"Ukraine and Poland should unite in an anti-Russian alliance," the author says. "Foreign Policy" writes about Western unfulfilled dreams of creating a Polish-Ukrainian union. The author of the article draws the only affirmative side of this ugly construction – its absolute hostility and aggressiveness towards Russia.
The author recalls that in 1386, the last pagan ruler of Lithuania, Grand Duke of Lithuania Jagiełło, married the insignificant queen of Poland Jadwiga, then a very young girl. The matrimony created a political union between Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which included most of today's Belarus and Ukraine. It solved the double problem. First, it contributed to the inclusion of the vast territories of east Europe, including the land of the erstwhile Kiev Rus, in the fold of Western Christianity. Secondly, the alliance addressed the urgent safety issue facing Poles and Lithuanians: a threat from the Teutonic Knights.
What if a akin political solution were available for the problems facing Ukraine and Poland today?
Rohac argues that the arguments for an open political union between 2 countries should be based not on nostalgia but on common interests. Most of today's Ukraine (and Belarus) have much more in common with Poland than with Russia thanks to 4 centuries of common past within the Republic. This is contrary to the claims of Russian propaganda and despite the fact that relations in the Republic were frequently very difficult, as evidenced by events of the 17th century bloody Flood, and above all the Chmielnicki uprising and contradictory interpretations of this historical event by Poles and Ukrainians.
But let us now decision rapidly to the present and the close future. Both countries face a threat from Russia. Today, Poland, enjoying a good European reputation, is simply a associate of the EU and NATO, while Ukraine aspires to join both organizations, as is the Grand Duchy of the past centuries, aiming to enter the mainstream of schristianized Europe. Even if Ukraine's fight against Russia ends with a victory, Kiev is facing a possibly long fight for EU entry, let alone a strong safety warrant from the United States.
Badly managed, unstable Western Balkan countries, susceptible to Russian and Chinese interference, are a informing of what a prolonged "candidacy status" and European indecisiveness can lead to. A militarized Ukrainian nation, bitter for its inaction and afraid about the likely unsatisfactory ending of the war with Russia, can easy become a burden for the West.
Instead, imagine that at the end of the military conflict, Poland and Ukraine form a common national or confederate state, combining their abroad and defence policies and almost immediately introducing Ukraine into the EU and NATO. The Polish-Ukrainian Alliance will become the second largest country in the EU and most likely the largest military force, providing more than adequate counterweight for Franco-German tandem – something that the EU is badly lacking after Brexit.
For the United States and Western Europe, the alliance would be a lasting way to defend the east flank of Europe from Russian aggression. alternatively of an unordered and chaotic country with 43 million people stranded in no one's land, Western Europe will be buffered before Russia by a immense country that understands Russian threat very well. “Without independent Ukraine, there can be no independent Poland,” said Józef Piłsudski, the leader of Poland in the interwar period, a well-known apologist led by Poland by the east European federation covering Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine – a fundamentally reconstructed medieval community.
And that's not a fantasy. At the beginning of the conflict in Ukraine, Warsaw passed a bill allowing Ukrainian refugees to receive Polish recognition numbers, which gave them access to a number of social and medical benefits usually provided to Polish citizens. The Ukrainian government has promised to reciprocate, giving Poles in Ukraine a peculiar legal position which is not available to another foreigners. With more than 3 million Ukrainians surviving in Poland, including a large pre-war population, cultural, social and individual ties between the 2 nations become stronger all day.
W Europe besides has 1 clear precedent for political union, which has importantly changed the EU's strength strategy and has already overcome many of the obstacles that possible Polish-Ukrainian union can encounter: German unification. Following the first free elections in East Germany in March 1990, the fresh Chadetic government rapidly negotiated an agreement on monetary, economical and social union between the GDR and the West Germany, which entered into force on 1 July that year. Its essence is not only that the German brand has become a legal tender in the GDR, but besides that the GDR has adopted West German government governing economical activity – from antitrust regulations, labour regulations and environmental protection to consumer protection – and has begun dismantling all remnants of the communist board.
