POLAND: Chancellor Angela Merkel yesterday attempted to repair strained German-Polish relations by promising to present a united front at the forthcoming EU budget negotiations.
Speaking after talks in Warsaw yesterday with Poland's prime minister, Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz, she said that she wanted to restore trust between Berlin and Warsaw and promised to hold talks with her Polish counterpart to "create a common position" after Britain presents its draft budget proposals on Monday. "We will strive not just for our interests . . . but the interests of our neighbours," Dr Merkel added.
Mr Marcinkiewicz said that Dr Merkel's visit marked a "new chapter" in bilateral relations, reflecting the relief in Polish political circles at the departure of former chancellor Gerhard Schröder, whom they felt had sought closer relations with France and Russia at the expense of Poland.
"There is room for more optimism now than when Schröder was in office," said Piotr Kaczynski, of the Institute of Public Affairs (ISP). "Hopefully, we can get back to the traditional role of Germany listening to concerns of smaller countries."
Relations between Berlin and Warsaw suffered when they took opposite sides on the Iraq war. They deteriorated further when a centre remembering Germans expelled after the second World War from today's Polish territory opened in Berlin. Poles saw this as an attempt to honour with a museum German victims of a war in which Poland lost six million citizens as a result of Nazi brutality.
Mr Marcinkiewicz was clearly referring to this row, and the view that Berlin does not quite understand Polish outrage, when he warned yesterday that "the future can only be built on the truth from the past". The new German government has already moved to end the row, suggesting a centre looking at the history of mass expulsions around the world, not just at the German experience.
Another row blew up in August when Russian monopoly gas supplier Gazprom and two German companies signed an agreement to build a 1,200 km undersea pipeline from Russia to Germany. Polish leaders were not consulted about the plan and were outraged at its goal - to bypass existing pipelines through Poland, Ukraine and Belarus.
Berlin officials described this as a business deal rather than a political one. But, where Germans see potential, Poles see a potential threat. They view Russia's recent rise in the price of gas supplied to Ukraine and Moldova as justification for feeling threatened, quite literally, of being left in the dark.
"Gazprom is Russian foreign policy by other means," said Eugeniusz Smolar, president of Warsaw's Centre for International Relations. "We cannot understand how you could sign something like that without consulting friends and neighbours first."
Dr Merkel moved to defuse that row yesterday, establishing a bilateral group and saying that, from Germany's point of view, "access should be open to the pipeline".
Poland's new minority government of the centre-right Law and Justice Party (PiS) has given few foreign policy signals since taking office, but political observers expect it to be "euro-realistic" and "more assertive of Polish interests" than the last government.
Others warn that it is not just the new EU budget which hangs in the balance, but popular opinion in Poland towards the EU.
"A split in the EU on the budget will trigger a national debate in Poland about benefits of membership and Poland's role in the EU, a debate that would only benefit radical right-wing parties," says Dr Robert Sobiech, of the University of Warsaw.
"It would show that larger countries just act according to their own economic interests and would highlight the naivete of the Poles to the reality in Europe."