Poland 2009.
Ten years in NATO, five years in the EU.
Plus the lesson from Georgia.

 

Address by His Excellency
Radosław Sikorski
Minister of Foreign Affairs of Poland
September 25,  2008
School of International Public Affairs,  Columbia University, New York

 

President Bollinger,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Distinguished Professors, Scholars & Members of the Academic Community,
Dear Students,

I'm delighted to be here as Poland's Minister of Foreign Affairs. Poland and I salute your immense academic achievements. More than seventy scholars who have received the Nobel Prize testify to the quality and significance of academic work that is being done here. Theodore Roosevelt got his prize here in 1906, Enrico Fermi got his in 1938, while Joseph Stiglitz was awarded for his work in economics in 2001. Last, but very far from least, Anne Applebaum, my wife, received a well deserved Pulitzer Prize here for her magisterial study of the Soviet 'Gulag'. 

I am so pleased that the Poland I represent here is a prosperous, successful country in Europe's mainstream. It was not always so. The year 2009 will be rich in reminiscences of both the tragedies and triumphs of our past. It will mark the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War, the 20th anniversary of the demise of the communist system in Eastern Europe to which Poland contributed decisively, the 10th anniversary of Poland’s membership in the North Atlantic Alliance and the 5th anniversary of Poland’s joining the European Union.  What a coincidence, and what a rare opportunity to reflect on where we have come from and where are we going.

Poland and the United States share more history than many realize. I always remember that in the 18th century the US had the first constitution in the world, but Poland came right after you. We both had to fight wars to defend our liberties. You won yours and, in due course, you've become a super power. We lost ours and we disappeared from the map for all of the 19th century.

In the 20th century we were even more unlucky. In 1939, just as our country was nearing economic success, we were the first to fight Hitler but we succumbed to simultaneous invasions by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. In a war which for us lasted six years we lost six million citizens, half Jews, half Catholics. In the Warsaw uprising alone we were losing every day, for 63 days, as many people as were killed here in New York on 9/11. And then, in 1945, with the connivance of our allies at Yalta, we fell under Soviet domination. We did not give up and created Solidarity, a peaceful trade union which challenged Communism to deliver on its promise of workers' rights in a workers' state - and exposed it as wanting. Solidarity and the round table agreements in early 1989 mightily contributed to ridding the world of Communist totalitarianism.

Poles and Americans share something that cannot be said of all other friends and allies of both our countries. We treat human rights and liberty seriously. We feel them to the marrow of our bones.

The difference is that your geostrategic position has, until most recently, allowed you to stay away from your competitors. As regards ours, let me just remind you what NATO planners used to say back in the seventies and eighties looking at the flat plain between two powerful neighbors: God created Poland for tank warfare. But I think that even those planners couldn’t predict a challenge we confronted almost twenty years ago when within two years Poland changed all of its neighbors. Where we had East Germany, we now have united Germany, where we had Czechoslovakia, we now have the Czech Republic and Slovakia, respectively. Where we had the Soviet Union, which has left us for good, we now have Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania and the Russian Federation. And the nineties were glorious. We knew we had an opportunity to join the West where we belonged. We also knew that we couldn’t afford to miss it - and we didn’t. Our aspirations to reunite with the mainstream of the Western world manifested themselves mostly through a desire to join NATO and the European Union.

Today Poland is a NATO member of 10 years standing. During this period we integrated with the Alliance’s political and military structures, procedures, habits and culture of discourse. Each year of Polish membership in NATO was a test of our credibility and effectiveness in a joint fight against common threats and challenges. Since the first days of accession, Poland has participated in NATO missions, in the Balkans and Afghanistan. We believe we have proved to be a serious and responsible ally.

The UE is the largest economy on Earth and unlike NAFTA does have some attributes of a federation. The EU is not exclusively about economic integration, it is also about shared security concerns. Poland has actively supported, ever since becoming a member some five years ago, the European Security and Defence Policy. Our challenging geopolitical situation and conviction that Europe must speak with one voice on security matters have made us believe that we should be a significant part of this process. The aim of developing civilian and military capabilities is to provide the EU with instruments to conduct crisis management operations throughout the world - in the Western Balkans, Africa, Middle East. Poland has always argued that the EU should be more present in the region adjacent to its eastern borders, particularly in the unstable South Caucasus. Last events in Georgia testify to how prophetic our voice was.

In short, the EU is an emerging superpower. Is this in your, American interest? That depends. Sometimes we will disagree, but on most occasions when we do agree, we will be able to conjointly take care of crises that otherwise you would have to address by yourself.  

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Against this backdrop, I would like to explain how we interpret recent events in Georgia. I believe that the crisis over Georgia has at least five dimensions: ideological, local, regional, Russian internal, and global.