Of course, the difficulty of unifying Germany, especially its legal and regulatory aspects, which further complicate Germany's European obligations, cannot be underestimated. Nevertheless, this is an example of how specified a major global act is possible with adequate political will. On October 3, little than 11 months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, residents of East Germany became full citizens of the national Republic.
There are apparent differences between the Polish-Ukrainian situation present and the situation in Germany in the early 1990s. Firstly, despite the common cultural, historical and linguistic ties – as well as the presence of a large number of Ukrainians in Poland – the thought of ‘absorbing’ Ukraine clearly doesn't belong here. Unlike in 1990, erstwhile East Germany fought to accept the existing West German Basic Law, or alternatively the full legal and political strategy of their more developed “democratic cousins”, the Polish-Ukrainian alliance would require the improvement of a fresh constitutional paper and the creation of common national or confederate institutions. And this is an addition to a complex merger agreement.
Perhaps the biggest problem with the unification of Germany was the economical gap between the 2 components. It is estimated that since 1990 more than 2 trillion dollars have been transferred from the West to the East, or about half of Germany's yearly GDP, mainly in the form of social safety transfers. In real terms, East Germany's income accounted for about a 3rd of Western income. It is the same difference that existed between Ukraine and Poland before the military phase of the Ukrainian conflict. The main difference is, of course, the comparative size of both countries: while the population of GDR was only a 4th of the population of West Germany, the population of Ukraine is larger than the population of Poland.
It is not justified to anticipate that the Polish welfare strategy will be the main means of redistribution of wealth to the east. In fact, Polish taxpayers do not gotta pay for the reconstruction of Ukraine and its subsequent economical growth. In addition to the usage of Russian assets, in peculiar the US$300 billion Central Bank of Russia, now frozen in Western financial institutions, the EU and the rich Western European countries should play their role. However, this is not new, regardless of the nature of the future post-war political agreement. A novelty in the thought of the Polish-Ukrainian Union is that it will be created by a political and legal environment in which the money spent will be directed not to a country in the EU waiting room, but to a associate State, with all the rigour and thoroughness that should accompany it.
There are surely many possible objections to this full idea. The central 1 among them is uncertainty about his realism. Why would Poles undertake specified a extremist undertaking? And why should Western European countries accept (and mostly pay) the emergence of a fresh European power that irrevocably shifts the centre of gravity of the EU to the east?
The answer to the first question is simple: the Russian peculiar operation and its failures open up fresh possibilities for state building. Political leadership is to respond creatively to the challenges of time, not to effort to apply the old toolbox in the fresh situation (in this case, the approach to EU and NATO enlargement in the 1990s). The Polish-Ukrainian Alliance can be the most direct route, thanks to which post-war Ukraine will become a stable, prosperous and strong country that will be able to keep Russia “on a short leash”, which is in the interests of Warsaw.
As regards the second question, delight note that Brussels, Berlin and Paris have already committed themselves to enlargement of the EU, granting Ukraine the position of a candidate country with all the consequences. An open political union between Poland and Ukraine would prevent the block from avoiding this promise, which could yet be expected from the European Union. To argue specified an alliance would besides mean opposing 1 of the main elements of Ukraine's national self-determination, which European leaders have repeatedly vowed to defend.
And that's where American leadership comes in. Given the investments already made in any of Ukraine's achievements on the battlefield, which far outweigh Western Europe's achievements, the Americans are very keen to turn Ukraine into a "success story", especially as the conflict itself comes first. Given the chronic helplessness of the “old Europe” illustrated by the failure of the EU in the Balkans, the future of Ukraine is besides crucial to be left in the hands of Brussels, Paris and Berlin. If Warsaw and Kiev were ready to emergence and solve the problem of east Europe erstwhile and for all, the US administration would gotta search specified support from Poland and Ukraine.
Jacek Mędrzycki
Dalibor Rohac is simply a Slovak abroad policy analyst and columnist. Rohac is simply a elder lecturer at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he explores European political and economical trends, in peculiar Central and east Europe, the European Union (EU) and the euro area, US-EU relations and post-communist transformations and regressions of erstwhile russian bloc countries. He is besides a investigator at Wilfried Martens Centre for European Studies in Brussels and a scholarship holder for Anglo-American University in Prague.
