Poland is making every effort to achieve its “return to Europe”, together with the other nine candidate countries for EU enlargement. The timetable is fairly short, since the objective is to arrive at the European elections in 2004 with a group of candidate countries that have already concluded the membership procedure, and hence eligible to participate in the ballot. The question was recently discussed at a meeting at the Polish Institute in Rome, with the title “Poland, bridge to the West or bulwark of Europe?” According to Carla Tonini, lecturer in the history of Eastern Europe at the University of Bologna, who intervened at the conference, the “return to Europe” is an objective of great importance for Poland that has pursued it since 1989, the year in which “the Berlin wall fell” and the Soviet Union disintegrated. The Secretary of the Negotiation Group for Poland’ entry into the EU, Jaroslaw Pietras, emphasized the role this country may play in relation to its neighbouring countries in Eastern Europe: a positive role he maintained which could increase Poland’s political clout in the area. The idea is endorsed by the journalist Jas Gawronski, MEP, who considers Poland a “key country in this process of enlargement and rapprochement”, not only because it is the largest, but also because “it is the most influential and close to countries like Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania which have still to achieve their internal readjustment and could therefore see in their larger neighbour a ‘bridge’ to the West, as well as a socio-political model to imitate”.
