The escalating conflict between Poland’s right-wing government and the country’s top constitutional court is starting to taint its crucial security relationship with the United States.
Poland has long viewed itself as a key U.S. ally in Europe, with a special relationship that goes back decades. While many Poles felt the U.K. and France betrayed them during World War II, the U.S. was seen as a defender of Poland during communism. And in turn, in the post-Cold War era, America has nurtured Poland as a trusted European partner.
Poland’s current constitutional standoff is upending the relationship, with potentially far-reaching consequences for Poland’s region and the Western alliance. These days, Washington sees Poland as less of an asset and more of a problem, alongside other Central European countries seen as democracy backsliders.
The troubles in Warsaw are a distraction ahead of the coming NATO summit in July, during which the Poles will push hard for the permanent stationing of alliance troops in Poland to deter a newly aggressive Russia.
Worried Washington
President Barack Obama’s administration has “certainly been concerned” with recent developments in Poland, a senior administration official said Friday. But, the official added, “the new Polish government is still fairly young and finding its way forward, so we want to see how they respond to the report of the Venice Commission.”
The tribunal ruled last week that changes to its procedures pushed through parliament in December were unconstitutional. Despite criticism from Washington and European allies, the government has refused to recognize that decision and said it will not publish the verdict, a necessary step to make it enforceable. On Friday, the Venice Commission, a legal body of the Council of Europe, the continent’s leading human rights body, found the Polish government was largely in the wrong in its dispute with the tribunal. The commission warned that the government’s steps endangered democracy and the rule of law, and called on it to publish and follow the tribunal’s verdict.
The Polish government is standing by its position that the Constitutional Tribunal verdict is illegitimate, and it has no intention of publishing it. “There is no verdict. There is nothing to publish,” Jarosław Kaczyński, leader of the ruling Law and Justice party (PiS) and the country’s most powerful politician, told Polish television on Monday. He described the tribunal’s decision as “the private position of a certain group of people.”
“People who were only building their country in the 18th century are telling us what democracy is — a nation that already had structures of representative democracy in the 13th and 14th centuries” — Antoni Macierewicz, Polish defense minister
Polish officials’ reactions to the recommendations of the Venice Commission have been similarly negative. “The opinion of the Venice Commission is not a binding opinion,” Beata Mazurek, spokeswoman for PiS’s parliamentary wing, told reporters, noting that many countries have reacted in different ways to the commission, from following its opinions to rejecting them. “And such countries didn’t cease to exist.”
If that continues to be the government’s position, then Washington faces a problem.
“We want to make sure that Poland continues down the path of liberal democracy and the rule of law,” said the administration official, “and when you have a body like the Venice Commission raise concerns about the separation of power and steps the government has taken that may be inconsistent with liberal democratic norms, obviously it’s something the U.S. is watching carefully.”
Poland’s response
So far, Warsaw hasn’t responded to the increasingly insistent signals coming out of Washington.
Daniel Fried, a former U.S. ambassador to Poland and now coordinator of sanctions policy, dropped in to the Polish capital in January, meeting with foreign ministry officials as well as seeing Kaczyński, according to a source familiar with the meeting. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland was also in Warsaw last month.
In addition, three senior senators — John McCain, Richard Durbin and Benjamin Cardin — wrote to Prime Minister Beata Szydło in February. Calling themselves “friends of Poland,” they warned that the fight with the Constitutional Tribunal, as well as a law allowing greater government control of the public media “could serve to diminish democratic norms in Poland.”
Witold Waszczykowski, the foreign minister, responded that the senators’ letter was based on “misinformation” about the situation in Poland and had been inspired by “people who wish Poland ill.”
Antoni Macierewicz, the defense minister, was even more dismissive of the United States when speaking Saturday at a security conference commemorating Poland’s 1999 accession to NATO: “People who were only building their country in the 18th century are telling us what democracy is — a nation that already had structures of representative democracy in the 13th and 14th centuries.”
Warsaw looks to NATO
The diplomatic ill-temper comes at a time when Poland wants to push through an agreement at the July NATO summit to permanently station alliance forces on its territory. That’s something other NATO allies like Germany and France are reluctant to accept out of fear of Russia’s reaction.
“We demand equal treatment through gaining not only political but also military guarantees before any threat that could face us,” Waszczykowski said Saturday at the security conference.
That’s going to be a tough sell for the U.S. administration at a time when Poland is seen as straying from the normal rules of democratic states.
Despite efforts on the Polish side, the U.S. has not said if there will be a one-on-one meeting between Duda and Obama.
The administration is “trying to send very clear messages privately and trying to publicly note it, but not go too heavy-handed on it,” said Heather Conley, director of the Europe program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Conley served as deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs under George W. Bush.
While Conley believes the situation won’t affect the NATO summit agenda, she said that if the situation in Poland worsens, the White House will have to decide whether to scale back its bilateral engagement with Poland at the summit and “limit some of the exposure and not give the Polish government a lot of meeting time bilaterally.”
That’s already happening with the nuclear security summit in Washington on March 31. Polish President Andrzej Duda is attending, but despite efforts on the Polish side, the U.S. has not said if there will be a one-on-one meeting between him and Obama.
The danger for Warsaw is that its increasingly awkward government could find itself sidelined, and any future NATO bases in the region could go to less controversial allies like Estonia or Latvia, warned Paweł Kowal, a deputy foreign minster during Law and Justice’s previous stint in power from 2005 to 2007 who broke with the party in 2011.
“It could turn out that additional defense measures do come to the region, but that they don’t come to Poland,” he said, adding that the risks for Poland of being internationally isolated are very large. “Polish history is really pretty definite. We’re either in some sort of a union, or else Russian troops are stationed in Poland.”
Jan Cienski reported from Warsaw and Joseph Schatz and Benjamin Oreskes from Washington.