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COLLECTIVE REVIEW
Beate Neuss, and Antje Nötzold (Eds.). (2013). Polen als Motor des europäischen Integrationsprozesses: Bilanz der polnischen Ratspräsidentschaft and Ireneusz Paweł Karolewski, Thomas Mehlhausen, and Monika Sus (Eds.). (2014). Poland's EU-Council Presidency under Evaluation: Navigating Europe through Stormy Waters.
Until late 2014, Poland was guided by a national security strategy that had not been revised for nearly a decade. In our turbulent times, advances in societal and technological development, just as the flux of rapid (mis)developments in world politics, an outdated vision of the state's international role and security is as much fraught with nasty consequences as it is in case of more tangible challenges, such as an economic crisis or illegal migration.
Shortly before the Polish national security strategy was updated in November 2014, this edited volume on the Polish state's foreign policy dilemmas was published. The volume does not cover, however, the events that occurred after late 2013, when the conference on which it draws took place. The main mission of the conference, and respectively – the book, has been to 'diagnose the most significant new developments and trends in the international environment of Poland and to determine their impact for continuity or change in the existing interests and goals of Polish foreign policy, just as to reveal respective dilemmas they posit for the country' (p. 11).
In times of 'big choices' to be made (again) in European politics, framed by the manifold challenges– from financial and migration to 'Brexit' and security crises, the policymaker and expert community's attention is drawn 'back to Europe and the EU's neighbourhood'. Tulmets' (2014) richly sourced and thoroughly researched comparative account of East Central European foreign policy identity may well facilitate understanding of CEE countries' past and future choices, particularly with regard to the EU's turbulent neighbourhoods.
The Book's main aim is to study the influence of three selected EU member states on the shape and development of the European Neighbourhood Policy. The underlying research question of the study reads as follows: "How do EU member states within their respective regional concepts and modes of interaction influence European Neighbourhood Policy?" (p.30). In the book, it is supported by a number of empirical sub-questions addressing both policy (content) and politics (process) aspects, "whereas polity – the form aspect – is only taken into consideration as a framework in which national and European policy-making takes place" (p.31).
Russian revisionist geopolitics, backed by a coarse power's action, that brings aggression as a foreign policy means back to the repertoire of state actors, has revived the topicality of European security debates, not least in the national contexts. Once enthusiastically supported on the whole, the European Union's Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) experiences a comprehensive audit of all the composites once again. Thus, the "Europeanness", "commonness" just as the effectiveness of "security" and "defence" of the EU's most wanted and least warranted policy are undergoing a crucial moment of reevaluation, redefinition, and reorientation. The differences in national pull or push factors vis-à-vis Union's security and defence efforts yet again question the long-suffering "convergence" of their perspectives on highly delicate matters of defence and security. Addressing the matter in question and written nearly five years ago, Laura Chappell's "Germany, Poland and the Common Security and Defence Policy: Converging Security and Defence Perspectives in an Enlarged EU" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) might well become a frequent read today, particularly for those interested not only in the fate of the EU's security and defence policy, but also those looking for answers to recent German and Polish reactions to the Russian regional security challenge.
Multilevel politics is as intriguing and attractive as complex for it involves a plentiful of actors that interact through multiple layers of sub-regional, national, and regional European structures both formalized and informal ones. The perplexing web of policymaking that characterizes the EU system of governance bears however pitfalls of responsibility escape, especially at the national level, since there is always a temptation to 'nationalize success' and 'Europeanize failures', as once put by former EU Commission President José Manuel Barroso. In the Polish context, this trivial situation has been particularly exemplary and traceable in the long-lasting public discourse best captured with a recognizable blaming formula 'winna Unia Europejska' or a rhetorical sighing after the single word 'Unia…'.
Kaminska's timely book addresses this problem in Polish public discourse and actual European politics within the domain of European Union external relations. Although the title may not straight off reveal this, 'Poland and EU Enlargement: Foreign Policy in Transformation' by Joanna Kaminska is in fact a study of Europeanization of Polish foreign policy, and thus a valuable contribution to understanding domestic change and transformation with regard to foreign policy formulation in EU member states in the wake of a two-way 'Europeanization' process (comprising 'downloading' and 'uploading' activities).
It is astonishing how a history book could re-gain its resonance and topicality some 70 years past – after the events described in the monograph had long been considered bygone. History tends to repeat itself, indeed. Rather mystically, this edited book appeared shortly before the unwinding hype on the proliferation of 'hybrid war(fare)' [1] – and certainly is an original and important source in the unfolding debate on war in both strategic studies as well as the public discourse more generally.
Whereas now, in the midst of the rule of law spat with the European Union, it is rather the domestic political situation in Poland that draws most attention in academia and among the policymaking community, the country's foreign and security policy, too, falls under the loop of security scholars and professionals – particularly since Russia's hybrid overtures in Ukrainian Crimea and Donbas as well as further afield in post-2014 Europe. Written by a renowned Polish IR scholar from Warsaw University and a national security policy insider, Poland's Security Policy: The West, Russia, and the Changing International Order, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2016, provides therefore a well-timed, astute and detailed account of complex national security dilemmas and their management by the Republic of Poland from the period of post-communist transition in 1989 onwards.