POLAND:POLAND WILL present a proposal for improving relations with the EU's eastern neighbours at a foreign ministers' meeting today, the first test of relations strained under the previous Polish administration.
The two-page Eastern Partnership document, drafted by Polish and Swedish officials, proposes visa-free travel and free trade zones with Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan.
The proposal calls for bilateral agreements with the individual countries similar to the one the European Commission is currently negotiating with Kiev.
Poland has traditionally been a champion of Ukraine's EU ambitions, but to minimise objections the new proposal makes no mention of membership prospects and dispenses with a lengthy appendix.
Unlike France's proposals for a Mediterranean Union, the eastern project would not have its own secretariat but would be based on the EU's existing Neighbourhood Policy, with a central role for the commission.
It proposes engaging at an expert level only with Belarus as long as concerns remain about the democratic and human rights record of President Alexander Lukashenko.
"The EU's eastern policy is of interest to the whole EU," said Danuta Hubner, Poland's EU Commissioner, to the Rzeczpospolitanewspaper. "The weakness of [earlier] northern, eastern or southern European Union policies was that they existed only in the sphere of interest of member countries in those regions."
Poland will be watching closely the reaction to its first EU proposal since last year's "square root" voting plan by former prime minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski brought to a new low Warsaw's strained relations with the EU.
Polish prime minister Donald Tusk is confident the proposal will find approval, so much so that he is expected to tell French president Nicolas Sarkozy during his visit to Warsaw next week that Polish backing for the Mediterranean plan is conditional on French approval of the eastern initiative.
Mr Tusk badly needs a policy success. Six months after taking office, the opposition has chastised the government for sitting on its hands. A poll last week found that 79 per cent of Poles did not believe the government had done anything significant since taking office.
Just 4 per cent said they thought Poland's image had improved under the new administration while 43 per cent said they saw no difference in effectiveness between this government and the previous administration.
