‘One would have thought that in the intervening time of warfare there can be little doubt about who’s the perpetrator and who the sufferer, about who’s the supply of aggression and revisionism and who’s threatening the safety and sovereignty of all of the states in central jap Europe,’ write the editors of Osteuropa of their introduction to the present difficulty.
‘The Baltic states know this, which is why they welcome the presence of NATO troops in Lithuania. A part of the Polish inhabitants is aware of this too. However the governing coalition between the nationwide conservative PiS and the minnow Solidarity Poland occasion have a unique system of coordinates. For them, probably the most critical risk at the moment comes from Berlin.’
Inconvenient information
PiS is ratcheting up the anti-German rhetoric because the parliamentary elections in September strategy, writes Reinhold Vetter. Generally, criticism of Germany has a respectable core; however extra typically it’s propaganda that distorts actuality to the purpose of absurdity.
A favorite trope is that Germany carries the majority of accountability for the warfare in Ukraine, alongside Russia itself. Polish PM Mateusz Morawiecki doesn’t tire of repeating that Germany is ‘the most important blocker within the EU’ and ‘the principle hindrance to stricter measures towards Russia’.
This concept is, in fact, linked to criticism of German vitality coverage over the earlier many years: criticism that might be respectable, have been it not that PiS overlooks Poland’s personal heavy dependency on Russian coal. Now coal imports have been cancelled, many Polish households are apprehensive about their vitality provide. Good purpose, then, to not point out the subject.
Disloyalty is a brush PiS makes use of to tar its political opponents. Members of the so-called ‘German occasion’ embrace the previous deputy marshal of the Sejm and ladies’s rights activist Wanda Nowicka; the previous international minister Radosław Sikorski; the previous ombudsman for civil rights Adam Bodnar; and Donald Tusk, the chief of the Civic Coalition and the best electoral risk to PiS. All have been accused of supporting ‘German hegemony’ within the EU and inserting German pursuits above these of Poland.
Maybe probably the most potent message of Poland’s nationalists is the demand for warfare reparations. Vetter acknowledges that ‘there stays an ethical obligation upon German society to repeatedly keep in mind what the Germans did in Poland’. Contributions to the restitution of Polish cultural objects or the financing of buildings destroyed by the Germany in 1944 are commensurate, Vetter argues. ‘However that may solely work in a local weather during which the information are overtly acknowledged.’
These information embrace Poland’s waiving of reparations entitlements in keeping with binding worldwide regulation and bilateral agreements with Germany, in addition to the compensation paid by the German state to Polish victims of the Nazis since reunification. The large German contribution to the EU structural funding paid to Poland since 2005 additionally goes unmentioned within the anti-German discourse of PiS.
The outdated asymmetry
Reparations calls for marked a turning level in Polish coverage in the direction of Germany, writes Felix Ackermann in an in depth and outspoken article on the uneven relations between the 2 nations since 1945.
After the election of Lech Kaczyński as Polish president in 2005, Poland took the offensive. Beneath the brand new populist regime, Poland’s position was not that of the long-suffering sufferer extending its hand to its erstwhile tormentor – a job established by the Polish Catholic Church within the early Fifties – however that of the insurgents of the Warsaw Rebellion.
Willy Brandt’s ‘Kniefall’ on the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes in Warsaw is mostly seen in Germany as a watershed in nationwide reminiscence coverage. In actual fact, the second of excessive symbolism perpetuated the outdated imbalance. Because of Brandt, the determine of the ‘good German’ supplied Germans the prospect of redemption. However on the state degree nothing modified: as Ackermann factors out, no reparations have been paid to Poland underneath Brandt.
Within the Nineteen Eighties, it turned in style in West Germany to ship meals packages to Poland – non-public acts of charity that expressed financial inequality greater than the rest. After reunification and Germany’s recognition of the Oder-Neiß line, reparations have been off the desk: important elements of the German elite tacitly understood Germany’s dropping of its declare to its former jap territories as compensation sufficient.
All through the Nineteen Nineties, odd acts of bi-national cooperation have been more and more celebrated as moments of ‘reconciliation’ (coined Versohnungskitsch by critics of the exaggerated sentimentality), whereas ‘atonement’ (Wiedergutmachung) turned the official buzzword.
Initiatives have been set as much as present humanitarian and monetary assist to Polish victims of the German occupation. The Basis for Polish-German Reconciliation, which paid reparations to former inmates of German concentrations camps and different Polish victims of Nazi Germany, handled three million functions. One other 500 million euros have been spent on humanitarian programmes through the German international ministry.
However, writes Ackermann, compensation was largely symbolic. Regardless of Poland’s accession to NATO in 1999 and to the EU in 2004, acts of symbolic symmetry, asymmetries endured within the negotiation of pursuits.
With the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, Poland has entered onto equal footing with Germany for the primary time. Within the humanitarian and army arenas, Poland has acted shortly, clearly and constantly. However the authorities isn’t utilizing its new place of energy to claim its personal pursuits. As a substitute, PiS is falling again on outdated habits.
The calls for for reparations once more made by Kaczyński to kick of the election marketing campaign ‘are ammunition within the battle over the way forward for the EU’. The purpose, writes Ackermann, is to disclaim Germany’s proper to drive EU integration and safety coverage.
Georgian nightmare
The present regime in Tbilisi – nominally led by Irakli Garibashvili however with oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili pulling the strings – marks a sea change in Georgia’s gradual pro-western path of improvement over the previous thirty years. For all of the faults of previous governments, there isn’t a precedent for the authoritarian flip underway since 2020.
In dialog with Osteuropa editor Volker Weichsel, Zaal Andronikashvili talks concerning the pro-Russia flip in Georgian political life. With the outbreak of full-scale warfare, the governing occasion’s fence-sitting has develop into seen to all:
‘On the newest since 24 February 2022,’ says Andronikashvili, ‘western European governments have come to see by the declare that Russia was provoked in 2008. However Georgian Dream has caught to its story, and to what it sees as a coverage of de-escalation.‘
