PANEL DISCUSSION 2025

Krzysztof BOSAK: 
THE UNITED STATES IS WITHDRAWING FROM EUROPE, WE SHOULD CREATE A COUNCIL FOR CENTRAL EUROPEAN COOPERATION

Thank you very much. Thank you for the invitation to this plenary debate. 

My main job now is being the leader of the Confederation of Freedom and Independence, and of my party, National Movement, within the Confederation. First, let me start with a few words about my country, because everybody asks what is going on in Poland. The situation is quite stable. We are two years ahead of parliamentary elections. We have a right-wing president and a liberal centre-left government. Bad government, good president, and a possible right-wing majority in the next parliamentary elections in two years.

So it is a good time to talk. It is a good time to plan what to do if we are in power. And it is a very good opportunity for all your organizations to be in touch with political parties and think tanks in Poland, especially right-wing parties and right-wing think tanks, to help us to shape also a regional programme of cooperation between our countries and our organizations, to help you if we are in power, and to shape the new regional order in line with our values and our beliefs.

Let me say a few sentences about the European Union and the situation in Europe. I agree with everything that Mr Havlíček said. We also, in Poland, as a Confederation, support a free market economy. We believe that this tendency of centralizing everything in Europe is a complete nightmare destroying our economy. From a greater distance, the economy in Poland still looks quite good, but unfortunately, some signs of decline in the private sector and the public sector have already appeared. We need to restore a normal, common-sense economic order.

But there is a big debate now because of the Russian war on Ukraine, and because of the new American policy in Europe about the United States leaving Europe. I think that it is a new reality that can help our agenda: to cooperate more, to take responsibility for our countries and for our region, not only to wait for some doctrines and plans from abroad, from the United States or Brussels, but to do our job in our countries, to talk seriously with our societies, to tell the truth, to be honest, and to have a good strategy based on our interests, not some global interests of other players.

It is obvious that the United States are leaving Europe. We do not know how fast this process will happen. For now, especially in Poland, it is not clear what will happen. But what is obvious? That the United States are also losing their influence in the world, that the situation is becoming more and more multipolar, and that the United States are becoming more Eurosceptic than ever.

In my opinion, it will not be only the policy of this administration. We can see the shift also in other political parties and other political circles. And it has ground, it has reasons, in clear, hard economic data. It is not only a tendency in one administration or another. What we should do is to cooperate on our own terms, and to show our proposition of how we would like to shape the international order, how we would like to shape the economic order.

For me, it is completely clear that the European Union has no proposition that fits our needs. When I started my political career 20 years ago, I was writing, as a staff member in the European Parliament, some analyses that the European Union was going to introduce some strategy on deregulation. We are 20 years later, and they are still proposing new strategies and new documents about deregulation, and they do completely the opposite.

Of course we have to go to these meetings. We have to be in these institutions. But it is clear for everybody who sees the truth that the results are completely different from what we would like. I do not know how it will develop, but my conviction is that we have to show courage to our nations and strongly oppose everything that is wrong: climate policy, the European Green Deal, and so-called liberal values.

Progressivism as a European value is completely not true. We should defend openly Christian heritage, traditional values, and common sense. In Poland, we had very big problems with the so-called rule of law agenda. Under this brand, in the Polish tradition of the Polish right-wing movement, of course we have great respect for the rule of law. But the problem is in the definition. If you propose a liberal agenda or leftism as the rule of law, we reject this. We do not want to be influenced in this way.

And also there is a big problem with Ukraine. I do not mean helping Ukraine. Every country can decide on its own whether to help or not, and at which level. But I mean integrating Ukraine with the European Union. It is obvious for me, when I talk with people from Brussels, that Ukraine will be used as a tool to centralize the European Union, and this is what we should also reject: any new treaties, more centralized, any new Lisbon Treaty. I believe that there will be very big pressure put on us to agree, because it is Ukraine. We have to help, like a moral blackmail against us. And I believe we should reject this proposition to centralize and to change institutional rules under this Ukraine pretext.

It has nothing to do with our relations with Ukraine, because we need relations and we need to shape them in our interests. But the European Union is a different question. What we should focus on, and this is a growing issue in Poland, is interconnectivity of our region. It was a main topic of the Polish–Croatian initiative in the Trimarium Initiative. It was started by the Polish president and the Croatian president, but now we have every country of the region in this initiative. I think it is a very good initiative. It is about using also infrastructure connections in line with our interests.

I believe we should focus more on this issue: hard infrastructure, digital infrastructure, roads, railways. We still have many things to do, and I was surprised, when I went into the details, that there is still so much to do to connect our countries, to use our advantage of being so close, having in sum a big population and big economic potential, but not using it properly because of the lack of infrastructure. I believe that our Central European cooperation should be not only about ideas and values, but also about things that are understandable for people who are not interested in values, but more in the economy and more in engineering, and so on.

Then we should use the advantage of our location, of geopolitics, of our geography. Of course, now everybody talks about the threat of Russia. But the other side of the coin is that we have a good position in the world, and we should use it. And the European Union is taking our advantages and stopping us from using them. In fact, the European Union is using our territory, sometimes even against our interests – this is the case of Poland now, I believe, unfortunately – and is not taking financial responsibility for this process.

We need some model of institutional cooperation. I believe we have formats like the Visegrad Four and the Three Seas Initiative, and they are good, but we need something more. After many years of my activism also on this international level, I believe that we need permanent working groups. We need meetings of experts. And we need to meet not only once a year – maybe not in the whole region, but maybe bilaterally or something like that – but more often. If we meet only once a year, there is no progress.

We also need to involve in the cooperation normal party members, normal office workers in our foundations, institutes, think tanks, media, and so on, because not everybody is interested in international cooperation. For an ordinary person, it is quite expensive to travel a lot and to have friends in different countries. It is quite complicated. It needs focus. You need focus and some capacity. We need to help people to know more about the results of conferences like this.

The last thing that I would like to underline is a proposition of building some kind of Central European Cooperation Council, or something like that. Not a bureaucracy –rather a network. Nine years ago, when we were writing the programme of my party, we proposed, for example, a Parliamentary Assembly of the Visegrad Four, to allow MPs to meet more often, because there are not many opportunities to meet MPs from one party to another. The European Parliament is a place for international discussion, but it does not work if we look at local relations between parties and between people involved in the debate. So, some assemblies, some councils, some network permanently working, this is what I think we need.

My conclusion is that the goal is not to build any new mini EU, local EU, or something like that, but rather a platform for the sovereign nations in our region – nations interested in defending their identity, their values, and Christian moral order. I believe that we have a chance to build a new centre of balance between the moral decline of Western elites and the imperialism of Russia. We have a good tradition in Poland of building a commonwealth with other countries and other nations, and we should use this experience, and we are happy to do that with all of you. Thank you very much.