Ein gutes erstes Jahr als Mitglied der EU habe zu wenig Einfluss auf die Politik in Polen, so Krzysztof Burnetko und Jaroslaw Makowski in Transitions Online.
The 19th-century British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli may famously have said, “There are lies, damn lies, and statistics,” but the reality of Polish attitudes to the European Union is now best described with numbers. And the numbers are compelling.
Poland has made a net profit of over 1.5 billion euros ($1.94 billion) from being a member of the EU. Poland may have paid over a billion euros into Europe’s coffers, but it has received twice as much back. This year Poland will earn even more.
Since trade barriers came down, Polish products have charged across the border. In the space of a year, exports to the EU member states have soared 33 percent. Poland’s imports have also risen sharply (by 23 percent), but Poland has boasted a trade surplus with the 24 other EU states of nearly 1 billion euros each month this year.
The economy last year grew faster than it had for seven years, and economists say membership of the EU was a major contributory factor. In 2004 the Polish economy expanded by 5.3 percent in 2004, up from 3.7 percent in the year before accession.
For farmers and businessmen, the year has therefore been good. The feelings of ordinary Poles are more mixed. Analysts had predicted that, a year after accession, inflation would not exceed 3-4 percent. That prediction has proved right (the rate is now 3.5 percent and falling), but for much of the year prices were rising at a faster pace than that. At the end of 2004, inflation stood at almost 5 percent. More importantly, food prices have risen – and, since the average Polish household spends around 30 percent of the family income on food, this is very important. In some months, food prices climbed by 10 percent year on year. The prices of some products, such as rice and sugar, climbed by up to 50 percent between March 2004 and March 2005. And connoisseurs of French wine and whiskey drinkers who hoped that an EU-enforced cut in the alcohol tax would lower the cost of their habit have been proven wrong.
The market mechanisms of competition and supply and demand have mitigated the impact. Huge exports of Polish beef initially sent prices rocketing, but when Poles stopped buying this newly expensive meat, the prices came down. Still, beef now costs nearly 40 percent more than it did a year ago. Here at least is food for the critics.
The political losers
Prices, though, are the only food critics have found after a year of EU membership. The critics have lost – and the biggest losers are the nationalists who played on national phobias.
First, they can no longer claim that enlargement is bad for farmers – because it is farmers who have been the greatest beneficiaries of integration. They have received 1.5 billion euros in help from Europe, spending some of it on modernizing their farms and changing their product lines. Polish food was supposed to be swept off Polish shelves by a flood of cheap European products. Polish farmers were expecting to be bankrupt. Instead, Polish food has caught the fancy of Europeans’ palettes. As the result, Polish farmers have been transformed from being Poland’s leading skeptics before accession to the greatest fans of integration. A year ago, at most 20 percent of rural Poles supported EU membership; today, that figure is 70 percent.
Second, they cannot claim that Europe will lay waste to Polish businesses. Poland’s small and medium-sized companies are still here. They have not collapsed. They have not been taken over by stronger Western competitors. There has been no marked decline in the number of businesses, a government report shows. Instead, a large number of small entrepreneurs and companies are building for the future, successfully finding European subsidies for investments. Some Polish industries, mainly those dominated by small businesses (such as furniture makers and textile companies), are making their first real appearance on Europe’s markets.
Third, another vision of foreigners pillaging and laying waste to Poland has been dispelled. Foreigners were supposed to be massing to buy up Polish properties. That has not happened. Indeed, paradoxically and unexpectedly, a completely different trend has emerged: Polish businessmen are buying up real estate in Germany (mostly in the east, in the former German Democratic Republic).
Other expectations have also been confounded. Over the past 12 months, more than 600,000 Poles have worked in the other 24 member states. Even so, there has been no great wave of emigration. Prior to accession, around 500,000 Poles are thought to have been working in the EU. The difference is that before May 2004, Poles worked mainly illegally; now, most of them are working legally, not only in the three EU states in which they were immediately given working rights, but also in Germany where they have been allowed to open up one-person businesses. If there have been any waves, it has been the outflow of young people to schools and universities elsewhere in the EU. For the Polish educational system, this may be a boon, as it will take pressure off overburdened schools. For Poland, it may allow more young Poles to gain higher education; for some nationalist parties, such as the League of Polish Families, the “mass escape” of young Polish brains is a major concern.
To read the article in full, visit the Transitions Online website.