’Europe’s centre of gravity is shifting towards Poland’: report
Joe Biden’s upcoming visit to Warsaw shows that Europe’s centre of gravity is shifting towards Poland, the British magazine The Spectator has reported.
Polish President Andrzej Duda (right) and US President Joe Biden (left) meet for talks in Warsaw on Saturday, March 26, 2022.Photo: KPRP/Jakub Szymczuk
„The President of the United States of America flies into Poland this month. Not to Germany or France or even the UK,” The Spectator said in an article posted on its website on Tuesday.
The British news magazine added: „There is great symbolism in this gesture, which goes further than Washington merely showing solidarity to the front-line states in Russia’s war against Ukraine. It is emblematic of a trend which has seen Europe’s geopolitical fulcrum shift eastwards.”
Biden’s visit to Poland to mark the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, when he will meet with Polish President Andrzej Duda and other eastern European allies, „is viewed locally as a tribute to their forthright support of Ukraine,” according to the article, penned by John Keiger.
But more importantly, he says, the trip „is perceived as a correction to the overweening dominance of western member states in EU politics.”
Keiger adds: „The EU Commission has felt obliged to tone down its pressure on Warsaw for refusing to acquiesce to Brussels’ cultural diktats; Poland is seen as too crucial to European security.”
Poland has „a dynamic pro-NATO, pro-US foreign and defence policy” and has emerged as „the spokesman of the Visegrad states,” according to Keiger.
He notes that Poland has the EU’s fifth-largest population, at around 38 million, and is the bloc’s sixth-biggest economy.
According to The Spectator, Poland „has been increasingly forceful in contesting and counterbalancing the EU’s western domination” and Warsaw’s „robust support” of Kyiv „contrasts with” the „ambivalence” of Paris and the „evasiveness” of Berlin.
Keiger writes: „Are we at a realignment in EU politics? Will chastened western member states now have to accept a more balanced partnership with eastern Europe, rather than regarding it merely as backward and needing to be educated? The time when a French President like Jacques Chirac could tell the Eastern European states that they would be well advised to keep quiet has long passed.”
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Source: PAP, spectator.co.uk
