Poland and Russia

Adam Rotfeld is one of the most seasoned figures in Polish foreign policy. As foreign minister, he was a notable hawk in dealings with Russia, at a time when the authorities there were taking a tough line with Poland on everything from history to meat exports. Lately he has been a leading figure in the delicately named joint commission on "difficult historical issues". 

He has just sent Eastern Approaches an English translation of a recent article in Gazeta Wyborcza, the Polish daily, calling for rapprochement with Russia. Many may disagree with it, but it highlights the shift in Polish thinking towards a stance that would be unremarkable in, say Germany, but has in the past been rare in somewhere like Poland. We reprint it below in full.

Poland and Russia. Time for change.

We have a unique opportunity of co-writing the West’s strategy towards Russia in line with our national interests. But first we need to discard the complexes that overshadow our debate on Russia.

On May 1 1942 an eminent diplomat delivered a lecture at the Association of Polish Lawyers in New York titled “Poland and Russia in a free Europe”. At  that time Germany was not only occupying  Paris and Warsaw but also Minsk, Kiev and much of Russia. The speaker said:

“The attitude of Poles to our Western neighbor is homogenous (…). But our attitude to Russia is different, more complex. It is high time for Poles to seriously reflect on that attitude, to start thinking about the matter without anger, without prejudice (…), without any imposed preconceptions. We not only have to consider the tactics we should use in our daily talks and negotiations with Russia, in our daily though exceptionally important and serious matters. First and foremost, we need to think about elaborating a general Polish-Russian concept in post-war Europe.”

Those words were uttered by Anatol Mühlstein, previously minister plenipotentiary and deputy to the Polish ambassador in Paris - a man who enjoyed Józef Piłsudski’s unconditional trust and performed difficult, extraordinary missions for him. But on that occasion Mühlstein was no longer acting in any official capacity. He said what he considered right and he took personal responsibility for it.

I am tempted to quote the lecture in full because   Mühlstein’s opinions have lost none of their weight. Take the simple assertion that thinking has a future:

“It is of utmost importance to keep thinking,” he said, “to create lasting concepts that are not so much a program of political action but an elaboration of the goals that our country pursues and which diplomacy, as an executive instrument, should implement. Professional diplomats usually refer with certain irony to general political concepts (…). Though I have dedicated my entire life to practical diplomatic work, I beg to differ (…). Wherever there is no general concept in national history, in national interests, no firmly established political concept, political practice is always hobbled”.

Aleksander Skrzyński, the pre-eminent Polish foreign minister of the interwar period, wrote that Poland had not perished due to an inadequacy of its army or treasury, but precisely due to a lack of foreign policy. Almost seventy years have passed since the time when one of the outstanding Polish diplomats of the inter-war period uttered those words.

I

Twenty years have elapsed since the end of the Cold War, as much as history had set aside for the entire inter-war period. Today, many ask: what is Poland’s strategy towards Russia and what should it be in the second decade of the 21^st century?  I intentionally introduce a ten-year time limit here, since Europe and Poland are experiencing a period of accelerated changes.

Today, Russia, Europe and America, the whole Transatlantic area and the rest of the world find themselves as a crossroads. There is no shortage of those who advocate preserving the status quo. And then there are theoreticians and practitioners who believe it would be most desirable to have international relations that are modeled on Metternich’s 19^th century concept - a concert of European powers - since that policy had ensured peace and stability for several generations.

The American analyst John Mearsheirmer was the first to formulate the thesis about a return to the past as a postulate for the future. That was after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. His essay “Back to the Future: Instability in Europe after the Cold War” is today treated by many as a prophetic vision.

The most recent illustration that Mearsheimer’s postulate still constitutes a guideline for practical action is an article headlined “Getting Russia Right”, published almost a month ago  by two former (though still influential) German politicians, Wolfgang Ischinger and Ulrich Weisser (“Getting Russia Right”, New York Times, June 9 2010). They critically evaluated the report “NATO 2020”, prepared by a group of independent experts led by Madeleine Albright.  They claimed that the main flaw and shortcoming of the report consisted in its lack of courage and improper treatment of Russia.

