Amid this tricky transcontinental row, Theresa May flew to Warsaw with senior cabinet ministers, seeking to develop a strategic alliance with Poland ahead of the second phase of Brexit talks. Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki obligingly signalled that Poland would back the UK on a bespoke deal, including services. Mrs May offered a security partnership with a country anxious about an ever more assertive Russia. This bilateral bargain is complicated by the European commission’s deep suspicion of UK efforts to negotiate behind its back. It fears that London’s divide-and-rule strategy will work better in the second phase of Brexit talks than in the first, when it hit a wall of pan-EU solidarity. The Tories have made common cause with Law and Justice before. Many European leaders wanted Mrs May to signal her goodwill to them by transmitting in Warsaw their view that Poland has crossed a line. Instead, she described constitutional issues as “primarily a matter for the country concerned, not the EU”. [...]
The possibility of a premier league of EU states, based around single-currency membership, is much enhanced by Brexit. It leaves Poland as the biggest non-eurozone member. The UK was also a leading advocate of EU enlargement, partly because it wanted a wide and shallow union. Eastern expansion was partly intended as a brake on western-centred integration.
Hardly anyone in Brussels welcomes the UK’s departure, but as talks get tough it might increasingly be seen as a blessed relief – the amputation of an infected limb, permitting less inhibited forward movement. British Euroscepticism has been an irritant to EU officials over the years, but it has also been a valuable component in the mix. Brexit is, by definition, a uniquely British phenomenon. But nationalist politicians blaming the EU for domestic woes is not. The Polish government’s undemocratic lurch deserves criticism. The unsolved riddle for Brussels is how to uphold the values on which the EU was founded, using methods that do not cultivate resentment and so further undermine those values.
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