Forget Polexit: Poland is indispensable to the damaged EU

“Polexit” is not only one of the ugliest and most unwieldy political neologisms ever concocted, it is also the most absurd. Despite the hysteria being whipped up by mischief-making EU politicians and media commentators, there is not the slightest prospect of Poland imitating Brexit. The latest opinion surveys show 88 per cent of Poles in favour of EU membership.

The Polish government is not attempting to drag its country out of the EU, it is simply trying to ensure it retains membership on terms compatible with maintaining its national sovereignty. That is hardly an ambition unique to Poland: it is shared by a large majority of EU member states who are watching the confrontation between Brussels and Warsaw with intense interest. Poland, in fact, is fighting not only its own corner, but that of every member state that wishes to conserve its fundamental sovereignty.

Brussels is indulging its habit of making unforced errors by parading its super-state integrationist ambitions in front of nations it previously lulled into a state of constitutional complacency. Countries join the EU for economic advantage; in doing so, they accept that entails the loss of some measure of independence, but not total abnegation of national sovereignty, regardless of the small print on EU treaties. If you doubt that, ask yourself whether France, which invariably leads the tut-tutting at supposedly delinquent member states, looks like a nation that has surrendered its sovereignty and regards itself as nothing more than a colony of the Brussels empire. Does that chime with the observable facts of France’s conduct?

Poland’s constitutional tribunal has ruled on the key question – with resonance among the 26 other member states – of sovereignty, by declaring that ultimately, on certain matters, Polish law takes precedence over EU law. That is precisely how most other member states see their constitutional relationship with Brussels, even if they do not shout it from the rooftops. Last year the German constitutional court, seated at Karlsruhe, fired a warning shot at the German central bank’s participation in the ECB’s bond-buying spree; this year it paused the EU recovery fund.

Both judgements confirmed the axiom that German constitutional law outranked EU legislation. So, why did Brussels not harass Germany on the scale on which it is now threatening Poland? It is clear from these three instances, two German initiatives and one Polish, that it is acknowledged among EU member states, including the most powerful of them, that EU law does not universally trump national sovereignty. That is the reality: Brussels’ integrationist aspirations may be reiterated with overblown rhetoric about “ever closer union”, but, ultimately, nation states will consult their own vital interests.

If the 27 member states of the European Union are not sovereign, why do they exchange ambassadors with other nations around the world? Why, then, is Brussels, King Lear-like, thundering threats against Poland? Because it thinks it can get away with it, is the answer. Ever since the accession to power of Poland’s Law and Justice party, Brussels has been demonising that country, as it has similarly treated Hungary, as part of an aggressive culture war. In that, the apparatchiks have been abetted by “journalists” whose knowledge of Poland could be engraved on a grain of rice and still leave room for the Lord’s Prayer. Polish history is not a casual cultural backdrop to contemporary events: it is intrinsic to them. It also explains why the EU has not the slightest hope of compelling Poland to abandon her hard-won sovereignty.

Poland, in the days of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, presided over a considerable European empire. It was ruined by its disastrous constitutional arrangements: an elective monarchy, constantly fought over by the warring great families. By the 18^th century that licensed chaos had brought Poland to the brink of dissolution. Its powerful neighbours – Prussia, Russia and the Holy Roman Empire – took advantage of Poland’s institutional weakness with the First Partition of the country in 1772.

The First Partition deprived Poland of half of its population and almost one-third of its territory (81,500 square miles). This act of banditry was carried out jointly by Frederick “the Great” of Prussia, Catherine “the Great” of Russia, and Habsburg Emperor Joseph II. All were leading figures of the pseudo-Enlightenment, hailed as “liberals”, all correspondents of Voltaire. This episode provided early evidence, later corroborated by the bloody French Revolution, that there is nothing more tyrannical than a liberal and that the displacement of Christian morality by “Enlightenment values” is not conducive to peace and harmony.

Poland was whittled away to non-existence by the successive Second Partition of 1793, which removed a further 115,000 square miles, and the Third Partition of 1795, after the rebellion of the patriot Kosciuszko, when the remaining 83,000 square miles were finally gobbled up by the three predators and Poland ceased to exist. It had a brief regeneration as the puppet state Grand Duchy of Warsaw within the Napoleonic empire. Poland, however, did not exist in any substantial form, despite repeated insurgencies, until 1918.

