SŁUBICE, Poland — Getting here from Germany on foot is easy: Simply cross a bridge over the river Oder. If it were not for the large signs advertising everything from tobacco products to plastic surgery on the eastern side of the river, this Polish town of fewer than 20,000 and its German counterpart of Frankfurt an der Oder might feel like one.
Guards stopped patrolling the bridge in 2007 when Poland joined Europe’s Schengen zone and the country dropped border controls, allowing the two cities’ residents to regularly cross the river and the guard huts to be turned into kiosks that sell cigarettes and vodka.
But the mood here in recent years has shifted. Hope that the border would eventually vanish is fading. Poland’s Law and Justice party, widely known by its Polish initials PiS and elected two years ago to head the national government, has distanced itself both from the mighty neighbor to the west and the larger European Union that Germany is seen to lead. Neighborly relations seemed to sour this past summer as Polish politicians from the ruling conservative government resurrected the topic of German war reparations from World War II, saying they remain on the negotiating table.
“Poland has the right to reparations, and the Polish state has right to make those demands,” Prime Minister Beata Szydlo stated flatly during a Sept. 7 radio interview.
The demand for amends from a war that concluded more than seven decades ago may seem out of place in a united trading bloc but they resonate in today’s Poland. A survey carried out by IPSOS for the Polish news show ” Wiadomości TVP” in September found that some 63 percent of Poles favor reparations, while 31 percent are against.
The reparation calls have become part of a larger, testy sparring match between the European Union and a country that is among the largest recipients of money from the organization’s budget. This past summer the European Commission warned the country over making changes to the Polish Supreme Court nomination procedure that the organization viewed as undemocratic. The warning over the courts joined an EU court decision that condemned the logging of Bialowieza Forest — one of Europe’s last expanses of primeval forests.
Many fear that under the ultra-conservative Law and Justice party, Poland is following countries like Hungary with right-tilting domestic politics, at the cost of EU relations. Inside Poland, however, observers say Warsaw is trying to reassert itself within the EU. “There’s a slogan: Poland is rising from her knees,” says Włodzimierz Borodziej, a professor at the University of Warsaw who has written a book on the Warsaw Uprising, the WWII effort by the Polish underground the liberate Poland’s capital city.
Adds Janusz Bugajski of the Center for European Policy Analysis in Washington, D.C.: “It’s not really anti-EU. Poles fear that they have become a second-tier country within the EU.”
The contentious relations with the EU are a sign of how much Poland has changed since the 1990s, when the country was seen as a model convert to free-market, liberal democracy and a loyal partner of the organization.
Within a decade of the fall of the Iron Curtain, Poland was one of the most successful economies in post-communist Europe, thanks to painful reform measures implemented by one of its early elected national governments, says Mark Keck-Szajbel, an American historian of the region at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt.
[READ: Best global universities in Poland.]
Parallel to the economic growth, say experts, personal freedoms and liberal democracy progressed in Poland. Poland was the only EU country which did not have a recession following 2008, notes Keck-Szajbel.
“People who remember our achievements in the ’90s see them as a huge success; but people who don’t remember, think they are absolutely obvious,” says Helena Chmielewska-Szlajfer, an assistant professor at Kozminski University in Warsaw, who studies the politicization of online tabloids and personal rights and freedoms.
Now, says Chmielewska-Szlajfer, the PiS-led government is threatening already restrictive abortion laws, nongovernmental organizations and an independent military, after having pushed through education reforms.
“It is increasingly hostile,” she says about the current political atmosphere. “Right now the government is opening up new fire points toward its citizens.”
Polish demands for reparations have intensified in the last several months as the country commemorated both the Nazi German invasion of the country in 1939 and the 1944 uprising by resistance fighters.
During the ensuing war, almost 6 million Poles, more than half of them Jewish, died at the hands of the Germans, according to the Institute of National Remembrance. During the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, the nation’s capital was almost destroyed and 200,000 people killed.
And while revisiting past wars appears antithetical to a union formed to prevent conflicts and realize shared destinies, Poland is not the first European country to balk at the power that the bloc yields over its members, nor is it the first country to bring up reparations for a war more than seven decades in the past. At the height of the Greek bailout in 2015, Greece’s prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, also demanded reparations from the country that was instrumental in forcing austerity on his economy.
Jarosław Kaczyński, chairman of the conservative Law and Justice party, signaled its resurgence this year by speaking about the issue during the August anniversary of the Warsaw uprising.
“We are talking here about huge sums, and also about the fact that Germany for many years refused to take responsibility for World War II,” Kaczyński told a local radio station, according to press reports.
A right-wing news site published an altered image evoking the concentration camp signage with the wards “REPARATIONEN MACHEN FREI,” a phrase, which in German roughly means “Reparations will free you.”
Still, observers say the calls are intended more for a domestic audience than a German one, says Borodziej, the University of Warsaw historian who specializes on German-Polish relations.
Helena Chmielewska-Szlajfer agrees that, at least in part, public talk of war reparation is directed at a national audience. “These are internal Polish conversations and they are intended for the Polish public.”
Meanwhile in Słubice, no one seems to want to talk about war with neighbors or reparations. “I’m done with that topic,” says one shopkeeper who did not want to be identified.
“I always leave politics out of it,” adds Artur Kasiubowski, a Polish-German businessman who connects German consumers to Polish service providers with his website. Having lived on both sides of the border, Kasiubowski says that while cross-border shopping visits are frequent, the language barrier has populations living next to each other rather than with each other.
“In the reality , the bridge is made between people,” he says, sitting in his office, located at the foot of the actual bridge between the two countries. “Ignore the politicians.”
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