'New Europe's' Iraq squeeze

While no one is likely to make good on such a threat, its perceived arrogance played into the hands of EU opponents in Poland, a deeply pro-American country where a referendum on EU membership is scheduled for June.

The prospect of cloudy relations with Germany and France is worrying, officials here say, in an uncertain international situation where old truisms are irrelevant. "For the first time, we are confronted by a new type of dilemma," says Mr. Rotfeld. "For centuries, our main dilemma was whether to be with Russia against Germany, or with Germany against Russia. Now we are confronted with a new one - to be with the US against Europe, or with Europe against America. But that is a false dilemma."

"Only America and NATO can give us external security," adds Bogdan Goralzyk, an adviser to foreign minister Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz. "But even more pressing is domestic security, which means modernization, and nobody but the EU can give us that."

Poland does 70 percent of its foreign trade with EU countries. That is unlikely to change however political relations develop. But the international crisis over Iraq, which has opened splits across the Atlantic and within Europe, has shown how much harder the EU will find it to achieve one of its cherished goals - a common foreign and security policy - when it contains 25 members with varying backgrounds and views.

Already the EU is split over how to deal with Saddam Hussein between countries that put a high priority on good relations with Washington, such as Britain and Spain, and others more committed to developing a distinctly European outlook. In Paris and Berlin, officials fear that the arrival in the EU of Central European countries like Poland, who bear a sense of gratitude to Washington for its role in destroying the Soviet Union, might make it even easier for the US to divide Europe in a future crisis, "cherry picking" its allies.

"There will be no common foreign and security policy among 25 members," predicts Janusz Reiter, a former Polish ambassador to Germany, who now heads the Center for International Relations, a Warsaw think tank. "There will be enhanced cooperation among a group of willing and able countries. The question is whether Poland will be willing and able. I hope it will be," he continues. "Poland needs a deeply integrated EU, because when it disintegrates, like now, national egoisms get stronger, and Poland is not good at that game compared to major powers like France and Germany. But we cannot rely on only one partner in this world. Look at the map: We are in Central Europe."

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