After two decades of genuine independence, the country was reduced to ruins in 1939, enslaved by the Nazis until 1945, sold out at Yalta by the Allies who had supposedly gone to war to free it, and left to fester under Soviet tyranny until the collapse of communism in 1989. A total of six million Poles were killed in the Second World War: three million Jews and three million Gentiles. In the period 1772-1793 only half of Poland was free; from 1795-1918 the country ceased to exist as a nation; from 1939-1989 it was under either Nazi or Soviet domination. Over the past 225 years, Poland has been free and sovereign for only 53 of those years.

That is an exceptionally tragic history. Putting oneself in the position of any Pole, does it seem likely he would be willing to barter his recently recovered freedom for an EU recovery grant? Are people whose grandfathers lie beneath the soil of Katyn Forest or the permafrost of a Siberian gulag likely to quail before the threats of Ursula von der Leyen, the EU pantomime dame? Will Poles lightly surrender their unaccustomed freedom to another imperial power bloc, especially one dominated by Germany?

Poles knows the cost and the consequent value of sovereignty and will never voluntarily give it up. Yet, instead of being moved by admiration for this noble nation whose squadrons fought in the Battle of Britain and whose battalions stormed Monte Cassino, Western commentators have swallowed the Brussels propaganda about “European values”, sometimes termed “Enlightenment values”, being rejected by Poland. As related, Poland had its first encounter with Enlightenment values in 1772, so it is unsurprising if Poles find them unpersuasive today.

Poland is traduced because it remains Catholic, does not think it a good or moral idea to kill its children in the womb or to import millions of migrants, some of whom have a militantly anti-Christian agenda. It infuriates Brussels because its churches are still places of worship, rather than museums of atheism on the UNESCO heritage trail. Worst of all, it insists on preserving its sovereignty.

In that respect, it is fighting the common cause of EU member states against the integrationist Brussels bureaucracy. There is no reason why joining the European Union – at least as originally advertised – should require abandonment of sovereignty or national culture. If EU states are required to have a common “culture”, whatever happened to diversity? Brussels, in its arrogance, still thinks of Poland as an impoverished former Soviet satellite state; in fact, it is now the 20^th largest economy in the world, with low tax rates and fast falling debt at 45 per cent of GDP, contrasting with France’s 115 per cent of GDP, while Poland’s budget deficit is a modest €6.5bn.

But, desperately insist the EU flunkeys, Poland’s courts are corrupt, so the judgement of the constitutional tribunal is invalid. The reality is that Poland has been pilloried for trying finally to free itself of the self-perpetuating system of communist judges imposed on the country by General Jaruzelsky at his notorious “Round Table” settlement, rushed through before Poles could be certain the Soviet Union would not intervene. So enduring has been that tendril of Marxism within the Polish judiciary that, in one instance, the succession to the bench was hereditary. Is that the judicial standard the EU promotes?

But hark at who is condemning. The European institutions are intrinsically corrupt. The rot has set in beyond even the immediate organs of the EU. Take the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), an arm of the Council of Europe rather than of the European Commission, but with which the EU is ponderously negotiating accession. At least 22 of the 100 permanent ECHR judges serving between 2009 and 2019 were former officials or collaborators of seven NGOs that are highly active before the court.

Twelve judges are linked to the Open Society Foundation, seven to the Helsinki committees, five to the International Commission of Jurists, three to Amnesty International, and one each to Human Rights Watch, Interights and the A.I.R.E. Centre. All of these bodies are funded by the Open Society network. Since 2009 there have been at least 185 cases in which at least one of those seven NGOs was involved. In 88 of these cases, judges sat in a case in which the NGO with which they were connected was involved. In only 12 cases did a judge recuse himself.

That is how business is conducted in Europe, even above the EU institutions, at the iconic level of the ECHR. European condemnation of Poland is hypocritical and self-interested. Polexit is a nonsense, the Poles have no intention of leaving. Or are we seriously to believe the EU, wounded by Britain’s departure, would try to expel a major member state? There remains, of course, the possibility that, just as it baited Britain for decades, Brussels might progressively wear down Polish tolerance and change public opinion in a Eurosceptic direction. Never underestimate Brussels’ penchant for sawing off the branch on which it is sitting. Otherwise, this latest “crisis” is just so much sound and fury, signifying nothing.