The EU is a union of equals but there’s always one country that is a little more equal than the others. That’s because its ministers and diplomats chair meetings of the 27 states and act as a kind of administrative sheepdog, herding decisions and legislation through the complex machinery of Brussels. For the next six months, it’s Poland’s turn to be top dog.
It takes over on January 1 and already has attracted considerable attention and a weight of expectations around the EU capital. For one thing, its presidency of the EU Council coincides with the recent arrival of a new European Commission, the EU’s executive body, following five-yearly elections to the European Parliament. Handed a second term by leaders of the member states, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and her new team will be setting out their agenda for the next five years. And the Council, made up of national governments, will, with Poland in the chair, feed in its guidance and priorities.
Presidencies can come and go without making much impact. For one thing, for the past 15 years, European Council summits—of prime ministers and presidents—have had their own, full-time president. And some countries struggle to be heard during their six months chairing lower-level Council meetings. In the doghouse over its friendship with Russia and its attitude toward civil rights, Hungary moved few countries its way during a turn as EU Council chair over the past six months. Poland, however, is in an altogether different position.
Poland’s moment
After years when the last Polish government was aligned with Hungary in opposition to the EU consensus, Prime Minister Donald Tusk has won high marks from his peers for bringing Warsaw back into the democratic fold. As a former European Council president—the full-time summit chair—and as a leading light, along with von der Leyen, of the center-right EPP party that is the biggest in the EU parliament, Tusk has a powerful network in Brussels. Moreover, as by far the biggest of the once communist-ruled states that joined the EU over the past two decades, with one of the fastest-growing EU economies, and with frontline insight into the bloc’s biggest immediate worry—Russia’s aggression in Ukraine—Poland is a voice to be reckoned with. Factor in political disarray in the EU’s founding partners, Germany and France; the departure of Britain and the rise to power in Italy of hard-right eurosceptics, and Brussels is looking to 2025 as a moment for Polish leadership.
Tusk and Polish officials and diplomats seem to be embracing the opportunity with enthusiasm. There is much to be done if the European Union is to fend off dangers to its people that are emerging from changes in the wider world as well as threats to its own cohesion and survival that have roots in disillusion among the EU’s own citizens. In that sense, Poland’s “security, security, security” mantra might seem somewhat limited, even blinkered—especially when the priority list runs to fully seven repetitions of security.
However, closer inspection shows the presidency indeed plans to act over a broad front. Warsaw’s new ambassador to the EU, Agnieszka Bartol, has years of experience working as an EU official in the engine room of the Council. She has been briefing Brussels’ insiders that security will be the “leitmotiv” of the Polish presidency, but that this will cover many issues well beyond the evident menace from the Kremlin in the east and uncertainty over the future of the western military alliance under the returning President Donald Trump.
Outside forces
Naturally, however, this is where Security #1 in the Polish priority list starts. On the external security file, Ms. Bartol and the Warsaw government team will be pushing for the EU to do more to defend Ukraine but also to beef up its own defenses, including investing in the arms industry and “dual-use” infrastructure, such as roads and railways, that are useful in peacetime but might prove vital for wartime defense. Leading by example, Poland already devotes more than double NATO’s target 2% share of its income to defense, placing it out of reach of Trump’s fury at U.S. allies who chip in much less to the alliance.
Beyond the “hot” military aspects of external security, Poland also wants the EU to focus on helping neighbors other than Ukraine, including Moldova and Balkan countries like Serbia, on making the reforms they need to join the bloc in the coming years. That’s seen by supporters in Brussels as a way of stabilizing the wider region but viewed with suspicion by others who fear opening EU borders to states struggling with poverty and crime. Migration to the EU is also part of the external security dossier, especially where Poland sees hostile neighbors, notably Russia and Belarus, “weaponizing” the issue by escorting desperate people to the Union’s frontiers in an effort at social and economic disruption.
Of the other six security priorities for Warsaw, energy security means further weaning EU countries off Russian gas to remove Moscow’s leverage and avoid the kind of price hikes seen in 2022 when pipelines were cut off after the invasion of Ukraine. A key element is the switch to renewables like wind, wave and solar, which also features in the priority for climate security, along with ramping up European preparedness for floods and other natural weather disasters, as well as for longer-term environmental change.
To underline how far so much of public policy is intertwined, issues around green energy and reducing dependence on imports are also in focus for Poland under priorities for food security (including making sure European farmers make a living) and for economic security. Under this latter heading, expect to hear a lot about “competitiveness”—a major concern in Brussels, where European businesses are seen as struggling to grow as fast or generate the same investment returns as U.S. and Chinese rivals. Poland will push fellow member states to keep promises to let firms trade freely across internal European borders and as Trump threatens to impose hefty taxes on EU exports to the U.S., it will provide the kind of social and technological fabric that can help European companies be more efficient.
Internal anxiety
Efficiency and collaboration are keywords for health security, with minds still exercised by the realization, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, that Europe had let itself become reliant on imports for some critical medical products. That’s a concern, too, when it comes to information and communications services and technology, an area where Poland has defined a seventh priority as information security. The cancellation in December of Romania’s presidential election results over concerns about hostile influencers exploiting foreign-owned social media platforms to promote an anti-EU, pro-Moscow candidate is, say Polish officials, just the tip of an iceberg of threats to Europe’s hard-won democracy.
It’s tempting to argue that not all “priorities” can be a priority in such a long list. However, the repetition of the security angle in each case does help focus minds on what are perhaps the true core priorities for the European Union today. The world is changing fast in many different ways and a lot of old certainties about how powerful nations will act toward each other have evaporated. That creates unease for many people and a strong wish to feel safe—a human need that psychologists traditionally place below only air, food and water in the hierarchy of desires that are driven by our instinct for survival.
The success of nationalist political movements critical of the EU and of established parties owes much to promises that they make of returning to some previous state of affairs when people imagine life was safer. The Polish priority list reflects a will in Brussels to win back European voters’ trust by talking seriously about restoring security in their lives.
There’s a limit to what it can be achieved in six months, but the Polish presidency can set the tone for the next five years of the new Commission and Parliament. If, in that time, a degree of trust between citizens and EU governments can be restored, in the teeth of determined efforts from outside to undermine it, then we might look forward to better days. Such a day might come when we stop worrying so much about security and embrace the opportunities of a world in which each person is ever more in touch with everyone else on the planet and where hope and common humanity offer a better compass than fear of our neighbors. A Europe that feels more secure and trustworthy to its citizens would be a fine place to start.
