Poland accuses Germany of playing isolation politics

Germany is seeking to isolate Poland within the EU, while paying lip service to bilateral cooperation, a senior Polish diplomat said in a newspaper early this week.”Look at the Germans’ Poland policy of recent months: the laborious, stubborn efforts to isolate Poland within the EU on the one hand and on the other political rhetoric about real cooperation on bilateral matters,” Mariusz Muszynski, Poland’s top foreign policy aide for relations with Germany, wrote in the German business daily Handelsblatt.

He said Germany’s attitude towards its eastern neighbor had taken a turn for the worse since the departure of former conservative chancellor Helmut Kohl and criticized his two successors, Gerhard Schroeder and Angela Merkel.”The most recent governments have lacked Helmut Kohl’s moderation,” he wrote. “It is clear that under Schroeder, Germany failed to cement integration and find fields of joint cooperation.” He accused Merkel, the current chancellor and one-time protege of Kohl, of being dismissive when Warsaw seeks closer ties.

“After two years one cannot say that Merkel has taken the same road as her mentor.” He said Berlin displayed “coldness and distance” last year when Polish Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski proposed the formation of a joint EU army.Muszynski had levelled similar criticisms six months ago as Merkel was about to visit Warsaw, when he said the German government was “essentially nationalistic and egotistical and right now it is not friendly towards Poland.” Six decades after World War II, resentment over Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland still lingers and the Kaczynski brothers exploited these historic grievances in the run-up to 2005 elections to win support.