Explaining Poland's Europeanized Foreign Policy and Its Rivals

The centerpiece of Poland’s Europeanized foreign policy under governments led by Civic Platform (PO) 2007-2015 is rapprochement with Germany and ‘embeddedness’ in the EU, designed to solve Poland’s traditional vulnerability to great powers to its east and west.  The crisis in Ukraine and heightened threat from Russia helped produce the upset defeat of president Komorowski by Law and Justice (PiS) candidate Andrzej Duda.  The rival foreign policy approach advocated by PiS is the formation of a bloc of likeminded EU members in Central and Eastern Europe prepared to be tougher than the EU consensus on Ukraine and to press EU influence in the Eastern Partnership countries, over the opposition of Germany.  According to this vision, other CEE countries would fall in behind Poland in turning the EU toward these aims. 

            Viewed from a constructivist perspective, an evolving sense of what Poland is and who Poles are lies behind foreign policy orientation in Poland, a country whose ‘return to Europe’ has underpinned its post-1989 statehood.  Poland’s Europeanizing foreign policy is the dominant strain in Polish Third Republic diplomacy, led by distinguished foreign ministers such as Geremek, Skubiszewski, Bartowszewski and Rotfeld.  Contestation around foreign policy visions reflects tensions around ideas of national identity, as well as radically different interpretations of post-1989 history.  At the same time, PiS arguments about authenticity, solidarity, Islamophobia and the rejection of ‘foreign’ values resonate with those advanced by populist-nationalists in founding EU countries.