Poland rejects Stoiber's demands

Stoiber's statement elicited a sharp response from the Polish Prime Minister, just as the earlier demands addressed to the Czech Republic were smartly rejected by the entire Czech Parliament (a fact the European Parliament apparently chose to ignore). The Polish Foreign Minister, Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz led the Polish reaction against Stoiber's demands, saying that EU leaders should look to the future, not to the past. He was later joined by the Polish Prime Minister, Leszek Miller. (The issue of land sales to Germans is already a very sensitive issue in Poland, even without Stoiber's demand for a wholesale repatriation or restitution of Germans.)

Other Polish politicians said that Germany was trying to overturn the Treaty of Potsdam (1945), just as she had tried to overturn the Treaty of Versailles (1919) under Hitler. Prime Minister Miller reminded the Bavarian premier that the expulsion of the Germans had been decided by the Allied powers in 1945 and he pointed out that, unlike the Czech case, the decrees pertained to people who were German citizens at the time. Miller said the issue was closed and that the Polish government was not prepared to re-open it. On the other hand, the government rejected a motion put down by nationalist members of the Polish parliament, which uses the same language of firm rejection as the Czech parliament had done recently.

The European Commission, for its part, has picked up on the distinction made by Mr. Miller, saying that the decrees expelling the Germans from Poland were not discriminatory because the Germans were German citizens and not Polish citizens. In Czechoslovakia, by contrast, the Germans expelled were (or had been) Czech citizens. This is a good example of legalistic formalism producing absurdity: the Sudeten Germans were opponents of the Czechoslovak state and, as such, were expelled from it. The Germans expelled from the territories awarded to Poland, by contrast, simply lived in the wrong part of Germany.

European Foundation Intelligence Digest Issue No. 145, 27.06.2002


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