While threats from the East can be countered with the military, the greater threat is from the West, which is dividing Poland and destroying its sovereignty, warned a Polish professor and member of the European Parliament for the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party.
In an interview this week, Prof. Zdzisław Krasnodębski said that the threat coming from the East was easily defined and met with military force, and the Polish nation was totally united against it. This is why he felt that the greater threat to Poland’s sovereignty comes from the West through soft power that is dividing Poles internally and eroding Polish sovereignty by stealth.
The remarks caused a storm from the opposition parties, who accused the professor of seeing the West as an enemy and even some ruling party politicians expressed reservations whether Prof. Krasnodębski’s intervention was helpful.
However, Prof. Ryszard Legutko had no such reservations. In an interview with conservative news outlet wPolityce.pl, he advised people to listen to Prof. Krasnodębski and said that he for one fully agrees with him. This is because there was awareness of the Russian threat among Poles, whereas there is no such awareness with regard to the threat to Polish sovereignty from the West.
He pointed to the EU becoming an “oligarchic structure” dominated by a Germany convinced it has the right to lead it. Having a bloc in which one power has a leading role may be music to the ears of the post-communists and left who used to take their orders from Moscow but not to most Poles, he argues.
Apart from German domination, Legutko sees the propensity of European institutions to breach powers bestowed upon them by treaties as a big threat. If the principle of unanimity on certain decisions in the EU is removed or Brussels finds a way to circumvent this powerful check on their power, then smaller states will be marginalized and even excluded, he said.
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Legutko accuses politicians from the liberal opposition of being accomplices in the process of Poland losing sovereignty. He believes that their stance of egging on the European Commission to stop EU funds that are owed to Poland is demoralizing and anti-democratic. He believes that a situation in which a country is effectively being told to change its democratically elected government is one that is an obvious challenge to national sovereignty.
Asked to comment on his colleague Witold Waszczykowski’s assertion that Polish left-wing opposition leaders Donald Tusk and Radosław Sikorski have not visited Ukraine because of Germany’s lukewarm attitude to Ukraine’s struggle against Russia, Legutko said that the liberal opposition has for years taken its cue for its foreign policy from Germany and that Tusk owed his appointment as president of the European Council to German support.
It was likely that should the liberals regain power, they would tie their foreign policy stance on Ukraine more closely to that of Germany and France, concluded Legutko.
