Gdansk Summit Produces Treaty of Nancy as France Pivots East While Maintaining Complicated Historical Memory About the Direction
Reported by Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
GDANSK, Poland — France and Poland held their first-ever formal bilateral summit in Gdansk, producing the Treaty of Nancy as the foundational document of a new Franco-Polish partnership that both governments described as “historic” and “long overdue” — two characterizations that are not in tension but do invite the observation that if it is long overdue, one wonders about the preceding period, which involved France and Poland disagreeing extensively about Russia, NATO, EU institutional structure, and the appropriate speed of European integration, among other topics.
The History, Briefly Acknowledged and Then Set Aside
France and Poland have had a complicated relationship since approximately the 18th century. Napoleon is beloved in Poland as the figure whose continental campaigns repeatedly promised Polish restoration, delivered a version of it in the form of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, and then lost it again at Moscow. The French Romantic tradition contains significant Polish figures, including Frederic Chopin and Adam Mickiewicz, who lived in Paris exile and shaped French cultural life. The twentieth century was complicated. The European Union period was also complicated, with Poland under the Law and Justice government frequently in conflict with Brussels over rule of law issues that France supported and Poland resisted.
None of this is in the Treaty of Nancy. The Treaty of Nancy, named for the French city with historical connections to the Polish royal house of Leszczynski — a connection that the communique mentioned because it is diplomatically useful to mention — establishes a framework for defense cooperation, economic partnership, and the specific contemporary purpose of presenting a unified European posture on the eastern security situation that Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine has made urgent. The history is the background. The security situation is the foreground. Gdansk, where the Solidarity movement began, is the symbolically resonant setting. Both governments understand all of this and have staged the summit accordingly.
Why Now
France’s eastward diplomatic pivot — formalized in the Gdansk summit but in progress since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 — reflects a recalibration of French strategic interests that the war has accelerated. France under Macron had previously maintained a posture toward Russia that eastern European NATO members, including Poland, considered insufficiently alert to the Russian threat. The invasion settled this debate comprehensively in Poland’s favor. Macron has since moved to a position of clear support for Ukrainian defense and European rearmament, which has improved France’s standing in Warsaw considerably.
Poland, which has significantly increased its defense spending to among the highest in NATO as a percentage of GDP, and which has been building its own bilateral relationships with the United States and the United Kingdom, is also interested in a stronger relationship with France as part of a broader European defense architecture that does not depend exclusively on US commitment — a calculation that the Trump administration’s ambivalence toward NATO has made more urgent across European capitals. The Franco-Polish summit is one piece of this architecture. The Treaty of Nancy is its foundational document. NATO has welcomed the bilateral commitment. The alliance is the structure within which the bilateral operates. The bilateral reinforces the structure. This is how European security architecture is built: one summit at a time, in symbolically resonant cities, with treaties named after historical connections that both sides are glad to have discovered at this particular moment.
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SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