Ideological component is there but not in the way that Francis Fukuyama defined it. People say “Cold War is impossible because there are no two great ideologies”. I beg to differ. There are profound ideological differences between the European Union and Russia. The EU is a postmodern institution based on the assumption that the nation state is not the pinnacle of institutional development. The European Union is not quite a federal state yet, but it is certainly more than any other group of nations around the globe today. It has an unstated ideology which is about overcoming borders. Europeans have made borders irrelevant by free trade zones, by free movement of capital, goods, and people, and by physically removing border controls. A year ago Poland has removed its border controls with our neighbor, Germany. European approach is that the best way to deal with national minorities and with border disputes is to get rid of the border. And Russia, clearly, by its deeds, has shown that it is in a different century, where wars over borders and disputes over rights of minorities were the norm. Abhorrence of violence is in Europe's very DNA. We have avoided war on our continent for the longest period ever. Therefore, regulating our problems through sometimes cumbersome legal procedures and reaching consensus is something that we feel very strongly about.

The local dimensions are that there are now Russian forces in strength on the southern rim of the Caucasians. The consequence is that we can no longer feel as secure as before about gas and oil pipelines from the Caspian Sea basin across Azerbaijan and Georgia, to the Black Sea, Turkey and world markets. It is true that the Russians have not damaged them but certainly they did something else: they undermined the credibility of future investments in this area.

The regional implications are profound. We don’t know yet whether what has happened in Georgia is a crisis or a pattern. When Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov visited Warsaw two weeks ago, he told me that the war in Georgia was a one-of-a-kind event and not a beginning of a new trend. I hope it's true. But it remains to be seen and tested.

Needless to say, there are profound implications for Russian internal politics. Recent events have shown who is really in charge in Russia. And the person in charge doesn’t seem to be the nominal leader of the country. But it also shows something more worrying, namely that Russia has again chosen a model of integrating its politics through mobilization against an external enemy. This is an effective but costly method, particularly from the point of view of its neighbors.

And then the global implications are also far-reaching. Russia says that this is payback for Kosovo. I don’t understand why, since both Kosovo and Serbia are actually getting over it. Serbia has signed an association agreement with the EU, which is tantamount to stating that this country is now on a credible path to integration with the EU. That applies to Kosovo, too. So why should Russia be more upset over Kosovo, which she never controlled, than Serbia itself?

President Medvedev has just announced what the commentators are calling “The Medvedev Doctrine”. In a nutshell, it says that Russia is back on the scene. She will protect her citizens and infrastructure projects outside her territory by force, if need be. The justification that has been given in the case of Georgia - the self-given right to protect Russian citizens with tanks and bombers - has implications for many of the former Soviet republics. This has far-reaching consequences, in particular if you couple that with a speech that Mr Putin, then the president, made to the NATO-Russia Council in Bucharest in April of this year. He depicted Ukraine as an artificial creation. Should the Georgian scenario be emulated in Ukraine, we would have a large-scale European crisis. Here's a doctrine for a doctrine:

Any further attempt to re-draw borders in Europe by force or by subversion will be regarded by Poland as an existential threat to its security and should entail a proportional response by the whole Atlantic community.

I believe this to be self-evident but if it were to be adopted, NATO will need to change its current trajectory. At NATO we've addressed the threat of radical Islam through expeditionary operations. Afghanistan must be won and stabilized. We see the future of the Alliance as an appropriate mix of the old and new missions and capabilities. We need to make NATO's traditional guarantee credible again.

NATO has to recover its role, not as just an alliance, but as a military organization. That is what made NATO different from alliances of the past. It has its own military committee, its own staff, its own intelligence - assessing instruments. We need to go back to basics. We need to do war-gaming, we need to have contingency planning that are not immobilized due to political correctness, as has been so often the case in the recent years.

And at the EU we also have powerful instruments at our disposal. We are almost half a billion people and we account for almost a third of the global economic output. We have quite staggering twelve trillion euros of GDP and we are the biggest market of energy for Russia. Let's remember that the European Union is about regulation. If we can regulate Microsoft, so we should also be able to regulate Gazprom. If we are the main market for Russian energy goods, then we should be able to get reciprocal rules of transit for our energy through Russia and from Russia, and from Central Asia. It’s just a question of will. I believe that the European Commission should enforce Europe's energy policy. We need to obtain a far better deal for our consumers.

Having said all that, I want to be clear that confrontation with Russia is in nobody’s interest. We have huge problems to resolve along the North-South axis: mass migrations, uneven economic development of the globe, the scourge of terrorism or climate change. Russia could be and should be a useful part of a broadly defined West in tackling these challenges. The reemergence of the East-West divide would be an anachronism.

I’ll finish by saying that we’re delighted that in the midst of this Georgian crisis we signed with the United States an agreement on missile defense. I know it’s a controversial project, but we treat it as an act of friendship for the United States.  Timing was coincidental but I feel that the crisis in Georgia made credible our arguments about the need to balance two things - the contribution that Poland is making to the security of NATO and the United States, from ballistic missiles from rogue states, with the increased risk that Poland is taking on .

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I am confident that this is the beginning of a new era in collaboration between Europe and the United States. After all, as the European Security Strategy phrases it ‘Acting together, the European Union and the United States can be a formidable force for good in the world.’ The collaboration will soon intensify between Poland and the United States and even more importantly - between Poland and Columbia University. I am delighted to say that we are well advanced in gathering the funds for an endowment which may enable a Chair of Polish Studies to be founded here. I wish all those involved in this noble endeavor every success in bringing it to a successful conclusion. May it flourish as well as the friendship between our countries. Thank you for your attention.