Four legs good, two legs bad
The unprecedented action by 14 member states of the European Union (EU) to round on Austrian democracy, with the threat to launch a near boycott of the Alpine state in the event of populist Jorg Haider's Freedom Party entering the next government in Vienna, did not go unnoticed in Poland. While many Polish politicians, especially on the left, gave a knee-jerk positive response to the display of moral condemnation by Europe's social democratic governments, many wiser observers spotted trouble ahead for the broader goal of maintaining the already waning support among the Polish people for EU membership.
The truth is that the victory of Haider in Austria, together with the reaction of the EU, causes potential problems for the Polish road to the EU. Haider has made no secret of his anti-Polish sentiments, openly calling Poles a "nation of car thieves," and bracketing them together with other Central Europeans as spongers on the Austrian welfare state. Haider's political intuition that this would go down well with those Austrians fearful of their jobs on the frontline of the EU are combined with a more principled view that the expansion of the EU is an undesirable development, precisely because of the consequences for the Austrian people of unfettered access to the Austrian job market by Poles and others, together with the possible additional strain on Austria's contributions to the EU budget. So clearly Haider in government is not good news for those wanting Poland to maintain its movement toward the EU.
But what to do? If the EU governments were concerned to neutralize Haider, and to convince Poles and other Central Europeans that the EU is the place to be, they seem to have scored a spectacular own goal. The immediate reaction in Warsaw to the decision to isolate Austria was decidedly muted, with Poland's governing politicians realizing that the actions of the EU member states may have fatally weakened public support for EU membership. The normally pro-EU Foreign Ministry, headed by Bronislaw Geremek, after one public declaration fell into silence, with Deputy Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski quickly declaring that it was not Poland's place to meddle in the internal affairs of an EU state. True, Prime Minister Jerzy Buzek supported the EU governments' position, but even he after a couple of days lapsed into silence. Why?
Firstly, governing politicians feel that the Polish public may recoil at what may be perceived as evidence of blatant EU meddling in the internal affairs of a democratic country. Poles have been traditionally sensitive to put it mildly to attempts to subvert their sovereignty, and the sense that the EU may one day decide that it does not like a democratically elected Polish government, and deploy the entire arsenal of modern diplomacy to effect its change, will be grist to the mill of those politicians who label the EU as a threat to national identity and traditions.
Secondly, many Poles will recoil at what they see as humbug and hypocrisy writ large. It was not a problem for the EU to stay silent when Italian governments included post-fascist parties, and when French governments included communists. Haider is accused of denying the Holocaust, but the history of French and Italian politics is riddled with leading left-wing politicians denying the reality of the Gulag and the Great Hunger of the 1930s in Ukraine. Many right-wing Polish politicians also reacted by pointing out that it poses no problem for Western social-democratic leaders precisely the ones who are condemning Haider to hobnob with Leszek Miller, leader of the Democratic Left Alliance (SLD), at meetings of the Socialist International, when only 10 years ago as a leading member of the old Polish Communist Party Miller was actively defending the virtues of the communist system in Poland, and owing his then position to the Soviet armed presence in Poland. That's the political equivalent of Haider having been a paid-up member of the Nazi Party, and riding German tanks into Vienna at the time of the Anschluss. Yet Miller and his party colleagues are currently the darlings of the salons of Warsaw's EU ambassadors, whose governments at the same time are slamming the door on Austria.
Small wonder that Polish politicians fear they will find it more difficult to persuade Poles that the EU is the place to be. It would be much wiser instead to ponder the reasons for Haider's rise to popularity in Austria, which derive mainly from a combination of the failure of Austria to de-Nazify after the war and instead practice the art of historical amnesia, together with a popular reaction against cronyism at the heart of the Austrian political establishment. If EU governments sincerely want to prevent a backlash against the EU developing in Poland, they should be more measured in their diplomatic adventures against Austria, and less obvious in their flirtation with Poland's post-communist left. And as for Polish politicians, those who oppose remembering what communism was about would be wise to look at the effects of historical amnesia in Austrian politics, and be mindful that the current trend to cronyism in Polish politics does not one day lead to a similar backlash against the political establishment by the Polish people.
Marek Matraszek is the Warsaw director of CEC Government Relations. He can be e-mailed at director@cec.com.pl
