As Europe crumbles, one plucky stayer, Poland, stands tall
Radoslaw Sikorski says his nation faces its past hardships with black humour. Picture: John Feder Source: The Australian
VETERANS of European communism always have a store of jokes about that hateful old hag of an ideology.
Radoslaw Sikorski, Poland's erudite, impressive, young Foreign Minister, is no exception. I remark to him that communism as an ideology failed both in theory and in practice.
He replies: "We had a joke. Why were Marxists not scientists? Because if they had been scientists they would have tried their experiments on rats first." And then: "What is communism? The longest road from capitalism to capitalism."
Sikorski is something of a Polish phenomenon. His family found refuge in England when he was young and he studied at Oxford and wrote for The Spectator. Later he worked for a US think tank before returning to democratic Poland and becoming a government minister.
He is married to the renowned US chronicler of communism, Anne Applebaum. I meet him in the Polish consulate in Sydney as he makes an official visit to Australia and New Zealand.
Sikorski is one of the brilliant men of Europe, touted at times as a NATO secretary-general or for other high office within the EU, of which he is an ardent supporter. He has all kinds of ideas for Europe's future, and for Poland's.
It is important to remember that Poland, a nation of 38 million, is a European success story. Since the global financial crisis, its economy has grown, cumulatively, by a whopping 19 per cent, whereas the eurozone average growth in that time is zero.
But more of that later. I can't resist asking Sikorski about Poland's emergence from decades of communist rule. How did it manage to avoid the bitter internal polarisations that have characterised many other ex-communist nations?
"It's like all post-revolutionary societies," he says, "some people feel the culprits of the old regime were not punished enough. But on the whole, the negotiated exit from communism was successful. Today, Poland is an example that others seem to want to learn from. Our speciality is the technology of transition."
Sikorski lists some of the distinctive features of his country's situation that helped it exit communism peacefully, with a functioning society intact.
"The presence of the pope (the Pole, John Paul II) in the equation was useful," he says. "The Polish Catholic Church on the whole supported our return to the community of free nations. Then there was the enterprising spirit of the people. And the Polish diaspora was a factor in maintaining the sense of us as a Western nation."
Former communists are active in Polish politics, some of them in leading positions in democratic parties and in the media. Does that indicate that communism had some degree of popular backing?
"Communism had some social support in the 1940s and 50s because the pre-war elites discredited themselves by losing the war so thoroughly," he says.
The industrial quality of state violence and death under communism also produced a social base for it, partly by wiping out the alternative social base. Sikorski says: "Both Hitler and Stalin subjected Poland to ethnic cleansing. Stalinism in Poland meant a social revolution. There were new people who owed everything to communism. But economic failure destroyed its legitimacy."
So how does he compare the two great evils of the 20th century, communism and Nazism, both of which wrought terrible harm to Poland?
"Communism was responsible for more corpses, not because it was worse but because it ruled for longer. There were similarities between the two, in the way they dehumanised their enemies. The technologies were similar. In Poland, both ideologies claimed their harvest of sorrow."
Poles believe, Sikorski says, that they had something to do with bringing the Cold War to an end.
Certainly, at the time of the fall of communism a number of Poles became the best known people on the planet, particularly John Paul II and Lech Walesa, the trade unionist who defied the Kremlin and its Polish stooges.
Does the national image forged at that time help Poland today? "I think we're known as a people that loves freedom. It's a useful image for some time. Of course, in the future we'd like to be known for our businessmen, our scientists, our sportsmen."
Like any good Pole, Sikorski is happy to talk about the past - proudly reminding me that in the 17th century Poland prevented the unification of Europe under the banner of Islam. But really he is much more interested in the future.
Poland has had the best performing economy in Europe over the past few years. Poland is outside the eurozone, still with its own currency.
Therefore, is Poland a pretty overwhelming argument for staying outside the common currency, keeping a distance from over-arching EU institutions?
Sikorski doesn't think so. He is a big European. Somewhat counter-intuitively (if not downright eccentrically), Sikorski thinks the solution to the European crisis is more Europe, not less. After all, he points out, the second best-performing economy in Europe over that time is Slovenia, and it's a member of the eurozone.
He has some other ready stats. If you combine government, corporate and private debt, Britain, which is outside the eurozone, has Europe's highest level of debt. And, as Spain showed, private debt can contribute to a crisis as much as government debt. The crisis is all about debt, he says, and it started in the US, which has a higher debt level than the European average.