Ischinger and Weisser wrote that the report had fallen short of expectations: “Regrettably, fundamental differences between some new members in Eastern Europe and those in Western Europe about how to deal with Russia have not been overcome. The expert group attempts to bridge the differences by proposing to reach out to Russia, but under the condition that any constructive engagement would have to be based on military reassurances within NATO. This means that defense planning activities – against Russia – would continue to be on the alliance agenda”.

These two authoritative and well-informed former politicians postulate a different kind of approach to Russia. It is to focus on building a common missile defense system, on joint Russia-EU and Russia-Germany projects. Issues relating to conventional and nuclear arms control and disarmament are to form  another area of collaboration. Interestingly, as regards the key Russian project of building a new security architecture, they postulate that the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and the “Corfu process” - seemingly, a natural platform for such debate - be rejected, since it would probably lead to a dead end. Instead, they propose to “animate the classic contact group format”, i.e. meetings of the foreign ministers of the US, Russia, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy  - “maybe including Poland plus the EU and NATO”. However, they prefer a smaller format, composed of three foreign ministers (US, Russia and the EU) plus the NATO secretary-general.

That German voice reflects a quite frequent nostalgia today for seeking solutions within a group of a handful of powers that would make decisions on matters affecting the whole Transatlantic community. Powers, by their very nature, prefer such a mode of decision-making to painstaking negotiations among the 28 NATO members or the 27 Union states. If that approach were to dominate as regards the elaboration of the West’s strategy on Russia, then Poland must be present in the group of states preparing new instruments for the engagement of Russia in matters of Transatlantic security.

The matter is evoking lively interest, both in diplomatic conference rooms in Europe and America and among independent analysts and thinkers. The Euro-Atlantic Security Initiative, established under the auspices of the Carnegie Endowment, is a multilateral commission co-chaired by Sam Nunn (USA), Igor Ivanov (Russia) and Wolfgang Ischinger. It includes almost twenty former prime ministers, foreign ministers, defense ministers, intelligence chiefs and others from many European states, Russia and the US. The commission’s works are likely to impact the elaboration of the strategy of mutual relations between Russia and the West.

The line of thinking that dominates in the debate on future relations with Russia finds reflection in the premier world journals devoted to security issues and foreign policy, including the American “Foreign Affairs’  and the London “Survival”. They have published a number of serious analyses, the theses of which are convergent: in modern history, the most advantageous and durable solutions were those that offered former adversaries an opportunity to join in shaping the post-war order based on an accord of the great powers. That was the case after the Napoleonic wars in the 19^th century and after World War II, when the Western democratic powers effectively included defeated Germany and Japan in the new security system. Now, twenty years after the Cold War, it is time for Russia.

II

Two directors of the Carnegie Center in Moscow, Samuel A. Greene and Dmitri Trenin, recently argued in a joint essay that the era of uncertainty requires the engagement of Russia. The West and Russia need each other. Russia’s turn towards the West is a matter of existential importance to the former. That is determined by:

• rising costs of economic activity and of political ambiguity, uncertainty and instability;
• the risk of falling further behind and remaining on the margins of world development;
• an urgent need to obtain Western investment capital and modern technologies, which necessitates institutional rather than personal guarantees in the top echelons of government;
• recognition of the need to combat legal nihilism, respect the law, build a pluralistic civil society and to conduct an internal democratization as an essential condition of a Western-type modernization.

The changes in Russia are being imposed in conditions of globalization by the economic, financial, demographic and civilizational crisis. This implies the need for a fundamental reorientation of Russian policy and necessity of discarding  the illusion that modernization may be accomplished by taking short cuts  (neo-Stalinist type). That Bolshevik path has been the source of Russia’s structural retardation. Another illusion consists in the belief that Russia can take some “third road”, emulate the Chinese model of development or perpetuate the system of government based on the so-called sovereign democracy – an autocratic, centralized government, steered from above at all levels.

