"Montagem de Angela Merkel nua faz levantar as... sobrancelhas" in Der Spiegel online, 26 de Junho de 2007

It's not exactly how one expects to see German Chancellor Angela Merkel: The broad, friendly smile seems completely at odds with her open blouse, two bare breasts spilling out. On each breast, one of Poland's governing Kaczynski twins is affixed - Prime Minister Jaroslaw is suckling on the left, President Lech has attached himself to the right. One of them is holding up the "victory" sign right in Merkel's cleavage. The image is on the cover of this week's Wprost, a conservative Polish newsmagazine that has not shied away from firing barbs at Germany in the past. The headline reads: "Europe's Step-Mother." As current holder of the EU's rotating presidency, Merkel, the magazine seems to be saying, is treating the rest of Europe like her step-children. And during last week's EU summit in Brussels, the article inside makes clear, she has been particularly condescending to the Poles. The magazine writes of Germany's "post-colonial reflexes" and says that six decades after the end of World War II, "the Germans still aren't able to treat Poles like partners." "The cover's message," Stanislaw Janecki, editor-in-chief of Wprost, told SPIEGEL ONLINE, "is that Germany, especially Ms. Merkel, was trying to treat Poles and the Polish leaders as small children completely unable to act on their own and somehow dependent on Germany.... There is the impression that Germany, being more powerful, wants to dominate Poland and that the Kaczynski brothers want to stand up to this domination."

Merkel's Head with a 21-Year-Old Body
"We imagined it to be a little funny," Janecki says. "The stepmother is often more sexy and more friendly that the real mother is. The body is of a young, 21-year-old model. I would say it is quite a nice body, and we didn't want to say anything bad about Ms. Merkel." He says they got the image from a model agency the magazine works with and they were looking for somebody "who was not so thin but someone who also has a good body." It's not the first time the Polish weekly Wprost has gotten in trouble in Germany. This week, the cover depicts Chancellor Angela Merkel breast-feeding the Kaczynski twins. But it could have been worse, the editor-in-chief points out. At least they used a 21-year-old model.

Relationship 'Clearly Not Working'
German reactions to the cover photograph have been predictably shrill. News agency dpa called the image "drastic." Many papers, including the Cologne daily Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, wrote of the Chancellor being "mocked" and "ridiculed." Tabloid Bild dove into its Rolodex and quotes a number of German politicians angrily denouncing the image's "tastelessness." The Wprost cover is just the most recent salvo fired in an ongoing media war (more...) between the two countries. Janecki's weekly has attracted unwanted attention for its covers on more than one occasion, the most offensive being a 2003 cover showing then Chancellor Gerhard Schröder being ridden dominatrix style by Erika Steinbach - head of a group representing Germans booted out of Poland following World War II - clad in Nazi garb. More recently, Germany's Die Tageszeitung has printed images of the Kaczynskis with potatoes as heads. And DER SPIEGEL recently switched around the Wprost cover by depicting Merkel being ridden by the Polish leaders. But reaction in the Polish press this week to the EU summit, which saw Merkel pushing through an 11th hour compromise deal (more...) after threatening to isolate Poland, has been far from universally critical of Germany. Daily Dziennik criticized Prime Minister Jaroslaw's pre-summit suggestion that Poland would have more influence in the EU had 6 million Poles not been killed in World War II (more...). And the newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza said that the Kaczynskis had "crossed the line of European good taste."
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,490795,00.html
JPTF 26/06/2007

