Earlier, in February 1990, Wałęsa had met presidents Vaclav Havel of Czechoslovakia and Jozsef Antall of Hungary at Vyšehrad, in Prague, where they reached a tripartite agreement to provide a framework for united action and regional security. Poland proposed that they seek entry into the European Union jointly, but this was rejected by Czechoslovakia, which, being economically fitter, was hoping to be admitted earlier on its own. Poland also wanted the Vyšehrad group, as it became known, to act as a bridge to Europe for countries such as Lithuania, but this initiative was turned down too.
Although it was not always successful, Polish diplomacy in the 1990s was remarkably inspired, sophisticated and consistent, despite the frequent changes of government, and was largely responsible for the peaceful resolution of painful problems in the whole region, which might otherwise easily have developed as they did in the Balkans.
Another area in which demons from the past had to be con-fronted was the issue of Polish-Jewish relations over the course of the twentieth century. In May 1991, during a visit to Israel, Wałęsa made a public apology on behalf of every Pole who had ever harmed a Jew. More important, Polish historians initiated a sensitive and objective discussion of the subject, which forced the whole of society to reconsider their view of the past. An important element in this was their uncoupling of acts of violence perpetrated on Jews by Poles from the harm done by Jews to Poles, which had the effect of disabling the tit-for-tat arguments hitherto used by both sides to blame and justify. This went hand in hand with a revival of interest in Jewish culture and its place in Poland’s past.
Polish diplomacy faced a no less delicate subject as it opened relations with Germany. In 1945 Poland had acquired, by Stalin’s writ and the Western Allies’ acquiescence, a huge swathe of former German territory, and those who had been ousted from it joined German nationalists in a chorus demanding its return. Alarm bells began ringing in Warsaw in 1990, when the West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl showed reluctance to ratify the existing border and Poland was not invited to take part in the ’two plus four’ talks (the two Germanies and the four wartime allies America, Britain, France and Russia) on the proposed unifi cation of Germany. Poland demanded formal ratification of its western border, reminding all concerned that, when signing agreements with Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine, it had declared its unconditional recognition of existing borders and its refusal to encourage claims by minorities either within those countries or ousted from them. This put moral pressure on Germany, and, with the support of the United States, which was already viewing Poland as a strategic partner for the future, the existing borders were confirmed.
Poland submitted an application for EU membership in 1994, and was formally admitted on 1 May 2004. A more significant date for many Poles was 12 March 1999, when the country joined NATO, along with Hungary and the Czech Republic, as this act finally cancelled out the Yalta Agreement by placing Poland firmly outside the Russian sphere of influence.
Poland took NATO membership seriously and offered large contingents for every one of its operations, including, crucially, that in Iraq, where the Polish special force GROM played a vital role, capturing the oil terminal of Basra in an advance operation. This earned the country recognition in Washington, where in January 2003 President George W. Bush told his Polish counterpart Aleksander Kwaśniewski that Poland was America’s best friend in Europe—but not in Paris, where President Chirac described its behaviour as ’infantile’.
Relations with both of Poland’s major neighbours subsequently took a turn for the worse, and echoes from an ugly past reverberated across the region. In 2004 a demand for compensation for those expelled from former German areas annexed to Poland in 1945 resurfaced as a political issue in Germany, the Poles countered by raking up German atrocities in Poland, and public opinion in both countries took over from common sense. While diplomatic relations remained cordial, politicians on both sides could not resist getting involved. When, in September 2005, the German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder signed an agreement with Russia to reroute a gas pipeline which was to have gone through Poland under the Baltic Sea, there was talk of the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact.