Over at Salon24, the leading Polish group blog, are my thoughts on how relations between Poland and the USA (and UK) have evolved down the ages – scroll down for the original version in English.

Thus:

The point?

Simply that things come and go over years and decades and centuries. The age when Poles’ best opportunities to live decently lay in abandoning their country to travel some 6000km to Chicago (and perhaps never return) has ended.

Now anyone in Poland can get a cheap bus to London (or now Munich), work for a few days to earn some extra money, then go back home again, all within a week and with no expensive and humiliating visa queues. It’s inevitable that in that new situation national perspectives must start to change quite fast.

Finally, Poland itself is deliberately surrendering significant parts of its own identity and foreign policy to ‘Europe’, a process helped by the excellent and generous deal on EU funding for Poland negotiated by the UK Presidency in 2005. But Poland’s strong support for ‘More Europe’ – soon to be exemplified in Poland’s first EU Presidency – tends to mean ‘Less Poland’.

If Poland decides to outsource more and more aspects of its diplomacy and collective national policy energy to the European Union, Poland should not be surprised if Washington starts to see Polish views as simply one minor and not easily comprehensible part of a messy Brussels consensus.

An observation which, of course, applies equally to the UK as to other European countries.