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an irreconcilable breach between the USSR and China and between their respective allies. After 1965, however, the increasing strains within the Communist movement brought about in part by the Vietnam conflict impelled Gomulka to give unequivocal and vocal support to the Soviet position and to denounce Peking's contribution to Communist disunity. He was a keynote speaker in the burst of condemnation of China by the Soviet Union's allies at the international Communist meeting in Moscow in June 1969. Since Gierek assumed power, Polish leaders, including Gierek himself, have harshly denounced the Chinese for splitting the international Communist movement, and have ascribed devious anti-Soviet motives to Peking for its positive responses to US initiatives.

b. German policy

Poland's location between Germany and Russia has not only conditioned the national consciousness of the Polish people through history, but has been the major key to the foreign policy of the country. A country so situated between powerful neighbors has a limited number of options, and Poland has tried them all, some more than once in combination. The first is to ally itself with one of the neighboring powers against the other, consenting to be used to a smaller or greater degree in the larger ally's interests. The second option is isolationism, a policy of total independence which might suit a stronger and better situated state. The leaders of interwar Poland, over impressed with the simultaneous collapse of the German and Russian empires, attempted such a policy which ended in the disaster of simultaneous occupation in 1939 by Nazi Germany and Communist Russia. The third option, which also played a role in the interwar policy, was to seek an anchor in some third bloc or country. France provided this alternative for much of the interwar period. It is because postwar Polish leaders saw these options as having failed to guarantee the security of the Polish state that they have implemented a combination of the first option - alliance with the victorious Soviet Union - with a fourth option, namely a search for a general and permanent European settlement in which Poland's position between Germany and Russia would become a mere fact instead of a liability.

Since 1956, Polish diplomacy, whether under Gomulka or under Gierek, has worked to this end. Despite frequent pauses and setbacks in the 1960s, the goal has been consistent: to seek a general settlement in central Europe which would remove Poland from the field of East-West rivalry in which the Poles have felt it would always play the role of a potential pawn. The specific proposals put forward were designed to exclude, or postpone, the reunification of Germany; at the same time these proposals generally have been accompanied by separate approaches, on a bilateral basis, to West Germany.

Like other Polish leaders conditioned by history, Gomulka had a lingering distrust of the big power, including the USSR. The specter of another Soviet-German alliance at the expense of Poland was one of the most important motives for Poland's efforts to secure the Central European status quo by means of multilateral European security schemes guaranteed by the major power. Thus, beginning in 1957, Poland introduced several versions of the Rapacki plan for nuclear disengagement and later the Gomulka plan for a nuclear freeze. Similarly, the concept of a European security conference was originally introduced by the Poles at the United Nations in 1964, and reintroduced by the Soviet bloc as a whole after the Warsaw Pact's Budapest Appeal of March 1969.

The failure of the West - in Polish eyes, especially West Germany - to respond favorably to the Polish, and later joint Polish-Soviet, proposals gradually led to a stiffening of Warsaw's public posture and the multiplication of conditions for the "normalization" of the relations with Bonn.

A countervailing factor, however, was the general unwillingness of Poland's Warsaw Pact allies to limit their freedom of action by acceding to a common policy towards Germany which gave seeming primacy to Polish interests. Awareness of this problem led to an early decision by Warsaw to supplement its various multilateral efforts by bilateral moves towards Bonn designed to keep open channels of communication. Thus, the Poles in many respects led the way in Eastern Europe for entering into a dialog with West Germany. In 1963 they were the first, for example, to conclude a bilateral trade treaty providing, among other things, for the reciprocal exchange of trade missions with the Federal Republic of Germany. Over the years, West Germany became Poland's second largest trading partner in Western Europe, after the United Kingdom. Trade contacts with Bonn later facilitated a sporadic but slowly increasing number of contacts on political matters as well, often conducted by private emissaries of both sides.

As early as February 1968 the Poles made approaches to the head of the West German trade mission in Warsaw, and exploratory talks ensued. These talks were interrupted by Poland's intra-party strife and the Czechoslovak crisis, but were resumed early in 1969 on Polish initiative. At the same time, the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs reportedly prepared

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APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200070029-7