"Aprendamos com a intransigência dos polacos" in Times 22 de Junho de 2007

The Brits and the French know how to play the game, a German diplomat embroiled in the European Union treaty negotiations told me last week. “We know we can rely on them. But the Poles, they are something else. I am not sure they understand the game at all.” Well, bravo for the Poles. They come fresh to the labyrinthine process of EU negotiations with a firmer grasp of their national interest than the current occupant of 10 Downing Street. Their reluctance to let Germany grant itself significantly greater voting power makes it Warsaw 1, Berlin 0, as today’s EU summit kicks off. Intransigent? Yes. Unacceptable? No. Look at France’s beloved Common Agricultural Policy. While EU leaders congratulate themselves on creating a foreign aid programme, recently branded one of the most wasteful and inefficient in the world, 40 per cent of the EU’s entire budget is still spent subsidising European farmers to keep African food out of the market. What hypocrisy. On Tuesday, José Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission, told Poland that it risked losing money and support if it blocked a deal to reform the EU’s institutions. What, for exercising its democratic right to object? That is blackmail. Unlike Lech Kaczynski, the President of Poland, Mr Barroso is not elected. The money he threatens to remove belongs primarily to British, Dutch, French, Italian and German taxpayers. What do those who foot the EU’s bills think about a new voting system that will not only change the relative voting power of different countries, but also dramatically reduce the power of individual nations to stop legislation, by raising the threshold for a blocking coalition? Do they agree with Brussels that we must make it easier for the EU to pass more laws? The Dutch don’t. Their perfectly reasonable “red card” proposal, which would allow a majority of national parliaments to block legislation that they did not like, has been dismissed out of hand. “The Dutch climbed a few trees and we now have to get them back down again,” an EU ambassador in Brussels said this week.

That is how Europe’s political elite views its citizens: they don’t know what’s good for them. Best to keep them out of it. As Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, has said, better to use “different terminology without changing the legal substance” of the old constitution, then present it to the public as an “amending treaty” that no longer requires a referendum. What fools they take us for. Do they really think that they can sustain the fiction that this “treaty” is essential for the EU to function, and yet so unimportant as to not be worth us bothering our little heads about? Do they expect us to believe that a document cleansed of the word “constitution”, but that still incorporates a full-time EU president and foreign minister, gives the power to make international treaties, and overrides national parliaments on criminal law, employment law, social policy and immigration (to name but a few), is so different from the one that Dutch and French voters rejected two years ago? Britain has pushed through the enlargement of the Union, it must therefore accept a change in voting weights. But it need not accept the higher thresholds for blocking legislation that could prevent us keeping out measures such as the Working Time Directive. Claims of gridlock are much exaggerated. Since the constitution was voted down two years ago, the EU has created the world’s first emissions trading scheme and the European Defence Agency. Sciences Po, the Paris institute, says that the EU has been adopting new rules and regulations 25 per cent faster since enlargement. But clearly not fast enough for those who fear that the federalist project may falter if anyone has time to think. In Britain, no one under 50 has had a chance to vote in a referendum on the direction of the EU. Yet those whom we elect as temporary holders of political office blithely continue to hand power permanently to unelected institutions. Whether this treaty ends up being a giant leap towards greater integration or just another step on the way is a less important distinction than it may appear. Each step hands power to the European Court of Justice, which seizes every opportunity to expand its domain, including slowly eroding national vetoes on tax. Our leaders give away more power then they realise. Unlike most MPs, I read every page of the original constitution. The loopholes are legion. Take the charter of fundamental rights, which Tony Blair has said Britain will never sign up to. It enshrines employment and social rights that would turn our clock back 30 years and grant workers co-decision powers in the businesses that employ them. Germany wants to leave the charter out of the new treaty but to include a reference that will make it legally binding nevertheless. Mr Blair wants a paragraph to exempt Britain. But lawyers tell me that it would be almost impossible to make the wording watertight. Oh, and the charter could come in by the back door, through powers to coordinate member states’ “economic and employment policies”. The EU should have grown out of trying to define national issues as European. It should be focusing on the few big challenges, such as climate change and trade, that are truly international. As Ed Balls, Gordon Brown’s confidant, put it in a recent pamphlet, we must stop doing “ ‘more EU’ for the sake of it”. Mr Brown himself must not condone the arrogance of those who act as though the Dutch and French had never voted. He must promise a referendum. It would not be a referendum on his premiership, as he may fear, but a chance to restrain an EU elite that has proved its total disregard for democracy.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/camilla_cavendish/article1963916.ece
JPTF 22/06/2007

