POLITICS AND SOCIETY
POLEXIT AND OTHER NOT FULLY COMPREHENSIBLE ISSUES Andrzej Olechowski, former Polish minister of foreign affairs (1993-1995) and in 2001 co-founder of the now opposition Civic Platform (PO), talks to Witold Żygulski.
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n recent weeks, the Polish government has been boasting of a great and effective diplomatic offensive, while the opposition claims that Poland has no coherent foreign policy at all today; what is your opinion? Under normal circumstances the main goal of foreign policy is to create the best possible conditions for the country’s security and economic relations. But today we do not know what the goals are. Statements from the foreign minister are extremely rare, his deputies speak only about specific situations and events, not about strategic plans. If we were to judge this policy by its effects, we would have to say that it isolates Poland rather than improving security and good economic cooperation. What is this isolation about? If we look at the relations with our neighbors, which, as we know, are the most important in terms of security - a country is safe when it is surrounded by friends - we have bad or at best cool relations with everyone around us. Starting with the west: with Germany, as with other Western European countries, we are currently engaged in a legal and ideological dispute. It concerns fundamental questions of the rule of law and its principles, which today are the cause of an extremely sharp conflict both with the institutions of The Warsaw Voice
the entire European Union and with individual EU countries. Note that the European Parliament’s resolutions that are unfavorable to Poland are passed by a huge majority of votes. Contrary to what the Polish authorities claim, this is not a dispute with EU bureaucrats, but with the nations that make up the European community and with the democratic representatives of those nations.
I CANNOT REMEMBER ANY TIME SINCE 1989 WHEN RELATIONS WITH RUSSIA WERE AS BAD AS THEY ARE TODAY Let us go further along the border. In the south we have an open conflict with the Czech Republic over the Turów mine, practically nonexistent cooperation in the Visegrad Group [Poland, Czechia, Slovakia and Hungary]. In the south-east there is Ukraine, with which we had very intensive relations under the previous government, but in recent years Winter 2021
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