Grzegorz Michalski: A world of Poles and Turks

by Bernard KENNEDY

Poland’s Ambassador to Ankara has spent much of his career in Turkey, and he has not wasted the opportunity to make himself acquainted with just about every aspect of the country’s history, language and culture. At the same time, he has come to some intriguing conclusions about the Turkish and Polish nations, about dealing with the EU and about the diplomatic profession itself. The following summary of our long but never boring conversation also covers issues of culture, politics, business and security.

Grzegorz Michalski has a lot to say and acknowledges few limits on whether or how he will say it. What begins as an orderly question-and-answer session with Ankara’s ambassador to Poland soon swells to a flood of miscellaneous facts and observations. Topics float, sink and resurface as swiftly, unexpectedly and – almost – imperceptibly as the Ambassador switches from Turkish to English and English to Turkish. He expounds with unwavering enthusiasm on energy security and Turkey’s EU membership bid, on the Internet and the Embassy’s period furniture. One moment you are in 1414, when the Poles sent their first envoy (another Grzegorz: Ermeni Gregor), to the Ottoman court in Bursa; the next you are propelled forward to the era of unemployment and migratory labour, cartoon wars, NGOs and public relations. Nothing is unrelated to anything else in Michalski’s stream of consciousness; his train of thought has separate compartments neither for the generals and poets of the past nor for the tourists and plumbers of today.

Formative years

Ambassador Michalski’s career has, of course, coincided with a series of bewildering transformations in international relations - and not least in the country he represents. In central Europe, this period has lent itself to statements of optimism and leaps of faith rather than to diplomatic nicety or scientific disinterest. Nor has Turkey itself stood still since Michalski first visited in 1985, while preparing for his master’s degree as a Turkish specialist at the Moscow Institute of International Relations.

The ambassador was to return to Istanbul and Ankara for further work experience in 1987 and 1988, and went on to serve as head of the consular department and as culture and press attaché between 1990 and 1995. For Poles, this was a time of identity-building but also a moment of economic crisis: “In those days, a lot of Polish people used to come to Istanbul for the baggage trade. When they lost their money or their passports, they would come and plead with me at the Consulate, and we would help them as far as we could. Today when I fly back and forth to Warsaw, I see some of these same people in Business Class… How times have changed! We have left the baggage trade to others, and we are sending 250-260,000 tourists here for holidays each year.”

Ambassador Michalski was culture attaché, counsellor and eventually chargé d’affaires from 1997 to 2003, and was named ambassador in 2005. In the intervening periods, he pursued his other speciality, security policy, at the OSCE in Vienna and as minister-counsellor at the Foreign Ministry in Warsaw. Like many others who have lived at times of momentous change, he has a keen interest in history. On the one hand, he has been reading İlber Ortaylı’s ‘Osmanlıyı Yeniden Keşfetmek’ (‘Rediscovering the Ottoman’); on the other, he has been penning for the Embassy website (www.polonya.org.tr) ever-more Turkish-language information on the history of relations between the Poles and the Turks.

Plenty of history

Sometimes enemies, but often friends, the two nations share an archive which abounds in rather glorious gestures: the welcome extended by the Ottoman Empire to innumerable nineteenth century Polish exiles, military and civilian; the establishment of Istanbul’s famous Polish village ‘Polonezkoy’ in 1842; the Polish recognition of the Republic of Turkey, ahead of all other states, on the day before the signing of the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, and the refusal of President İnönü to hand over the Polish embassy to the Germans following their occupation of Poland in World War II. Michalski notes that it was mainly Christian and Catholic states - Russia, Prussia and the Hapsburgs – which partitioned Poland between 1772 and 1795, whereas the Ottoman sultans, caliphs of Islam, refused to recognise the 123-year division. Of national romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz, who died of cholera in Istanbul in 1855, the Ambassador has this to say:

“He was a friend of Pushkin and Byron, who spent much of his years in France and Italy. His life is very similar to the contemporary notion of European culture. Turks are right to be proud that he died on their territory.”