If there is an awareness of what needs to be done, the question arises: what are the main obstacles to the attainment that goal? Radical reform is primarily prevented by historic memory and the fear that a process of fundamental change would unleash centrifugal and disintegrating forces in Russia. Opponents of modernization warn that Gorbachev’s perestroika, instead of modernizing and democratizing the USSR, triggered the process of its disintegration. The leaders of present-Russia want to be certain that the process of reform will not mark the beginning of the end of the Russian Federation.

On the other hand, Russia’s major Western partners do not want a repetition of the instability and unpredictability that marked the Yelstin era, when strategic choice was reduced to the dilemma: either a democratic Russia at the price of chaos and weakness, or autocratic and undemocratic government - but with a strong and stable Russia, whose state and legal institutions are largely for show and whose democracy in declarative and verbal.

Much indicates the choice has been made in favor of pragmatism and acceptance of Russia such as it is, without stimulating its internal democratization and liberalization from the outside and without indicating preferred modes of democratization, since the political class and society would be likely to receive such actions as humiliating and offensive to the dignity of the Russian people.

The West shows understanding for Kremlin’s warnings that a policy of isolation of Russia or its sidelining would invariably stimulate extreme nationalist, aggressive, backward and unpredictable forces. They would seek public support by claiming the West posed an external threat,   conclude alliances with anti-American regimes in the Islamic world and with populists in Iran or Venezuela and would support supranational terrorist groups (such as Hamas and Hezbollah) in an attempt to destabilize democratic states in Europe and America.

III

The challenge in properly understanding  the motives of Russian policy  lies in the fact that – unlike documents formulated in democratic countries – official Russian texts (statements by politicians, strategic concepts or doctrines) as a rule have propaganda goals and are mainly addressed to an audience in Russia. Rather than presenting a new position, the authors try to conceal new ideas in a deluge of old rhetoric, palatable to opponents of reforms and change.

And so, the Military Doctrine of the Russian Federation (February 5 2010) assigned the standard role of enemy and potential threat to NATO, while in private, unofficial conversations none of my Russian partners treated that assumption seriously, though all of them pointed to a direct threat in the South from Islamic fundamentalism and a growing potential threat in the Far East from China.

Another example of such duality is the draft treaty on European security (November 29 2009) or the proposed NATO-Russia agreement (December 4 2009). Both drafts postulate the principle of “indivisibility of security”. At the same time they seek to legalize the division of NATO into “old” members, with unlimited right to military security, and into “new” members (admitted after May 27 1997), who should be subject to various restrictions, prohibiting the stationing in their territories of units and arms exceeding strictly defined quotas.  That amounts to Cold War rhetoric, hindering the development of a “new type of relations” in the second decade of the 21^st century.

Against that background, a certain official document, meant for internal use, stands out in positive contrast. Its main message is that Russia’s foreign policy should be subordinated to the internal needs of modernization. I am referring to a memorandum of the Russian MFA (published in the May 11 issue of the Russian edition of Newsweek) under the bureaucratic title of “Program of effective utilization on a systemic basis of foreign policy factors for the long-term development of the Russian Federation”.

In an introductory letter to President Dmitri Medvedev, MFA head Sergei Lavrov says: “The present crisis (…) is a painful side-product of the transformations of the modern world since the end of the Cold War and of a systemic change of the coordinates of international relations, with the appearance of challenges and security threats common to all states. They are of a trans-frontier character and may only be countered through collective efforts of the global international community”. Translated into simple language, the opinions contained in the document of the Russian MFA might be reduced to the following theses:

• Russia is an integral part of the international community affected by a serious financial and economic crisis and is ready to address the common threats. However, it is essential to fundamentally realign the international system, which used to have its center of gravity in the US and the West. That state of affairs has been the source of instability of the world system.
• The crisis has affirmed that “the state is the key instrument for the protection and harmonization of the interests of the individual and society and the main participant in the process of international collaboration”. The focus remains on states rather than individuals or non-state actors.
• The process of reconstruction of the whole system of international relations has produced modest results. Its greatest achievement is the establishment of the G20 (at the expense of the G8) as a form of collective leadership in the world.
• New groups of states and institutions are gaining importance, e.g. BRIC (group of emerging powers: Brazil, Russia, India, China), while the reforms of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank generate little hope, since they are slow and advance with difficulty.
• Further transformations of the world system will be polycentric in character.
• The West wants to preserve its influence and ensure a “soft landing” for itself, particularly with regard to the financial crisis, and that is why it is trying to maintain at least remnants of influence in that sphere. That is the reason for attempts to preserve the G7, instead of the G8 (i.e. Russia is to be eliminated), in decision-making on currency issues.
• The US, according to the authors of the Russian document, seeks to marginalize those multilateral forms of cooperation (BRIC, Shanghai Organization) which it was not invited to join. The American right is pressing the Obama administration to return to the previous strategy (“war on terror”, confrontation with Iran, arms sales to Taiwan, sharpening of relations with China). In effect, conservative forces in the US are attempting to undermine the position of President Obama and his administration.
• As part of its global strategy, Russia is betting on an appreciating role of the UN system, wherein the position of the West is increasingly weaker. However, pride of place in Russia’s overall external policy is not assigned to institutions and procedures, but to support for modernization and a leap forward in the sphere of the most advanced technologies. The financial burdens borne by the main actors of the international scene (the US, the Union, and especially Germany and Great Britain) spell another found of shock and upheaval in world economy and finances within the next few years, with Russia as a potential, innocent victim.

That direction of development might be averted through state programs and stimulation of internal demand by implementing major infrastructural projects  (e.g. utilization of the US model of  the Silicon Valley and  establishment of a similar center at Skolkovo near Moscow) and broad-scale re-industrialization, with the use of cutting-edge energy-efficient and environment-friendly Western technologies, etc.

• Those goals require positive changes in world political relations, facilitating the mutual penetration of economies and cultures and the acquisition of innovative methods of modernization (exemplified by the EU-sponsored Partnership for Modernization). This applies to relations with the West – the US and the Union, but also to Brazil, India, South Korea, Singapore and, “to the extent possible”, to China (the wording relating to China is cautious).
• Russian foreign policy, according to the document, is supposed to promote the consolidation of the member countries of the Community of Independent States. The cornerstone of that cooperation is to consist not in political or military instruments but primarily in economic ones: the Euro-Asian Economic Community, the Customs Union of Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus, and the prospect of creating common economic space.

Thus, the tenets of the new Russian strategy are subordinated to internal  modernization and  external restoration of global power status.

IV

Our thinking should be rooted in the realization that change in Russian policy towards Poland is part of a much broader strategy towards the external world. Moscow perceives Poland in the context of Russian policy addressed towards the entire West, particularly the US and Europe. Our perception of Russia and its political impact on our security is incomparably greater that the place of Poland in Russia’s thinking about the world and its strategic political decisions. The time is ripe to reassess our attitude to Russia and to redefine our long-term expectations.

For the first time ever we have a unique opportunity of co-writing the West’s strategy towards Russia – both within NATO and the EU - in line with our national interests. This requires serious and mature reflection. Also, we need to discard the complexes that overshadow our debate on Russia.

And that debate often reflects a mixture of inferiority and superiority complexes. On the one hand, we hear concerns that “Russia is still playing Poland”, and on the other, that the so-called historic policy is our main asset and instrument. According to Robert Krasowski, it was conceived as a “political instrument to help the right weaken the left, and to let Poland as a whole win international games”; history “was supposed to assist politics, to be its asset, to allow the obtainment of additional benefits as redress for past wrongs” (“Rozkwit czy ostateczne fiasco polityki historycznej?” /The Rise or the Final Fiasco of Historic Policy?/, Europa, No.2/2010).

Let us be frank: historic memory is an important component of the foreign policy of any state and nation. However, it does not exhaust or replace political strategy. Aleksander Smolar accurately pointed out that thanks to us Russia might regain its “excruciatingly painful memory and be ready to confront it, creating the  foundations  of a democratic society (“Polska, Rosja i śmierć” /Poland, Russia and Death/, Gazeta Świąteczna, April 17 2010).

