East Meets West to Fill European Post, and It’s Harder to Tell Them Apart
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Version 0 of 1. WARSAW — The election of Donald Tusk, the veteran Polish prime minister with deft political skills, a shaky command of the English language and no French, as president of the European Council is both an acknowledgment of Poland’s rising profile and yet another sign that the old distinctions between Eastern and Western Europe are rapidly crumbling. “Poland has arrived in the West, you might say,” Janusz Reiter, a former ambassador and the founder of the Center for International Relations, a research group in Warsaw, said Sunday. “His election in Brussels shows that we must redefine what we mean by the West to include the experiences of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe.” The former Eastern bloc nations, which shared a common drive to escape Soviet shackles a quarter-century ago, speak with less unanimity these days. Even on an issue as crucial as the conflict in Ukraine, the hard-line position of Poland and the Baltic States is not shared by other nations in the region like Slovakia and Hungary. And the notion of a prosperous West and a poor, struggling East has been largely erased in recent years, with countries like Spain and Italy struggling while Poland is the only European nation to experience economic growth in every quarter since the recession hit in 2008. “The economic crisis has shaken the traditional ranking list in Europe,” Mr. Reiter said. “This image of Central Europe and Poland being poor cousins is badly out of date.” At the university in his hometown, Gdansk, Mr. Tusk, 57, was active in organizing support of Solidarity, the trade-union movement that led the fight to topple Communism in the 1980s. He was elected to Parliament in 1991, representing a party that he co-founded, and served in that body for most of the next two decades. In 2001, he was one of the founders of the Civic Platform party and ran unsuccessfully for president in 2005, pushing a program of free-market capitalism and a larger international role for Poland. Two years later, Civic Platform won parliamentary elections, and Mr. Tusk has been prime minister ever since, forging a particularly strong relationship with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany. Although Mr. Tusk’s relations with France have not always been so close, he has built a bond with President François Hollande, who did not move to block his election on Saturday. Aleksander Smolar, who divides his time between Warsaw and Paris as president of the Batory Foundation, which promotes democracy and civic issues, said he had seen a palpable shift in the last half-dozen years in the way Western European leaders thought about Poland. “Not so long ago, when European politics was discussed in Paris and Brussels, none of the countries of the so-called New Europe were even mentioned,” Mr. Smolar said. “It was always about Old Europe, about Germany, France, Britain, Italy. “Now, it is quite different,” he added. “The Polish position on many issues, especially regarding Russia and the East, is always mentioned and taken seriously.” Mr. Tusk has ascended to the top of the European Council — from which he will direct the agendas for the regular gatherings of European leaders and act as a kind of spokesman for the Continent internationally — after years of lobbying by Poland to include the former Soviet bloc nations in the leadership. “Once that argument was accepted, it seemed rather logical that one of the most important posts should go to the biggest and most influential country in the region,” said Marcin Zaborowski, the director of the Polish Institute of International Affairs. “Also, everywhere throughout Europe, sentiment toward a stronger European Union has been slowly declining. Only in Poland has it been on the rise.” As a politician, Mr. Tusk has a reputation for compromise and shrewd parliamentary maneuvering. The latter skill was on display this year when he managed to preserve his government after a scandal in which top officials were caught on wiretaps making unsavory comments, including calling for a parliamentary vote of confidence before the opposition expected one. But it is his skills as a compromiser that are expected to come into play in Brussels. Even on the issue of the Ukraine crisis, about which Polish passions run high, Mr. Tusk was much less vocal about calling for harsh sanctions against Russia than some neighboring countries, or even the United States. “In Brussels, he will be the man who will find the compromise,” said Marek Wasinski, a Polish analyst of European affairs. The problem, Mr. Wasinski said, is that one of Mr. Tusk’s other skills is eliminating potential opponents to his leadership, and as a result there is no strong candidate to replace him as prime minister, with elections approaching next year. While it will be good for Poland to have Mr. Tusk at the head of the council, Mr. Wasinski said, the actual Polish representative on it — the next prime minister — is likely to have less clout. Linguistically, Mr. Tusk’s election can also be seen as an indicator of changing attitudes in Western European capitals toward Poland and the East. Though his second language is German, his skills in English are modest (he conducted his opening news conference in Brussels in Polish), and he speaks no French, a language once seen as a prerequisite for such a high position. “I hope and think that Tusk will not pretend to be one of the Western European boys, that he will not just join their club,” said Mr. Reiter, the former diplomat. “Poland is never going to be another Belgium or France. But it, too, is a part of Europe, and now its experiences are getting equal weight, not worse or better than the German or Italian experience.” |