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| Donald Tusk Photo by Alina Zienowicz. |
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| Johannes Dantiscus (1485-1548) |
Although it may not have made
much of a splash in the British or US press, the selection of Donald Tusk as
the new president of the European Council last night momentarily paralysed
Polish media, commentators and political elites, as they tried to take in the
significance of the moment. In domestic terms, it is a shock: Tusk has been
Poland’s most electorally successful prime minister since the fall of
Communism, in power since 2007. In Poland, it is now unclear whether Tusk’s
sudden departure for Brussels will make it harder for his Citizens’ Platform
party (PO) to defeat the right-wing Truth & Justice Party (PiS) at the 2015
parliamentary elections. If the price of Tusk’s recruitment is a victory for
the highly nationalist PiS, the EU might yet find its eastern policy even more
complicated, and the region more volatile.
But what of the historical
significance? Last night, Polish journalists and academics wrote that ‘Poland
has now returned to Europe’, that Tusk’s appointment amounted to ‘the
recognition of Poland’, ‘proof, that Europe does not end at the Oder river’.
The choice of Tusk by the EU’s leaders is seen domestically as a vindication of
Poland’s journey since 1989. The historical novelty of a Polish politician taking
a key role in European politics, and presiding over traditionally West European
institutions in Brussels does seem striking. Yet in the Renaissance period, under
the Jagiellonian kings, the Polish monarchy did produce diplomats of
international calibre. Erazm Ciołek, the son of a Kraków tavern-keeper, rose to
become the Crown’s top diplomat in the years circa 1500 – his fine Latin
orations before the papal curia made a tremendous impression in Rome, to the
extent that the Habsburg emperors engaged Ciołek to promote their own affairs
in the city. Another celebrity diplomat of the Polish Crown (born, like Tusk,
in Gdańsk), Johannes Dantiscus, in the 1520s and 1530s enjoyed the respect of
statesmen in Spain, the Low Countries and Germany, building an important
network around himself. And, in a less happy example, in the 18C, the exiled
Polish king Stanisław Leszczyński was relocated to France to rule the duchy of
Lorraine.
In the past two centuries, the
Polish state has been a supplicant, military target, or very junior ally of
Europe’s more westerly states – Tusk’s high profile international role in the
EU is a major symbolic step in a different direction, where Central European
politicians might exercise real agency in wider European politics, from the centre
itself. The Economist recently carried a feature asking if Poland, with her
geopolitical weight and economic successes, was entering ‘a new Jagiellonian [golden]
age’. Exactly what the Jagiellonian age stood for in Europe (1386-1572) remains
a subject of real debate: but it seems as if, in an echo of the sixteenth
century, Poland is again creating politicians of international calibre.
