Poland, Brussels and the Road to a German War

On the afternoon of Friday the 30th October, a judge of the Polish Constitutional Tribunal named Anna Korwin-Piotrowska signed an order suspending the President of the Tribunal, Bogdan Święczkowski, and his deputy, Bartłomiej Sochański, for one month, and announced that she would be running the court herself. She had been elected to the Tribunal by the present parliamentary majority earlier this year and had taken her oath in the Sejm, because the President of the Republic, before whom the law says such oaths are taken, had refused to receive it. Within hours, the two men had disappeared from the Tribunal’s website. The gates of the building in Warsaw were chained, and a cordon of riot police was posted round it at her written request and at that of the Justice Minister, Waldemar Żurek, who is also Prosecutor General and who has since asked for both men to be stripped of their immunity so that they can be charged with crimes. The deputy was turned away at the gate. Karol Nawrocki, the President, was on his way to Senegal. He had his aircraft turned round, flew back to Warsaw, went into the building and told the new management that they were not judges of the Tribunal. Outside, a crowd that some reports put in the hundreds of thousands stood singing patriotic songs through the night.

If you rely on the British media, you will know little of this. The BBC has managed a single report. The Guardian has published an opinion piece. The Times, at the moment of writing, has not reported it at all. Such coverage as exists follows the account given by Donald Tusk, the Prime Minister. In 2015, the Law and Justice party, which then governed Poland, filled seats on the Tribunal that had already been filled by the previous parliament, and spent the following eight years turning the court into an annexe of the party. Tusk’s coalition, which came to power at the end of 2023, is repairing the damage. “Restoring the rule of law is our duty,” he has said. “After years of PiS-led lawlessness, this is a difficult process, sometimes painful, and it requires decisive action. There is no other way.”

I do not dismiss the first half of this story. Law and Justice did pack the court, and it did so with a contempt for procedure that its present indignation does not erase. But the second half is harder to accept. Nothing in the Polish Constitution allows one judge of the Tribunal to suspend its President, and the Polish Bar Council is among those reported to have said so. Leszek Miller, a former Prime Minister who began his career as a Communist functionary and ended it by taking Poland into the European Union, and who can hardly be accused of nationalist sentiment, put the matter in a sentence: a state under the rule of law does not function on the principle that whoever has the police is right. That is the principle on which the Tribunal has now been taken. The next steps have already been announced. Korwin-Piotrowska has summoned a general assembly of judges to begin disciplinary proceedings against the men she has displaced, and to consider removing their immunity. Once that is done, there is nothing to prevent their arrest.

What is missing from nearly every account, Polish or British, is the reason why Tusk has chosen force at this moment, after nearly three years of manoeuvre. On the 18th December last year, in infringement proceedings brought by the European Commission against Poland, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Justice gave judgment in Case C-448/23. It held that a national constitutional court may not set aside the primacy of European Union law, whether by appealing to the constitutional identity of its country or by reviewing whether the institutions of the Union have exceeded their powers. It also held that, because of irregularities in the appointment of three of its judges and of its President and Vice-President, the Polish Tribunal was not an independent and impartial tribunal established by law, and that Poland was therefore in breach of its obligations under Article 19(1) of the Treaty on European Union. In plain words, Poland was told that its highest court was not a court, and that its Constitution ranks below the law made in Brussels and interpreted in Luxembourg.

Tusk knows what follows when a Polish government ignores the European Court. He watched it happen to his opponents. In October 2021, the Court fined Poland a million euros a day for failing to suspend the disciplinary chamber that Law and Justice had created in the Supreme Court. The rate was halved in April 2023 and the fines stopped accumulating that June. The Polish government refused to pay, and so the Commission took the money, about €320 million, by deducting it from Poland’s budget allocations. At the same time, it froze about €137 billion in recovery and cohesion funds. Tusk campaigned in 2023 on the promise that a vote for him would unblock the money. He won, he regularised the Supreme Court, the money was released, and he has since called the lost fines a tax on the lawlessness of his predecessors. Now he finds himself in their position. The Tribunal, still dominated by their appointees, strikes down his laws and affirms the supremacy of the Polish Constitution. The President vetoes whatever he passes to change it. A general election is due next year. Every month of non-compliance is a month in which the Commission can reach again for the purse. Tusk has been unusually candid about what is at stake. “I will not allow the right wing to take us out of the European Union,” he said. “That’s what the game is about today.”

He is right about the game, and it is a much larger game than Polish party politics. What we are watching in Warsaw is the federal order of the European Union enforcing itself through a willing national government against national institutions that resist it. And I think that order has two features that ought to worry us. It has become far more centralised since Britain left. And it is increasingly the instrument of a Germany that is rearming, and that has said openly against whom.

Take the first of these. The British were never the heroic resisters of European integration that some of our Eurosceptics like to imagine. Our governments signed almost everything put in front of them. But they were a brake. They stayed out of the euro and Schengen, they collected opt-outs, and in 2011 David Cameron vetoed a treaty on fiscal union, so that the other members had to make their arrangements outside the formal structures. Once the British had gone, the brake was off. In 2020, the Union agreed to borrow €750 billion in its own name for its recovery fund. This was a thing Germany had refused for a generation, and the precedent of common debt is now established. In the same year, it adopted the regulation that allows the Commission to suspend payments to any member whose judicial arrangements it disapproves of, which is the lever that was used against Poland. The migration pact agreed in 2024 obliges members to accept relocated migrants or pay for the privilege of refusing. The Union acquired its first Commissioner for Defence the same year. In May 2025, it adopted a €150 billion loan scheme for armaments, called SAFE, under the emergency procedure of Article 122, so that the European Parliament had no vote on it, as the opening move in a programme meant to raise €800 billion for rearmament. A few months later, the Court of Justice told Poland that it must recognise same-sex marriages contracted in other member states, whatever Polish law said about marriage. Each of these measures had its defenders and its reasons. But they all point the same way, and the judgment of last December states the principle behind all of them: the Union is supreme, and national constitutions survive on sufferance.