"Os polacos são os verdadeiros europeus?" in Der Spiegel Online, 21 de Junho de 2007

If Germany had never invaded Poland, there would be no need to talk about EU voting rights today, says Polish Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski. In Brussels there is irritation that Poland is playing the "history card" once again. But Germans in particular should be wary of being too quick to judge. Warsaw was destroyed during World War II, and over 6 million Poles were killed. The Poles are playing the history card in their current dispute with the EU, but with reason. In the dispute over the voting rights in the European treaty, the Polish Prime Minister Jarolsaw Kaczynski has now come up with an argument that any German would find it difficult to contradict. "If Poland had not had to live through the (World War II) years of 1939-1945, Poland would today be looking at the demographics of a country of 66 million." The Polish leader was attempting to justify his demands for an alternative voting rights system, rather than the one proposed by the German rotating EU presidency. There is no question that not only the history of Poland, but that of every European country, would have been much happier without the German invasion of Poland and its monstrous consequences. It should be remembered that during World War II there were an estimated 6 million Polish victims of the German occupation -- of which 5.7 million were civilians. In Poland alone, 2.4 million Jews were murdered. Kaczynski made the statement on Polish radio on Tuesday but otherwise it didn't really resonate at home. However in Brussels and Berlin the comments were registered with concern and were seen as an indication the Polish government is now doing what it often does when it runs into trouble: plays the history card. And this Thursday evening, when the Polish square-root idea is broached, one can expect this kind of reminiscing again. Warsaw is isolated and is threatening to use its veto. But anyone who thinks that a hopeless cause would make the Polish prime minister or president break out in a sweat doesn't know the Polish mentality. When there's nothing more to be done, that's when things really get going for people like the Kaczynskis.

Caught in the Amber of History
The Catholic twins are caught up in the amber of history. But what we might consider isolationism, and even parochialism, the Kaczynskis and most Poles see as a political defensive fortification. While amber conserves, it also protects from outside blows. Luxembourg's Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker has called on the Kaczynskis to make a "leap into the present." "You will not be happy in the long-run if you are always looking in the rearview mirror." Juncker is right. But it is worth looking in the Kaczynskis' rearview mirror. Because what the Polish president and his brother, the prime minister, see there is not the same thing that Tony Blair or Jean-Claude Juncker, Angela Merkel or Jose Manuel Barroso see. For the Kaczynskis objects in the mirror appear closer than they really are. In their rearview mirror, for example, it is the end of August 1939, a few days before the German invasion of Poland and a man by the name of Jozef Beck appears in view. He is Poland's foreign minister and he is receiving the US diplomat Joseph K. Davies in his office in Warsaw. The two are discussing the danger of war breaking out. Davies, previously US ambassador to Moscow, is pretty pessimistic, but Beck sees things differently. The Germans should come! If the Wehrmacht attacks, Polish troops will be in Berlin within three weeks. Davies thought Beck was completely crazy. And he turned out to be right. The Wehrmacht marched into Warsaw four weeks later, and the biggest ever program of destruction in the history of mankind got underway. Davies urged Beck to form an alliance with Moscow. That was out of the question for the Poles, just as, in all their quarrels with Brussels, it would be out of the question for the Kaczynskis today. The pattern of thought is certainly similar: Before, it was the Germans and the Russians who occupied us, now the EU wants to pull a fast one on us. But how did the Kaczynskis come to this conclusion? A look in their rearview mirror provides some answers.

No New Beginning, Rather Soviet Occupation
The Kaczynskis' father was badly injured fighting in the Warsaw uprising, while their mother joined the anti-German resistance at the age of 14 and worked as a medic. Several of their uncles died in Nazi concentration camps, on the way to Russian deportation, or in the Soviet mass shootings. For the Kaczynskis and their countrymen there was no new beginning in 1945. Instead, they were occupied by the Soviets. On Stalin's orders the Polish borders were shifted and millions of people were resettled. The suffering of these millions of Poles also belongs to the history of the expulsion of Germans from Polish lands, though it is often forgotten. A country that was on the brink of civil war fell under the Soviet yoke, but the Polish desire for freedom was never broken. And the fierce courage that was fired up during the Warsaw uprising against the Nazi occupation in 1944, came back to life in 1980 with the founding of the independent Solidarity trade union. In the end, despite martial law and all that went with it, the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union broke apart. Without the courage of the Poles, there would never have been a new Europe, the constitution of which is being fought over so fiercely today. These facts could have been emphasized, for instance, in an historical preamble to the European constitution -- something that could have possibly avoided the current conflict. The Poles are not just concerned with the specific voting rights, and that they will lose influence in the future (which is difficult to deny), but -- perhaps above all -- about the recognition of their services to history. The bravery paired with obstinacy of people like Beck and the Kaczynskis spawned both: The Warsaw Uprising, Solidarity -- and the blockade in Brussels. For the Poles these all go back to the same unbending attitude. In German sitting rooms people like to hang pictures of a stag in the morning dew -- but over Polish sofas there is an image of the Polish cavalry in 1939, attacking German tanks with raised sabers. Kitschy? Sure. But it causes any German who sees it to go red with shame and be moved to tears.

Poles Are the True Europeans
The martyr-like pose of the Poles has started to get on the nerves of many Europeans -- most of all, because they always adopt it whenever the going gets tough on the international stage. That was the case during the negotiations for Poland's EU membership, it's the case now during the treaty debate, and it will be the case in the future too. Whoever is concerned about this or whoever -- like Jean-Claude Juncker -- cheerfully tells the Warsaw brothers to stop moaning, should definitely bear in mind that the Poles live a more European life, and in particular work in a more globalized way, than most Europeans. While the euros are counted in Luxembourg, tens of thousands of Poles travel by bus every day from Warsaw, Krakow, and Wroclaw to other European countries to find work. Practically every pub in Ireland has Polish staff. No nation is as cosmopolitan as Germany's eastern neighbor. While the Germans regard foreign countries from the comfort of a hotel bar or beach, the Poles are busy cleaning rooms or plucking strawberries. Is this historically just, bearing in mind recent German-Polish history? No. In actual fact, it should all be the other way round. For this reason, the Poles are allowed to be annoying. They have their reasons. And they secretly know that they now have a glowing future in Europe anyway.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,490014,00.html
JPTF 2007/06/21

“A Polónia investiga Teletubbies 'gay'” in BBC, 29 de Maio de 2007

The spokesperson for children's rights in Poland, Ewa Sowinska, singled out Tinky Winky, the purple character with a triangular aerial on his head. "I noticed he was carrying a woman's handbag," she told a magazine. "At first, I didn't realise he was a boy." EU officials have criticised Polish government policy towards homosexuals. Ms Sowinska wants the psychologists to make a recommendation about whether the children's show should be broadcast on public television. Poland's authorities have recently initiated a series of moves to outlaw the promotion of homosexuality among the nation's children. Tinky Winky's psychological evaluation is being treated fairly light-heartedly by many people here. One radio station asked its listeners to vote for the most suspicious children's show. Some e-mailed in, saying that Winnie the Pooh had only male friends. Even Ms Sowinska has backtracked a little, insisting that she does not believe the Teletubbies is a threat to the nation's children. But the evaluation is still going ahead and her office can recommend that the show should be taken off the air. Poland was criticised recently after its education ministry announced plans to sack teachers who promote homosexuality. Last month the European Union singled out Poland for criticism in its resolution condemning homophobia in the 27-member bloc.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6698753.stm
JPTF 2007/05/29