"I think European institutions are at the heart of the solutions. The crisis exploded before Europe was institutionally equipped to deal with it. So we've had to manage the crisis and develop the institutions simultaneously," Sikorski says.
"We're almost there. We have a banking union; a mechanism for winding up insolvent banks; peer review of each others' budgets."
He accepts that being outside the eurozone has allowed Poland some useful economic flexibility. It experienced a 30 per cent devaluation in 2009 and this was helpful. But, he says, "the sources of Poland's success are much deeper than that".
Warsaw undertook the necessary economic reforms before the crisis, liberalising its economy, imposing a 60 per cent debt ceiling. Now Europe is forcing other countries to make these same adjustments, he says. Greece is sacking civil servants, which is long overdue. It is one-quarter Poland's size and has twice as many civil servants.
But surely, I suggest, Greece was enabled to put off the day of reckoning by the access it got to cheap debt because of the German dominance of the European economy.
One of Sikorski's disarming traits is his reasonableness. He is happy to acknowledge evidence which runs counter to his ideas: "It's true, they (Greece) hitched on to German credibility. That would have been the time to carry out reforms painlessly."
A rather unpleasant parallel suggests itself to me here. A country with a small population gets a big income windfall from an external source - in Greece's case German credibility generating cheap debt, in some other country's case a massive rise in commodity export prices - and then that country spends all the windfall, gives itself benefits it can't sustain and squibs the necessary reforms.
Sound familiar?
Back to Poland. Sikorski believes the country will join the eurozone in a few years' time, when the currency area is more stable.
He is a bit of a hawk on defence: "Being on the border concentrates the mind."
He wants Europe to act more cohesively in security and trade to get the benefits of scale, especially when dealing with Asia.
He is a bit worried by political trends in Russia, and describes Poland's relations with Moscow as "pragmatic but brittle".
Despite being an ultra-European he is still profoundly pro-US, citing Poland's contributions in Iraq and Afghanistan, made alongside Australia, as evidence of that friendship.
He has only one complaint about Australia. We don't recognise Polish driver's licences.
- by: GREG SHERIDAN, FOREIGN EDITOR
- From: The Australian
- May 04, 2013 12:00AM
Radoslaw Sikorski says his nation faces its past hardships with black humour. Picture: John Feder Source: The Australian
VETERANS of European communism always have a store of jokes about that hateful old hag of an ideology.
Radoslaw Sikorski, Poland's erudite, impressive, young Foreign Minister, is no exception. I remark to him that communism as an ideology failed both in theory and in practice.
He replies: "We had a joke. Why were Marxists not scientists? Because if they had been scientists they would have tried their experiments on rats first." And then: "What is communism? The longest road from capitalism to capitalism."
Sikorski is something of a Polish phenomenon. His family found refuge in England when he was young and he studied at Oxford and wrote for The Spectator. Later he worked for a US think tank before returning to democratic Poland and becoming a government minister.
He is married to the renowned US chronicler of communism, Anne Applebaum. I meet him in the Polish consulate in Sydney as he makes an official visit to Australia and New Zealand.
Sikorski is one of the brilliant men of Europe, touted at times as a NATO secretary-general or for other high office within the EU, of which he is an ardent supporter. He has all kinds of ideas for Europe's future, and for Poland's.
It is important to remember that Poland, a nation of 38 million, is a European success story. Since the global financial crisis, its economy has grown, cumulatively, by a whopping 19 per cent, whereas the eurozone average growth in that time is zero.
But more of that later. I can't resist asking Sikorski about Poland's emergence from decades of communist rule. How did it manage to avoid the bitter internal polarisations that have characterised many other ex-communist nations?
"It's like all post-revolutionary societies," he says, "some people feel the culprits of the old regime were not punished enough. But on the whole, the negotiated exit from communism was successful. Today, Poland is an example that others seem to want to learn from. Our speciality is the technology of transition."
Sikorski lists some of the distinctive features of his country's situation that helped it exit communism peacefully, with a functioning society intact.
"The presence of the pope (the Pole, John Paul II) in the equation was useful," he says. "The Polish Catholic Church on the whole supported our return to the community of free nations. Then there was the enterprising spirit of the people. And the Polish diaspora was a factor in maintaining the sense of us as a Western nation."
