their implementation, may fall into the common cauldron of the core, when the built nuclear power plants and the “most powerful army” will be managed in Berlin and Paris, and not Warsaw. |
| Posted by:badanov |
| #4 If there's a 'second class' version of Europe, the France and Germay are headed there. Look at the crime and productivity numbers. They just want to lock down their reservations in the lifeboats. |
| Posted by: ed in texas 2023-10-07 08:09 |
| #3 Given that the Poles are building the largest army and most modern in the EU, that Germany reneges constantly on national defense spending, Brussels may find itself with more problems than it thought it had. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2023-10-07 06:55 |
| #2 ^EU and it's zero sum "human rights" ideology. 1/2 a million Ukrainians = a very cheap way to fight Russia. If Poles are not careful, they'd become an additional bargain deal. |
| Posted by: Grom the Reflective 2023-10-07 01:53 |
| #1 A cancer on the body of humanity. |
| Posted by: Grom the Reflective 2023-10-07 01:21 |