Sikorski: German inaction scarier than Germans in action

POLAND’S foreign-policy course over the past five years has been marked by two features: caution, and improving relations with Germany. But in a remarkable speech in Berlin yesterday Radek Sikorski, Poland’s foreign minister, threw caution aside and made a dramatic appeal (couched more as a demand) to Germany. The speech made front-page news in the Financial Times, which also ran extracts as an op-ed.

The speech starts with a reference to the break-up of Yugoslavia, which Mr Sikorski (disclosure: a close friend of this author) witnessed as a journalist in 1991. The decision by Serbia to print its own dinars marked the end of the federal republic, and the path to a series of wars that killed 140,000 people, ruined the lives of millions more, and turned places that had once been among the most advanced bits of the “communist” world into impoverished backwaters.

Mr Sikorski (who studied philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford) then paid a nice tribute to the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who highlighted the moral importance of money. Kant, he noted, had argued that:

    the entire practice of lending money presupposed at least the honest intention to repay. If this condition were universally ignored, the very idea of lending and sharing wealth would be undermined. For Kant, honesty and responsibility were categorical imperatives: the foundation of any moral order. For the European Union, likewise, these are the cornerstones. I would point to the two fundamental values: Responsibility and Solidarity. Our responsibility for decisions and processes. And Solidarity when it comes to bearing the burdens.

Mr Sikorski then skewered the argument that enlargement is to blame for the euro zone’s problems. (That was raised in an FT op-ed a few weeks ago, and attacked in my European Voice column a few days later). Poland and Slovakia have been the two fastest-growing economies in the European Union in the past four years. Trade between the ten “new” EU members and the 15 “old” ones had risen from €51 billion* in 1995 to €222 billion now. That trade boom, he argued, had if anything cushioned the “West European welfare states” from facing reality.

The real cause of the crisis, Mr Sikorski said, was confidence. In a pointed dig at his German hosts, he continued:

    Let us be honest with ourselves and admit that markets have every right to doubt the credibility of the euro zone. After all, the Stability and Growth Pact has been broken 60 times! And not just by smaller countries in difficulty, but by its founders in the very core of the euro zone.

That, of course, includes Germany.

Mr Sikorski went on to highlight the fragility of the EU’s institutions and procedures: they work “tolerably well” when times are good, but depend on “goodwill and a sense of propriety” that frays quickly in a crisis. The collapse of the euro zone would be just such a crisis, but far worse than any experienced in the EU in its history. 

    The break-up would be a crisis of apocalyptic proportions beyond our financial system. Once the logic of “each man for himself” takes hold, can we really trust everyone to act communitarian and resist the temptation to settle scores in other areas, such as trade? Would you really bet the house on the proposition that if the euro zone breaks up, the single market, the cornerstone of the European Union, will definitely survive? After all, messy divorces are more frequent than amicable ones.

The choice, he said, was either deeper integration or collapse. Mr Sikorski outlined a fiscal federation, with tough rules (“almost impossible” to block by political means) for backsliders, in return for the European Central Bank becoming a real central bank, and acting as a lender of last resort. That should happen, he argued, even before the necessary laws are fully in place.

He also supported dramatic changes in the political governance of the EU, including pan-European candidates lists for the European Parliament, fewer commissioners and perhaps a directly elected EU president. In return, the EU would stay out of

    everything to do with national identity, culture, religion, lifestyle, public morals, and rates of income, corporate and VAT.

Next came a warning to Britain:

    If you can’t join, please allow us to forge ahead. And please start explaining to your people that European decisions are not Brussels’s diktats but results of agreements in which you freely participate

Mr Sikorski thanked (in German) his hosts for German generosity and support in past years. He also noted that Germany trades more with Poland than it does with Russia, adding, in a barbed aside, “although you would not always know it from the German political discourse”.

Then came the crunch, headlined “What does Poland ask of Germany?”. First came six points Mr Sikorski wanted Germany to acknowledge.

1) it is the biggest beneficiary of the current arrangements and therefore under the biggest obligation to sustain them
2) it is not the “innocent victim of others’ profligacy…You, who should have known better, have also broken the Growth and Stability Pact…your banks…recklessly bought risky bonds”
3) the crisis has lowered Germany’s borrowing costs
4) if its neighbours’ economies implode, it will suffer
5) the danger of collapse is greater than the danger of inflation
6) “your size and your history” mean a “special responsibility to preserve peace and democracy on the continent”.

The biggest threat to Poland’s security and prosperity, Mr Sikorski said, was not terrorism or the Taliban (and certainly not German tanks). It was not even the Russian missiles that the Kremlin is threatening to deploy on Poland’s border. A far greater threat would be the collapse of the euro zone.

Mr Sikorski concluded:

    I demand of Germany that, for your sake and for ours, you help [the euro zone] survive and prosper. You know full well that nobody else can do it. I will probably be the first Polish foreign minister in history to say so, but here it is: I fear German power less than I am beginning to fear German inactivity.

Germany, he said, was Europe’s “indispensable nation”.

    You may not fail to lead. Not dominate, but to lead in reform. Provided that you include us in decision-making, Poland will support you.

Mr Sikorski concluded by highlighting the danger of belated reform, which had doomed the old Polish-Lithuanian joint state, founded in 1385 and finally extinguished four centuries later. Like the EU, it raised the standards of its time, pioneering the rule of law, participatory politics and regional security. Political paralysis led to its demise. Reform (such as the abolition of a crippling unanimity rule and the introduction of a permanent government) came in 1791, but too late. Poland was wiped from the map four years later.

Mr Sikorski ended his speech with these words:

    We are standing on the edge of a precipice. This is the scariest moment of my ministerial life but therefore also the most sublime. Future generations will judge us by what we do, or fail to do. Whether we lay the foundations for decades of greatness, or shirk our responsibility and acquiesce in decline.

The speech deserves the attention it has brought. Whether or not it makes Germany change (or accelerate) course remains to be seen. But the historic moment is clear: to see a Polish foreign minister addressing a Berlin audience as a political heavyweight, with serious ideas and serious demands, is a huge change from the days when Poland was seen as a difficult and needy recipient of Western largesse.

*an editing error on our part in the first version of this piece mistakenly gave the foreign trade statistics as trillions of euros, not billions. Sorry.