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Poland Threat Perception
Throughout the communist era, official threat
perception by
the Polish military was identical to that of the Soviet
Union:
the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO--see Glossary)
would confront the forces of the socialist nations on the plains
of Northern Europe in a massive conventional war. Until 1990
Poland
had the special threat perception of renewed invasion from
Germany; although the Federal Republic of Germany (West
Germany)
was itself no longer a military power, it was the
ostensible
staging area for large numbers of NATO troops against the
Warsaw
Pact. On the other hand, the Soviet invasions of
Czechoslovakia
and Hungary exemplified the eastern threat perceived by
both
communist and noncommunist Poles with nationalist
loyalties. That
threat was also a convenient tool for the Jaruzelski
government
in justifying oppression of reform activity.
By 1987 the inefficient centralized industrial systems
of the
Warsaw Pact countries were increasingly unable to produce
hightechnology weaponry, and their national economies had
become
severely distorted by the priority given military
production.
Accordingly, Gorbachev's "new thinking" on Soviet security
prompted a redesign of Warsaw Pact strategy based on sober
reassessment of Warsaw Pact resources and on the belief
that
political means could replace military strategy in
protecting the
security of the alliance. The new strategy included
reducing
defense spending and emphasizing a pan-European security
plan
that might split NATO into American and European factions.
Although the new structure continued to regard Poland as a
central player in the coalition defense system, Poland was
able
to reduce and streamline key military units beginning in
1987.
Thus, before the revolutions of 1989, the Warsaw Pact's
combined
threat perception had changed pragmatically, and member
nations
had the opportunity to relieve somewhat the onus of
mandatory
support of the alliance's military structure. For Poland,
this
change triggered the search for a more realistic and
independent
threat perception that continued into the early 1990s.
The postcommunist era complicated Poland's threat
perception.
The new outlook began with the recognition that Poland was
not
and could not be militarily comparable to its
traditionally
dangerous neighbors. To the east, the Soviet Union had
fractured
into numerous republics, abolishing any remaining threat
of an
attack launched from the east to keep Poland within
ideological
limits. The uneasy relations among the former Soviet
republics,
especially between Russia and Ukraine over issues such as
jurisdiction over nuclear weapons and control of the Black
Sea,
caused alarm in Poland. So did the possibility that reform
would
fail in Russia, allowing an ultranationalist, hard-line
regime to
come to power, reassert Soviet or imperialist
prerogatives, and
renege on troop withdrawal schedules. Another threat was
the
rejection by the newly independent republics of arms
control
agreements signed by the Soviet Union. Such a move could
lead to
uncontrolled proliferation of nuclear weapons and the
failure of
limits on conventional forces in the region. In another
scenario,
central authority might fail entirely in former republics,
causing conflicts among former Soviet forces to spill over
onto
adjacent Polish territory. In 1991 three events--the
Soviet
crackdown in Lithuania in January, the attempted
reactionary coup
in the Soviet Union in August, and the chaos of the
SerbianCroatian struggle in the last half of the year--lent
urgency to
the formation of Poland's new European security policy.
Polish concerns were magnified by the strength and
disposition of forces in the former Soviet Union. Russian
troops
withdrawn from Germany and Poland went to Kaliningrad, the
isolated Russian province on Poland's northern border, and
often
remained there because the surrounding republics, Belarus
and
Lithuania, would not permit Russian troops to pass through
their
territory. The continued concentration of Russian armored,
artillery, and infantry forces in Kaliningrad was a source
of
alarm for Poland in 1992. (Poland did not seek a change in
the
political status of Kaliningrad, however.) To the east,
the armed
forces in Ukraine's Carpathian Military District adjoining
Poland
exceeded Poland's entire combat strength in 1992 (although
bilateral relations with Ukraine were quite friendly).
Many
Polish storage depots were located close to the borders of
both
Kaliningrad and Ukraine, making them vulnerable in case of
attack
from either direction.
Past territorial and military conflicts with Belarus,
Lithuania, and Ukraine were confined increasingly to the
memories
of the older generations on all sides. Nevertheless,
Belarus,
remembering that the Treaty of Riga had divided that
republic
between Poland and Soviet Russia in 1921, still claimed
the
Bialystok region of eastern Poland, which was home to a
substantial Belarusian population. And Ukrainian
nationalists
remembered the role of the Polish People's Army in helping
the
Soviet Union crush the anticommunist Ukrainian Resistance
Army in
1947, as well as the interwar Polish hegemony in western
Ukraine.
The most divisive issue in Polish-Lithuanian relations was
treatment of the Polish minority in Lithuania, estimated
at
300,000 people in 1990. In 1991 and 1992, that
well-organized
minority pressed for autonomy, putting the Polish
government in a
difficult diplomatic position and blocking Poland's
efforts to
secure its eastern and northern borders from ethnic
turmoil
(see Other Former Soviet Republics
, ch. 4).
Poland's evaluation of Germany's position was more
reassuring. In the early 1990s, Polish policy makers saw
the
newly reunified Germany's strong commitments to NATO and
the European Community
(EC--see Glossary),
the German national
outlook, and continued deemphasis of the German military
as
indicators that Germany would remain a benign neighbor
through
the 1990s. Poles increasingly perceived the threat from
Germany
as one of economic rather than military domination.
Accordingly,
Poland's best defense appeared to lie in forming closer
ties with
the traditionally robust German economy and reinvigorating
the
Polish political system rather than in strategic military
planning. Doubts about Germany's long-term territorial
goals were
revived briefly in 1990 when Germany hesitated in
accepting the
Oder-Neisse Line as a permanent border between the two
countries,
but tensions were eased by the signing of a border treaty
in mid1990 and a Polish-German friendship and cooperation treaty
in
late 1991
(see
fig. 12;
Germany
, ch. 4). In pursuing
closer
German ties, however, Poland cautiously soothed Russian
perceptions that a new alliance might be forming to its
west.
Data as of October 1992
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