There has also been criticism of Polish policy, mainly for abandoning “the Jagiellonian idea” and departing from the Giedroyć-Mieroszewski line.  It is high time to stop using labels that have little significance today. One gets the impression that those who speak of “the end of Giedroyć’s concept in Polish policy” do not comprehend that it is only now that   possibilities have appeared  for the implementation of his ideas on a scale previously unthinkable. Asnyk was right when he wrote:

“It is the living we must follow,

And leave the former life beneath,

Abandon the persistence hollow,

Shake off the withered laurel wreath”[1].

What, then, should we take into account in shaping our strategy towards Russia so that “we follow the living” and “leave the former life beneath”?

• We need to realize the consequences of the fact that ten years after our accession to NATO and six years after joining the EU Russia perceives Poland as an important actor in both these institutions and on the entire European scene. Europe is seen from the Russian vantage point as an attractive model of development and an important partner. But it is also viewed as a rival – not so much in economic terms, as in politics.

These three dimensions (model, partner, rival) also apply to Russia’s relations with Poland. A model, because we are a country that has achieved success – we have conducted effective transformations; a partner – because Poland ranks high in economic relations with Russia; and a rival – because, historically, we have competed in  the territories of states inhabited by nations that are our eastern  neighbors  and Russia’s  western neighbors.

We are an important state to Russia: not central in importance, but not marginal, either.

• From the Polish point of view Russia is an important regional power that has global aspirations. The new generation of Poles sees modern-day Poland through different eyes than their fathers:  we are an example of a Slavonic state where radical reforms and changes have succeeded. We contradict the widespread conviction in Russia that the models, norms and procedures of Western bourgeois societies are not suitable for the peasant nations to the east of Germany.
• Neither historic disputes (though they should be the subject of normal debate between historians), nor a lack of mutual understanding constitutes the main problem in our relations with Russia. The greatest obstacle to shaping normalcy lies in mutual prejudices and the resultant lack of mutual confidence. That is why it is desirable to seek ways of eliminating distrust.

These must not be extemporaneous actions. A year ago the Polish-Russian Group for Difficult Issues proposed to the prime ministers and foreign ministers  of the two states that the centers of dialog be institutionalized. The premiers of Poland and Russia accepted that proposal during their meeting in Sopot on September 1 2009 and ordered its implementation during a meeting with the co-chairs of the Group at Smolensk (April 7 2010).

It is time to fulfill that decision. The Group’s works have become a catalyst for the improvement of relations between Poland and Russia. Our experience in building confidence in relations with Russia has evoked interest in many states and at multilateral NATO and EU meetings. The basic assumption is not Russia’s isolation but, on the contrary, its inclusion in collaboration with us – in cooperation with Germany and France, with the use of the Weimar Triangle, as demonstrated by the recent meeting of the four foreign ministers in Paris.

• Finally, Poland and Norway have submitted proposals on confidence-building and military security. The possibility of cooperation relating to conventional and nuclear armament control could be an important element of additional security and diffusion of tensions and distrust.

We will win the understanding and support of our Western partners if Polish postulates are dictated by a political philosophy of including (rather than excluding) Russia; if they encourage Russia to abandon Cold War rhetoric and are based on a common search for ways of overcoming divisions by utilizing existent institutions (such as the NATO-Russia Council or the OSCE) rather than creating new structures. The multiplication of new entities beyond need does not make sense. We should base our relations with Russia on the principle of reciprocity and interdependence, openness, transparency and predictability.

Professor Adam Daniel Rotfeld – minister of foreign affairs in the cabinet of Marek Belka, co-chair of the Polish-Russian Group for Difficult Issues, member of the Group of Wise Men, chaired by  former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, which   prepared the  report “NATO 2020: Assured Security; Dynamic Engagement”  containing an analysis and recommendations regarding the New Strategic Concept of the Atlantic Alliance; member of the commission preparing the Euro-Atlantic Security Initiative.

Gazeta Wyborcza, July 3-4 2010