By a happy coincidence, the first foreign visit of any minister in the new Polish government formed in late 2005 was the visit of Culture Minister Kazimierz Michal Ujazdowski to Istanbul, where he took part in the reopening of the renovated Mickiewicz museum. Michalski’s history lesson is by no means over: he is planning to reprint the catalogue from the Polish trade fair held in Istanbul in 1924, and he will continue to visit the grave of Ambassador Michal Sokolnicki, who refused to return to a Soviet satellite state after 1945, became a lecturer at Ankara University and is buried in Cebeci Cemetery.

Religion and politics

These rich veins of history are one source, according to the Ambassador, of the solid support lent by the Polish people to Turkey’s EU membership bid  – the highest among the new EU member nations, he asserts. Polish backing also reflects the “moral obligation” to reciprocate Turkey’s backing for Poland’s membership in NATO. Like Turkey, Poland now stands on one of NATO’s longest borders; in future the two countries may also share a great deal of the EU’s periphery. Poles are thus aware of Turkey’s potential “geostrategic, geocultural and geoeconomic” contribution.

The Ambassador sees similarities of mentality too: “We are mainly a Catholic country… The late Pope John-Paul II was one of our best-known citizens. We know how important religious sentiments are. During the recent ‘cartoon wars’, the first European condemnation of the cartoons came from Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz. We respect the Turks and their religious beliefs because we want our own religious views to be respected…

“History has played many tricks on us. At times we have lost our independence or enjoyed only a semi-independence. As a result, we are very devoted to our state. When we entered the European Union, we were concerned about how much of our independence we were going to have to hand over. I observe that there are very similar concerns in Turkey. One of the most important messages which I would like to get across to my Turkish colleagues is that the EU does not make very great demands on our independence. It does not look as if the EU Constitution will enter into force in the foreseeable figure in its current form. So membership of the Union, as far as I can see, will not call for as many changes in the concept of statehood as some circles in both Poland and Turkey claim. We will be members as countries, and there is not be much need to sacrifice our state or independence and hand over authority to Brussels after we have become members. This understanding seems to be common to both Warsaw and Ankara.”

Helping to negotiate

The Turkish and Polish also share a lack of prejudice, Michalski argues. “According to French official sources, France needs 3,000 plumbers. According to the same sources, the number who have gone there from Poland is 153. But political propaganda based on prejudice exerts a powerful negative influence. There is none of this in Poland. This is another common factor. Five hundred years ago, two nations opened their doors to the Jews. One was the Ottoman Empire; the other was Poland.”

The Embassy has received “thousands” of requests from Turkish organisations wishing to tap into their Polish counterparts’ experience of the EU accession process. The Agriculture Ministry has shown particular interest in how Poland’s large, diverse, privately-owned agriculture sector sought to cope with the free EU market and health standards. The Ambassador himself has recently lectured on topics as diverse as employment and EU funding for local government. He sees similarities between pre-accession Poland and pre-accession Turkey in terms of the structure of local government and the need for decentralisation of responsibilities. With respect to unemployment, he points to the joblessness which emerged as a result of the opening up of Polish agriculture to the free market and the restructuring of heavy industry. Despite receiving billions of euros of foreign direct investment every year, Poland, with a population of under 40m compared to over 70m for Turkey, is still battling with an unemployment rate of around 17%.

When it comes to negotiating tactics, Ambassador Michalski argues that Turkey can learn from Poland’s mistakes as well as its successes. “Maintaining public support for the EU process is a challenge. The problems come to the surface and people become scared and start to undermine the process. Communications between the chief negotiator and the media are therefore of vital importance… You have to be very honest… The direct relationship between the Prime Minister and the chief negotiator is very important because in the end it is the Prime Minister who has to reconcile the different ministries and groups… Ninety per cent of the negotiations are internal arrangements.”

Turkey’s EU prospects

The Polish envoy is a firm believer in EU membership for Turkey and, indeed, Ukraine, if the Union is to play a role in the global economy, to challenge the logic of the “clash of civilisations”, to enjoy greater cultural and social diversity and to prevent “intellectual degeneration” of Europe.” The “common basket of values”, he argues, knows no geographical limits, and any desire to limit the definition of Europe to certain countries is bound to be overtaken by circumstances. Just as Cracow was Europe’s cultural capital in 2000, so Istanbul can and hopefully will be in 2010. Turkish membership of the EU will also strengthen its energy security, an issue on which Poland has been taking the lead, having suffered serious disruption of its gas supplies due to problems in Belarus in 2002 and the recent 2006 Ukraine-Russian crisis.

