The Polish Tiger - With its newfound ... clout, Poland is increasingly leaving the United States out

in the cold.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/05/27/the_polish_tiger

Poland extended Barack Obama an enthusiastic greeting upon his arrival on Friday, but it's increasingly clear that relations with the United States are no longer a top priority for policymakers here. Buoyed by the confidence of a dynamic economy -- the only European Union member to have survived the global financial crisis without falling into recession -- it's the EU and Germany, Poland's historic foe, that now capture Poles' imagination.

The triumph of the right-wing Law and Justice party in 2005, led by the twin Kaczynski brothers -- Lech, who became the president, and Jaroslaw, who was the prime minister -- brought pro-U.S. policy to its peak. The Kaczynskis were suspicious of the EU, fearing that Poland's traditional culture and Roman Catholicism would be diluted in a larger, cosmopolitan Europe. They saw Poland's traditional enemies, Germany and Russia, as potential foes, and relations with both neighbors soured. Poland's only true friend, they felt, was the United States.

Despite frequent promises by Washington to change the policy, Poland remains the only member of the EU's Schengen passport-free zone to need a visa to travel to the United States. Washington has said that Poland does not meet congressional requirements for the visa waiver program (which requires that less than 3 percent of visa applications are rejected), but the subject is an open wound. On a recent visit to the United States, Mikolaj Dowgielewicz, Poland's Secretary of State for European Affairs, shed diplomatic courtesies when asked about the subject: "Maybe one day here in Washington people will treat Poland as a reliable and important partner in the European Union, not just some country with sentimental links." (In an interview, one U.S. diplomat in Warsaw simply implored, "Don't talk to me about visas.")

But Poland's policymakers have made a decision to tie their fate to Europe; and increasingly, Europe knows its fate is tied with the rising power of Poland. The close ties and mutual respect is increasingly on display -- as when Sikorski and his German counterpart, Guido Westerwelle, journeyed last December to Minsk to persuade (unsuccessfully) Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko to hold free presidential elections.