Poland, Variable Geometry and the Enlarged European Union

Abstract

This article examines the role of Poland in the European Union, where the traditional Franco-German leadership axis has been replaced by a new ‘variable geometry’ of leadership constellations across a variety of policy areas. In this setting Poland has the potential to move from maintaining an initially passive role as a policy-taker towards becoming an agenda-setter alongside other larger and more traditionally dominant member states, especially Germany. However, Poland's success in this matter and subsequent influence on a variety of European Union policy areas, particularly the single market and the European Union's external relations, will substantially depend on the extent of its economic recovery from the effects of the global economic recession and wider developments in the European Union's debt crisis as well as its willingness to engage in constellations of member states that go beyond its traditional partners.

Notes

¹ The Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia all joined on 1 May 2004; Bulgaria and Romania joined the EU on 1 January 2007.

² ‘Downloading’, or national adaptation of policy preferences, is the process in which a ‘state is reactive, and where the state adapts and makes adjustments in its domestic politics and policy in compliance with European institutions’ (Wong 2011, p. 151).

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⁸ Established at Weimar, Germany, in 1991, the Weimar Triangle is a framework for political dialogue at various levels of government of Germany, France and Poland. It provides an opportunity to exchange views on a range of European policy matters.

⁹ One of the most striking, albeit tongue-in-cheek, images of the suggested domination of Poland by Germany in the Polish media was found on the cover of the Polish weekly Wprost which portrayed the German Chancellor Angela Merkel as a bare-breasted ‘step mother’ to Lech and Jaroslaw Kaczynski. See Wprost, No. 26/2007 (1279), available at: http://www.wprost.pl/tygodnik/?I = 1279, accessed 29 June 2012.

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¹² ‘Uploading’, or national projection of policy preferences, can be seen as states ‘projecting their national policies and policy styles onto the larger European structure. … By exporting their preferences and models onto EU institutions, they in effect generalise previously national policies onto a larger European stage’ (Wong 2011, p. 161).

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¹⁵ Copeland (in this collection).

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