Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk wrote that “President Nawrocki has once again pointed to the West as the main threat to Poland. This is the essence of the dispute between the anti-European bloc (Nawrocki, Braun, Mentzen, PiS) and our Coalition. A deadly serious dispute, a dispute over our values, security, sovereignty. East or West.” This was in response to President Karol Nawrocki’s speech in Poznan in late December commemorating the Greater Poland Uprising that secured Poland’s interwar western borders.
Notes From Poland drew attention to how Nawrocki declared that “Poland is a ‘national community open to the west, but also a national community ready to defend the western border of the republic, as the Greater Poland insurgents knew.’…He also recalled how ‘aggressive’ efforts were made to ‘take away our culture and national heritage’. Just as Poles back then took action to defend their national identity, so today ‘we must do everything we can to ensure that Poland remains Poland.’”
In response to Tusk’s post, Nawrocki wondered whether he has grievances against those historical Polish figures who fought Germany in the past in an allusion to Tusk’s long-suspected German loyalties. He also suggested that he’s either “unable to listen with understanding, or deliberately seeks conflict because his budget, healthcare, etc., aren’t adding up.” Nawrocki ended by reminding Tusk of his close ties with Putin during the golden era of Russian-EU relations, which remain controversial inside Poland to this day.
Analyzing this exchange, Nawrocki’s innuendo that the German-led EU poses a similar threat to Polish identity as the Imperial-era “Kulturkampf” upset Tusk, who then twisted his words and the context within which they were said to provoke a faux scandal for deflecting from his domestic political failures. Nawrocki wasn’t implying that Germany still poses the same threat to Poland’s territorial integrity as its predecessor states did, but he was nevertheless reaffirming that it’s still indeed a threat of some sort.
It was recently explained that “Germany Poses A Significant Non-Military Threat To Polish Sovereignty”, namely through its de facto control of the EU and associated attempts to erode Polish sovereignty, which also aim to weaken its national identity and thus amount to a modern-day “Kulturkampf”. This threat perception, which is shared among many on the Polish Right, compelled Nawrocki to devise a detailed plan for reforming the EU. He unveiled it during a speech in late November that can be read here.
Most media ignored this, but it contextualizes the part of his speech about “defend[ing] the western border of the republic” from threats from that direction, ergo why he said that “we must do everything we can to ensure that Poland remains Poland.” He also mentioned Imperial Germany’s plot to engineer demographic change, the policy of which continues through the German-led EU’s demands for Poland to accept civilizationally dissimilar migrants, including by literally dumping some of them into Poland.
Accordingly, Nawrocki therefore wasn’t fearmongering about German revanchism like Tusk claimed but was strongly alluding to the threats that Poland still faces from the west, they’re just much less kinetic nowadays. Instead of another invasion, they take the form of the hybrid warfare that Germany actively wages against Poland through the German-led EU, the goal of which is to deracinate Poles and erode their country’s sovereignty in order to facilitate their subordination as post-modern German vassals.