Former communists are active in Polish politics, some of them in leading positions in democratic parties and in the media. Does that indicate that communism had some degree of popular backing?
"Communism had some social support in the 1940s and 50s because the pre-war elites discredited themselves by losing the war so thoroughly," he says.
The industrial quality of state violence and death under communism also produced a social base for it, partly by wiping out the alternative social base. Sikorski says: "Both Hitler and Stalin subjected Poland to ethnic cleansing. Stalinism in Poland meant a social revolution. There were new people who owed everything to communism. But economic failure destroyed its legitimacy."
So how does he compare the two great evils of the 20th century, communism and Nazism, both of which wrought terrible harm to Poland?
"Communism was responsible for more corpses, not because it was worse but because it ruled for longer. There were similarities between the two, in the way they dehumanised their enemies. The technologies were similar. In Poland, both ideologies claimed their harvest of sorrow."
Poles believe, Sikorski says, that they had something to do with bringing the Cold War to an end.
Certainly, at the time of the fall of communism a number of Poles became the best known people on the planet, particularly John Paul II and Lech Walesa, the trade unionist who defied the Kremlin and its Polish stooges.
Does the national image forged at that time help Poland today? "I think we're known as a people that loves freedom. It's a useful image for some time. Of course, in the future we'd like to be known for our businessmen, our scientists, our sportsmen."
Like any good Pole, Sikorski is happy to talk about the past - proudly reminding me that in the 17th century Poland prevented the unification of Europe under the banner of Islam. But really he is much more interested in the future.
Poland has had the best performing economy in Europe over the past few years. Poland is outside the eurozone, still with its own currency.
Therefore, is Poland a pretty overwhelming argument for staying outside the common currency, keeping a distance from over-arching EU institutions?
Sikorski doesn't think so. He is a big European. Somewhat counter-intuitively (if not downright eccentrically), Sikorski thinks the solution to the European crisis is more Europe, not less. After all, he points out, the second best-performing economy in Europe over that time is Slovenia, and it's a member of the eurozone.
He has some other ready stats. If you combine government, corporate and private debt, Britain, which is outside the eurozone, has Europe's highest level of debt. And, as Spain showed, private debt can contribute to a crisis as much as government debt. The crisis is all about debt, he says, and it started in the US, which has a higher debt level than the European average.
"I think European institutions are at the heart of the solutions. The crisis exploded before Europe was institutionally equipped to deal with it. So we've had to manage the crisis and develop the institutions simultaneously," Sikorski says.
"We're almost there. We have a banking union; a mechanism for winding up insolvent banks; peer review of each others' budgets."
He accepts that being outside the eurozone has allowed Poland some useful economic flexibility. It experienced a 30 per cent devaluation in 2009 and this was helpful. But, he says, "the sources of Poland's success are much deeper than that".
Warsaw undertook the necessary economic reforms before the crisis, liberalising its economy, imposing a 60 per cent debt ceiling. Now Europe is forcing other countries to make these same adjustments, he says. Greece is sacking civil servants, which is long overdue. It is one-quarter Poland's size and has twice as many civil servants.
But surely, I suggest, Greece was enabled to put off the day of reckoning by the access it got to cheap debt because of the German dominance of the European economy.
One of Sikorski's disarming traits is his reasonableness. He is happy to acknowledge evidence which runs counter to his ideas: "It's true, they (Greece) hitched on to German credibility. That would have been the time to carry out reforms painlessly."
A rather unpleasant parallel suggests itself to me here. A country with a small population gets a big income windfall from an external source - in Greece's case German credibility generating cheap debt, in some other country's case a massive rise in commodity export prices - and then that country spends all the windfall, gives itself benefits it can't sustain and squibs the necessary reforms.
Sound familiar?
Back to Poland. Sikorski believes the country will join the eurozone in a few years' time, when the currency area is more stable.
He is a bit of a hawk on defence: "Being on the border concentrates the mind."
He wants Europe to act more cohesively in security and trade to get the benefits of scale, especially when dealing with Asia.
He is a bit worried by political trends in Russia, and describes Poland's relations with Moscow as "pragmatic but brittle".
Despite being an ultra-European he is still profoundly pro-US, citing Poland's contributions in Iraq and Afghanistan, made alongside Australia, as evidence of that friendship.
He has only one complaint about Australia. We don't recognise Polish driver's licences.
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