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12 Ania Krok-Paszkowska and Jan Zielonka payments levied on Polish food exports to the six EEC member states. Poland also wanted to maintain its traditional markets for agricultural products, but the main reason for seeking relations with the Common Market was to gain access to the technology and machinery essential for the creation of a more modern industrial base. 18 At this stage, given the geo-political context, the emphasis was very much on economic and technical rather than political cooperation. By 1972, Poland was maintaining regular unofficial contacts with the EEC and 14% of total Polish exports went to the EEC. (In 1998, when accession negotiations with the EU were launched, 68.3% of Poland’s exports went to the EU). At a meeting in Prague in June 1973, the CMEA decided to authorise its secretary general to establish preliminary contacts with the EEC. However, since neither side was willing to recognise the other as a supranational institution, it was not until September 1986 that the EEC and CMEA actually held a first round of talks about the possibility of establishing official relations. 19 In June 1987 official contacts between the CMEA and the EEC were established and new possibilities for cooperation were created. However, Poland had concluded bilateral agreements with the EEC in specific sectors such as pork and poultry exports well before official relations between the CMEA and the EEC had been established. It also entered into agreements on trade and economic cooperation aimed at facilitating access of Polish exports to Community’s markets and to enhance joint production ventures and scientific and technological cooperation. In September 1987 Poland applied to establish diplomatic relations with the EEC and it became the second socialist country after Hungary to be recognised by the EEC. 20 In 1988 a framework agreement between the CMEA and the EEC was concluded in the form of a joint declaration on mutual recognition. Within a year Poland then became the first Central and East European country to start its transition to democracy with the signing of the Roundtable Agreements between the Solidarity opposition and the PZPR [Polish United Workers’ Party] and its allies. 21 Transitional, partially free elections were held in June 1989. Solidarity candidates won all 35% of seats open to free competition in the lower house of parliament, the Sejm, and 99 out of 100 seats in the newly-created Senate. Two months later, a Solidarity prime minister, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, formed a coalition government made up of eleven Solidarity ministers, seven ministers from the satellite peasant and democratic parties, with four portfolios reserved for the communists. Full and rapid integration into Western political, economic and security structures such as the EU and NATO became the foreign policy priority for 18. J. KROK-PASZKOWSKI, Między Brukselą a Moskwą. Procesy integracyjne w Europie, Polonia Book Fund Limited, London, 1975. 19. For aspects of EEC-CMEA relations until the 1980s, see W. BIEŃKOWSKI and M. HAKOGI, Poland's Economic Relations with the West in the 1980's – the Impact of Political and Economic Factors, in: Coexistence, 25:3(1998), pp.299-318. 20. Warsaw Voice, 3 May 1988. 21. J. BROWN, Surge to Freedom: the End of Communist Rule in Eastern Europe, Adamantine, Twickenham, 1991.
Poland’s Road to the European Union 13 successive Polish governments. Diplomatic relations were established between Poland and the European Community and an Agreement on Trade and Economic Cooperation was signed in September 1989. Friends and foes of European Integration For the majority of Polish political elites the post-1989 efforts to re-install democracy and market economy went hand in hand with “Europeanisation”, meaning (re)integration with the Western part of Europe and its values and institutions. 22 This was the case even if the particular institutional solutions chosen reflected more the American than a European model of economy and government. However, especially in the first years of independence, Polish political discourse tended to operate with the notion of a Euro-Atlantic community, i.e. without drawing a sharp line between the EU and the US. Poland’s elite wanted first of all to return to the Western civilisation composed of democratic, capitalist and some would add Christian countries. Membership in Western institutional structures was about systemic reforms, historical justice and cultural affinity. It was not about meeting a detailed set of technical conditions. The return to Europe represented a return to normalcy; to something that Poland naturally belonged to. 23 Poland’s minister for European integration put it as follows: “Our country is returning to the family of European states because Europe is our home”. 24 The public clearly endorsed this reasoning. Opinion surveys in the early 1990s showed that over 80% of Poles were in favour of EU membership and associated the EU with democracy, prosperity and Western culture. They showed considerable emotional involvement in European affairs with “a relatively strong belief in Poland’s culturally and historically European identity, in its ‘right’ to a place in Europe […], but also expectations that unloved neighbours have to help us because that it is their moral duty”. 25 A large segment of the public simply assumed that joining the EU would give access to Western Europe’s wealth without the need to adapt or make any 22. Somewhat more narrowly, “Europeanization” is also taken to mean the shift of emphasis among national institutions and actors towards EU decision-making. See W. JABLOŃSKI, The Europeanisation of Government in Poland in the 1990s, in: K. CORDELL (ed.), Poland and the European Union, Routledge, London/New York, 2000, pp.127-141. See also D. PYSZNA and K. VIDA, The Management of Accession to the European Union in Poland and Hungary, Working Paper no.128, Institute for World Economics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, 2002. 23. A. SMOLAR, From Opposition to Atomization, in: Journal of Democracy, 7(January 1996), pp.24-38. 24. R. CZARNECKI, A Europe Understood as Unity and Diversity, Poland’s Committee for European Integration Materials and Documents, Warsaw, 8:2(1998), p.1655. 25. J. GOŁĘBIOWSKI, Social and Political Background of Poland’s Integration with the European Union, in: P.-C. MÜLLER-GRAFF and A. STĘPNIAK (eds.), Poland and the European Union: Between Association and Membership, Nomos, Baden-Baden, 1997, pp.91-106 (99).
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Page 7 and 8: 5 Introduction Anne Deighton This v
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