Poles apart?

In Warsaw last Tuesday the French defence minister, Michelle Alliot-Marie, continued her President’s ham-fisted strategy of offering patronising advice to Eastern European nations on course to join the European Union. ‘It was better to keep silent when you don’t know what’s going on,’ she declared. Poland’s deputy foreign minister, Adam Rotfeld, resented the lecture. ‘France has a right to its opinion and Poland has the right to decide what is good for it,’ he told an interviewer. Then, addressing himself directly to Ms Alliot-Marie’s boss, ‘I would prefer it if he expressed himself more politely.’ Another East European diplomat said Chirac had spoken in a tone that even Moscow would have been reluctant to use with its Warsaw Pact clients.

Chirac’s outburst has provided ammunition to EU opponents in Eastern Europe, who fear that membership involves a risk of surrendering the liberty recently regained from Moscow to a bloc that will ignore their interests and compound the offence by pretending it is doing them a favour.