Poland now assumes the six-month Polish Presidency for the first time.

Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski sets the scene:

“EU success story” gets some 600 Google News hits. “EU crisis” gets 14,000 hits.

What has gone wrong? Some people have a blunt answer: “Too much Europe!” EU structures and policies are said to be creating more problems than they are solving: over-complex institutions, over-ambitious integration (above all the euro zone), over-centralisation of decision-taking. We see a disturbing decline in confidence in European solidarity.

But for Poland, European integration is not a crisis. It’s an inspiration.

Twenty-two years ago when communism ended, Poland’s GDP shrank by 12 per cent. Inflation ran out of control. Key export markets vanished. We had to build a modern democracy and a thriving market economy from scratch, while disentangling ourselves from the Warsaw Pact.

With huge efforts – and generous help from our European partners – we have succeeded. Poland is growing at over 4 per cent per year. We are now the sixth largest economy in Europe, and one of the top 20 economies in the world. Poland is the only EU member to have maintained positive growth through the recent economic storms.

It is no surprise that surveys find Poles expressing strong confidence in the EU. All our success would not have been possible without the investment in institutional stability and solidarity which the EU delivered.

It is not enough to be optimistic and positive. We also must be realistic. The EU faces painful decisions.

Poland will not accept that the answer lies in less solidarity, or less integration. That is the sure path to disintegration…

Well put. But given the severe strains in the Eurozone (Poland says it wants to join but is not (yet) a member, so its role in Eurozone top-level discussions must at best be modest) and everything else going on, can any one Presidency really make much of a difference?

Poland wants to push ahead EU ideas for improving EU-wide e-commerce and better EU-wide patent arrangements – all good stuff but no prospect of short-term improvements arising therefrom.

The main success of Poland’s Presidency is likely to be on the foreign policy front, achieving better/closer EU relations with Russia, Ukraine and Moldova and maybe (subject to developments) a new EU move to engage sensibly with Belarus. That last one depends on Belarus being able to open itself up to a new approach: not easy as Russia unemotionally turns the energy and other screws on the erratic President Lukashenko.

Poland also can aim to help set an intelligent hard-headed EU policy framework for helping North Africa through its various ‘transitions’.

Meanwhile the next vast row over the EU Budget trundles into view. Here is Open Europe’s analysis on the first and inevitably absurd Commission proposals.

The point here is that the Commission deliberately overbids to start the negotiation process, hoping and expecting to lurch the heart of the debate in the general direction of More Europe.

In this case as it happens Poland’s Janusz Lewandowski is leading the charge in Brussels on behalf of the Commission. Polish wiliness is evident in the proposed package. ‘Less’ on CAP/agriculture, more on new EU-wide energy investments, ‘efficiency savings’ and so on: the EU Budget is very small, really, so we can and should afford to increase it [the more so since Poland is the largest net recipient] … 

But the key innovation is new EU-level tax-raising powers, said to simplify the way the EU is funded.

This is clever. Why?

Because any normal person will agree that the current mechanisms for funding EU spending need reform – too cumbersome, too many anomalies. Even London in principle is ready to talk about dropping the magnificent UK Rebate in exchange for deep reform to both how the money gets to the EU and what the EU then spends it on.

So Lewandowski is hoping to froth up alleged popular support across the EU for some sort of EU-levied tax on financial transactions to get new EU-level tax powers included as part of the final deal: "Y’all say you want reform and simplification – here’s the neat way to do it!"  

To be really clever he might add that national vetoes on any agreed tax level will still apply: if the UK and all other EU member states agree to launch this scheme  in 2018 at tax level X, it can not be increased (or decreased) unless all agree in future. That (it could be said) gives a not insignificant level of real reassurance to national governments that Brussels can’t run out of control.

To which we all say: "Nice try – but no thanks."

Because as we have seen in the USA, once the federal centre starts taxing it over time can and does run up insane debts. Somehow or other a national ‘lock’ on future increased tax increases inexorably will be nibbled away, as has happened with all the other EU policy vetoes we once enjoyed.

Plus the practical implementation of any EU-level tax will create a tsunami of new intrusive Brussels-driven mechanisms, rules and procedures which will erode national powers and set all sorts of over-arching legal precedents for a lot more of the same.

In short, this is the thin end of a huge fat wedge. Another one-way expensive ticket to a Lot More Europe. Which, in current circumstances, most of the EU Givers are not going to want to buy, however noisily the EU Getters cry that it is all for the best.

Anyway, my writings on the way all this works in practice (see many previous postings and this long account here) are a definitive guide to the months if not years of bad-tempered haggling which will now unfold. So check them out.

That epic Budget Battle is for tomorrow.

For today, even Eurosceptics can and should pleased that in the past 20 years Poland has made such an impressive transformation from its appalling communist past to be a credible and dynamic European country and, until 31 December this year, head of the EU family.