Jury Drakakhrust

What Were Poles Afraid of before Joining It and What Happened?

There was a big fear that the opening of the market and the abolishment of the customs border would lead the Polish agriculture to a disaster, the country would be inundated with cheap Western European products, Germans would buy up the land and there would be the end of the Polish farming. And these apprehensions had a distinctively political dimension. One of the leaders of the Peasants’ Party Jarosław Kamiński told us how much his party lost at that time when it defended the accession to the European Union going against the general attitude of its electorate.

It might be that Poles would have been ready to make this sacrifice because the accession to the European Union was a civilization choice for them which was worth more than money. Finally, all Poland is not rural.

But instead of the sacrifice they got a prize – quite a rare event in the Polish history.

It is Polish farmers who eventually gained the most from the accession to the European Union. Their revenues have not decreased but increased, besides, a half of these revenues comes from payments from all-European funds.

The Polish agriculture as an industry has also gained from the European Union: if prior to 2004 the trade balance in the agricultural products with the EU countries was negative for Poland, after the accession it became positive. Figuratively speaking, it was not the European Union who inundated Poland with foods, but Poland inundated the Union.

How did it happen? Well, one of the explanations is that the agriculture is the most regulated industry of the European economy; a half of the common budget of the European Union goes to support it. In this sense the good performance of the agriculture of one or another country is not only (and, probably, not so much) the result of farmers’ productivity but the productivity of its functionaries in extorting agricultural subsidies from Brussels. Well, in this sense Polish officials showed themselves rather productive, as a minimum.

But, naturally, not they alone. After all, the Polish agriculture uses less chemical products, food products taste better, at least, for Poles, so there was no outsqueezing of domestic products from the market.

Another apprehension was of political nature also. As editor of Polityka weekly Marek Ostrowski told us, prior to the accession to the European Union some people feared that when borders would become open, Germans from the border zone would begin buying up real estate in the western Poland, and the German capital would take the region under control. And since the circumstances in which Poland obtained its western lands are known to everyone, the imagination pictured rather unlovely scenes.

And what finally happened? Something quite opposite – the Polish expansion to the east of Germany. The thing is that this region of Germany is rather a depressive one; many people, especially young ones, left it long since for the western regions of the country. And now Poles are coming to their places. A house in a German town near the border with Poland costs the same amount of money as a one-room apartment in Szczecin. As a result, many Poles, including youth, live in Germany and go to work in Poland.

These episodes show that the European Union is, so to speak, not very frightful, that many fears and superstitions turn out to be totally vain, that a country which joins the European Union gets totally unexpected bonuses.

But if we look in general– were they isolated breakthroughs or an overall trend, what is the general outcome?
What the Membership in the European Union Gave to Poland?

Bonuses from the European integration look very convincing at the macro level as well. Ignacij Niemczycki, official at the government committee for the European integration, briefed Belarusian journalists on some figures.

GDP growth rate in Poland and in EU countries at average
2002    2003    2004    2005    2006    2007    2008
Poland     1.4     3.9     5.3     3.6     6.2     6.6     4.5
European Union      1.2     1.2     2.3     1.8    2.9    2.7     0.7

As we see, the Polish economy shows good dynamics, its growth rate after the accession to the European Union has not decreased, and the Polish economy develops faster than the European Union on the average.

The value in the last column as well as data for 2009 speak about a unique phenomenon – Poland suffered from the crisis probably the least of all EU countries; its economy feels better than the economies of the Western European countries as well as of such countries as Lithuania and Latvia.

According to Polish experts, the Polish economy was oriented less to exports and more to the internal consumption. When export opportunities dramatically decreased in the whole world, Poland was rocked less than the export-oriented Eastern European “dragons”.

From 2003 to 2008 the unemployment in Poland decreased twofold (from 20% to 10%). Besides, it concerns people who have and have found jobs in Poland. Many people – about two million – work abroad, mainly in the Great Britain, Germany, and Ireland. On one hand, this phenomenon is not necessarily bad, and on the other had, taking into account the size of population, this rate is commensurate with the Belarusian labor emigration.

Looking at Brussels

The fact that many Polish fears related to the accession to the European Union did not come true, and the rapid growth in prosperity found their reflection in the transformation of Poles’ attitude towards the membership in the European Union recorded in sociological polls.

Attitude of the society towards the membership of Poland in the European Union
2004     2007     2008
In favor    49%    80%     73%
Against    30%     10%     10%

If in the year of Poland’s accession to the Union only the relative, even if convincing, majority was in favor of it, now the absolute and overwhelming majority positively assess the country’s membership in the Union. More, in fact, than in the European Union on the average — for all twenty-seven countries sixty per cent of population are satisfied with their membership in the Union.

The five-year long membership of Poland in the European Union changes not only the Polish economy but politics as well, or rather, the political philosophy of Poles. Listening to my Polish interlocutors, I always paid attention to a strange and somewhat even comic contrast between Poland and Belarus. Speaking about almost any issue of the foreign policy, my interlocutors indispensably mentioned Brussels. Moreover, Brussels is mentioned not as a certain center which dispatches orders, but as a site where important decisions need to be coordinated. The point is that now Brussels is Warsaw as well, but not Warsaw only.

However, as interlocutors admitted honestly, the Polish interest and the Polish horizon of the foreign policy lay mostly in Europe. As for global politics, Poland looks at the world to a great extent by German and French, and also American eyes.

Not like “multi-vector” Belarus – Russia, Venezuela, China, India, the Sudan, Libya, Italy, Lithuania, Azerbaijan, the State of global thinking and global politics. A kind of the Soviet Union in miniature. Or in caricature.

What is better – the answer is, probably, a matter of taste. What are the advantages that Belarus gets from the races of its fidgety leader across the globe and from his brilliant foreign policy bluff is a matter of argument. But conversations with Polish colleagues shed light on the consensus culture of decision-taking in the European Union.

For example, now the Polish diplomacy works rather closely with the Maghreb countries — Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. Why and what for? Because the French initiative of the regional cooperation is directed exactly on these countries. And to obtain the agreement of Paris on the Polish initiative of the Eastern Partnership they have to oblige France in Northern Africa.

In fact, it partially explains why Europe supported the new policy towards Belarus with so much enthusiasm – when the mechanism of policy formulation is so complicated and demands a great deal of “exchange of interests”, a clear-cut policy which embraces determination and willingness to sacrifice their economic interests looks simply improbable.

But surprises are not always pleasant.