NOTe never underestimate the ability of the Poles to resist an order they do not want: this rule should appear in golden letters in the statutes of any political organization which integrates this key central European country.
For having ignored it, the Soviet Union had to resign itself to losing one after another, in 1989, its “satellite countries” shamelessly annexed by Stalin after the partition of the Second World War. Every ten years on average, with admirable tenacity, the Poles rose up against the Soviet dictatorship. Crushed, they always ended up getting up; at the end of the 1980s, taking advantage of a moment of weakness of the big neighbor in Moscow, when Mikhail Gorbachev himself understood that all this could not go on, they launched the last assault. This one was the right one. In June 1989, they opened a huge breach in the communist edifice by imposing pluralist elections. Brotherhood countries rushed into it and on November 9 the Berlin Wall fell. Exit the Soviet empire.
1er May 2004, Poland joined the European Union (EU). This decision was approved by a national referendum, with 77.4% of “yes”. It was the high point of their revolution: after having demolished the Soviet order, the Poles contributed their stone to another building, a construction opposite to that imposed on them in the 20th century.e century. They were finally part of the European family, free and democratic, the one they had watched all these decades with rage and envy, behind the Iron Curtain.
The EU, a scapegoat
For ten years, in its eagerness to make up for lost time, Poland, the largest of the ex-communist countries in the EU, enthusiastically played the community game. The diplomats and elected officials she sent to Brussels have often impressed in this enlarged Europe that they were helping to transform. With the help of European structural funds, the country has rebuilt its economy. Then things took a turn for the worse.
As in other Central European countries, the feeling of a two-speed EU took hold – on the one hand the rich Western Europe which was growing fat thanks to these new Eastern markets, on the other, second-class citizens trailing behind. The refugee crisis in 2015 and the attempt by Brussels, at the initiative of Berlin, to impose distribution quotas on all member states have accentuated the divide. In Budapest, Prague, Warsaw, political parties have won the favor of voters by exploiting their frustrations. And they have designated a scapegoat: the EU, which they sometimes even compare to the USSR.
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