October 13 marked 20 years since The Day the foreign ministers of Poland and what was then the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, signed a declaration on the main directions of Ukrainian-Polish relations. On this occasion, the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry’s Diplomatic Academy hosted a conference, “Twenty Years of Ukrainian-Polish Relations: Tested by Time, and Common Prospects for the Future” on October 22. The conference participants — diplomats and academics from both countries, including two former foreign ministers of Ukraine and two ambassadors to Poland — conducted what may be called an audit of Ukrainian-Polish relations and shared their visions of further developments.
Henryk Litwin, Under-Secretary of State at Poland’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, noted in his speech that both countries had begun to cooperate in a difficult situation, with a difficult history of relations between the Polish and Ukrainian peoples. “Now our relations are a great success story. While in 1990 the relations were bad, now the Poles consider Ukraine as a friendly nation. It is the result of cooperation between diplomats and people from both countries,” he emphasized.
Meanwhile, Mykhailo Kirsenko, a professor at the Diplomatic Academy of Ukraine, named several factors on which friendly relations of the two states are based. First of all, there is respectful attitude to history. Secondly, while the Poles had Katyn, the Ukrainians had Bykivnia; the Poles lost a quarter of their population, the Ukrainians a third. Kirsenko quoted Jerzy Giedroyc who would tirelessly tell the Poles: “There will be no independent Poland without an independent Ukraine,” and emphasized that peace in Europe depends on relationship between the two nations.
Although Poland is modernizing itself and surmounting the transitional barrier more successfully than Ukraine, both countries can be an active force, Kirsenko believes.
The European Union seems to be worried about a strategic partnership between Poland and Ukraine. At least this is the opinion of Ukraine’s Deputy Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin. “You can sometimes hear EU officials say: ‘you and the Poles have formed a special partnership and if you are admitted to the EU, the Ukrainian-Polish axis will be no less important than the German-French one. So we must think twice about how to behave with you and the Poles,’” the Ukrainian diplomat said. In his words, this moment is the object of a certain pride for us and our Polish friends. “That we have managed to build this kind of relationship in just 20 years, which is a historically short period, and that we are considered to be able to act so effectively within the EU framework, is very important for me,” Mr. Klimkin said.
Incidentally, he believes that partnership between Ukraine and Poland stems from a troubled history of statehood and mutual relations. Another important issue, in the deputy minister’s view, is the common historical experience and, even more importantly, overcoming the negative historical experience. In this connection, Klimkin cited Aleksander Kwasniewski: “The Poles and the Ukrainians are extending their hands above history, above the graves, and are marching towards the future together.” In his opinion, the idea of establishing the EU is not in unifying some economic projects, although this is also important, but in overcoming historical experience. “And what we have done in the past few years fits in very well with the overall context of Europe becoming the Europe we know: a postmodernist state based on the European Union,” he emphasized.
The third very important aspect in Polish-Ukrainian relations, Klimkin noted, is that they no longer depend on foreign politics. “If we look at their density and structure, I find it difficult to compare them with something else, as far as two-level contacts are concerned — from the presidents’ consultative committee to the Ukrainian-Polish Euro-integration conference,” the deputy minister said. He thanked the Poles for an absolutely novel idea: to convene entirely different experts several times a year to discuss the overall context of Ukraine’s Eurointegration. “On these foundations we should create a vision of the future, try to do something, and discuss this further. This example shows the uniqueness of not only the Ukrainian-Polish relations, as this sounds somewhat formal, but of Ukrainian-Polish interaction,” Klimkin stressed.
On his part, Valerii Chaly, Deputy Director General of the Razumkov Center and a former deputy foreign minister, believes that Ukraine, which aspires to integrate with the EU, should look more at Poland’s experience. In his view, the Polish pattern of government-opposition relations and the pattern of building a democratic society completely suits Ukraine.
Litwin admitted in his speech that meeting European demands is a painful and even harmful process. At the same time, he emphasized that the country had to adapt and be open to changes. “Openness to progress turned out to be critical in 2009, when all the EU countries were in a slump and Poland saw growth, as it had adapted to working in the EU,” Litwin said.
Halyna Yavorska, a research associate at the National Institute of Strategic Studies, also agrees that Ukraine will go through a fairly painful process of adapting to European demands. But she added, quite to the point, that Ukrainians should know what they should suffer for. This is what we still cannot hear from Ukraine’s current leadership. She pointed out that Ukrainians and Poles should not rest on their laurels. She believes that trust between peoples and governments is not permanent, so both sides must make efforts to keep this trend intact.