Yet Michalski harbours no illusions about the EU’s current problems, or its need to absorb the last wave of members. He is familiar, too, with the doubts of Turks about the terms set for negotiations, more than 40 years after their ties with the EU began. Warning against nationalism on both sides, he adds that Polish membership of the EU was by no means a foregone conclusion:

“I recall that President Walesa was not very optimistic when he met President Demirel in Warsaw in 1993 and in Ankara in 1994. “It was difficult in the early 1990s to convince western politicians that it would be a mistake to leave the Central European countries in a grey sphere. There was no invitation; it was us who went knocking on doors.”

The Michalski prescription is positive messages from the EU on the one hand, and more people-to-people contact on the other. In the latter context, he notes that that Poland received 1,000 applications for education visas in the first half of 2005 alone – and not only from big cities but from all over the country. He also takes pride in his Embassy’s cooperation with the Turkish National Agency for EU funds.

PR partner

References to NGOs pervade the Ambassador’s conversation. He welcomes the growing number of civil society and charity organisations in Turkey, and has found ways of taking part in their activities. The Embassy buildings and grounds are well-suited to meetings, recitals, festivals and fairs, and NGO-organised events of this kind go ahead there almost every month. While the organisation furthers its charity aims, the Embassy takes the opportunity to get to know people and perhaps to introduce the visitors to some Polish musical culture less universally familiar than Chopin.

In its “multi-directional diplomacy”, targeting politicians, the public and professional and interest groups alike, the Embassy also makes maximum use of its website and free publications. Efforts to reach more people with the same, limited resources have resulted in some interesting innovations. Michalski explains:

“As a rule, the first ladies of the embassies are people who accompany the ambassador. That is a very conservative part of diplomatic life. The wives of diplomats are generally well-educated, and in our own countries they do a wide range of jobs in all areas of business and culture. In our Embassy we have partners who are experts in the theatre and in science. We even had one who was a doctor. So the question is how to absorb their abilities. Considering the new spirit of enterprise in Poland, I asked my minister to grant a special dispensation for my wife to be employed at the Embassy. Like me, Edyta Michalska has an MA in political sciences and international relations. During our last spell in Poland she also studied public relations. She speaks Turkish as well as English, Portuguese and Russian. So she is now working with two hats as ambassador’s wife and as part-time employee in our culture - promotion office.”

Trade and security

One of the roles of diplomats, Michalski agrees, is to clear the path for economic relations. Political and cultural exchanges at the highest level were finally succeeded last month by an official visit to Turkey from a Polish economy minister, Pawel G. Wozniak. In the past fifteen years, Poland may not have solved its unemployment problem but it has absorbed over US$80bn of foreign investment and sprouted new industries and technologies. Decades ago, Poles were responsible for power plants, roads, tunnels and shipbuilding facilities in Turkey. Today, nascent Polish capital is sniffing around the electricity, gas and pipeline companies. The participation of Poland’s PKN Orlen in one of the consortia that bid for in the TÜPRAŞ refinery privatisation last year may be a sign of things to come. Meanwhile, the mutual volume of trade has jumped to US$2.5bn following Poland’s entry into the EU. Cleary, the relations which Michalski has forged with Turkish business leaders over the years are starting to bear fruit.

Needless to say, the Ambassador is equally eloquent on security affairs. He believes that NATO in its “hard and soft dimensions” has helped to keep Europe together and to suppress some of its historical tendencies. He sees no incompatibility between its continuing role and European security policy. The debate on future out-of-area NATO operations is a natural reflection of contemporary challenges, and disagreement is more about details than principle. The EU can take a role in preserving security, but “It is not only the Polish experience that you can only achieve your security in conjunction with others… And, yes, we need to contribute to peace outside Europe.”

In this spirit, Poland has offered troops for the EU mission to Darfur, while preparing to assume command of the ISAF in Afghanistan in 2007. Michalski argues that Poland’s troops in Iraq are not an occupation force but a stabilisation force. Poland is commanding a force of soldiers from more than a dozen nations, stationed in the centre of the country. A final note from the annals of bilateral history: Poland’s former military attaché to Ankara, General Andrzej Tyszkiewicz, was the first to command this force.

( DIPLOMAT  -  April 2006  -  Ankara )