Now take the second. The President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, was until 2019 the German Minister of Defence. The German Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, told the Bundestag in May 2025 that he intended to make the Bundeswehr the strongest conventional army in Europe. To pay for it, the German constitutional limit on borrowing was loosened for defence spending. The ordinary defence budget is to rise from €82.7 billion this year to €105.8 billion next year, or nearly €145 billion with the special fund, and to reach 3.7 per cent of national output by 2030. Last year, Germany overtook Britain as the largest military spender in Europe. A German armoured brigade is being stationed permanently in Lithuania, the first permanent deployment of German troops abroad since the war, and a new military service law has been passed to fill the ranks. The German Defence Minister, Boris Pistorius, has said that the country must become kriegstüchtig, which means fit to wage war, and German officials speak of 2029 as the year by which Russia might be ready to attack. I do not say that Germany wants a war with Russia. I say that it is building an army on the stated assumption that it may fight one, that it has placed its troops on the Russian frontier, and that the institutions of the Union, led by a former German defence minister, are being reshaped round the same assumption.

Poland matters to this design more than any other country. It has the largest land army in the European Union, and since 2022 it has armed it mainly with American and Korean equipment, with Abrams and K2 tanks, K9 howitzers and American rocket artillery. It is the largest single borrower under SAFE, with an allocation of more than €43 billion, and the condition of those loans is that most of the money be spent on equipment made inside the Union. That means, in practice, bringing Polish procurement within a European industry in which German and French firms are dominant. Nawrocki objected to this and proposed that Poland borrow the money on its own terms instead. A Constitutional Tribunal that insists on the primacy of the Polish Constitution, and a President who will not be bypassed, are the last national obstacles to Poland’s full absorption into a common European defence. Seen in this light, what happened on the 30th October looks less like a quarrel over judicial appointments and more like the removal of a blockage.

I should say what I do not believe, because some of the commentary on Poland has gone well beyond the evidence. It has been claimed that Tusk means to take Poland into the euro and hand its gold reserves, about 550 tonnes, to the European Central Bank in Frankfurt, and the scheme has been compared with Hitler’s seizure of the Czechoslovak gold in 1939. I think this is nonsense. Joining the euro would require an amendment to Article 227 of the Polish Constitution, which gives the National Bank of Poland the exclusive right to issue money, and that needs a two-thirds majority in the Sejm that Tusk has never had. Nor do members of the euro surrender their gold. They transfer a modest share of their reserves to the European Central Bank according to their capital key, and the Bundesbank still holds well over three thousand tonnes of its own. As for the comparison with 1939, it is the kind of thing that persuades only the persuaded. Modern Germany does not need to seize anything. It works through rules, budgets, procurement conditions and courts, and the method is more effective for being so dull.

There is a stronger objection, and it deserves an answer. The Polish right is not a peace party. Law and Justice and Nawrocki have been at least as hostile to Russia as Tusk, and in many respects more so. Under their government, Poland came to spend a larger share of its national output on arms than any other member of NATO, and they were among the loudest voices for helping Ukraine. If the Tribunal were restored tomorrow and Nawrocki given everything he wants, Poland would not disarm. All this is true. But it misses the point. A Poland that decides its own defence policy may still decide badly, but its decisions are made by people whom Poles can vote out, and they can be reversed by a change of government. A Polish army raised and equipped inside a federal structure, financed by common debt, supplied by Union industry, and governed by a court in Luxembourg that has declared itself superior to every national constitution, is no longer answerable to anyone in Poland. The question in Warsaw is not whether Poland will be hostile to Russia. It is who will decide when that hostility becomes war.

Which brings me home. I am more grateful than ever that we left. No court in Luxembourg can tell a British judge that he is not a judge, and no Commission can deduct fines from our budget for disobeying it. When the British Government tried last year to buy its way into SAFE, the talks collapsed over the price of admission, and British firms may now take part only on the terms offered to outsiders. I count that as a lucky escape. But formal independence is not the same as freedom of action. Since 2024, our governments have signed a series of arrangements that bind us to the same project by other means. In October 2024, the Trinity House Agreement provided for German maritime patrol aircraft to operate from Lossiemouth. In May 2025, we concluded a Security and Defence Partnership with the Union. In July 2025, Keir Starmer and Merz signed the Kensington Treaty, the first bilateral treaty between Britain and Germany since the war, in which each country promises to assist the other in the event of an armed attack. On top of all this, there is the “coalition of the willing”, in which British ministers have offered troops for Ukraine after any ceasefire. None of these was put to the voters. Few were seriously debated in Parliament. They have created obligations to a European military structure without giving us any vote in the decisions of that structure.

I have no illusions about our own ruling class. It has wanted confrontation with Russia for years, because confrontation gives it a purpose, a budget and a moral glow that nothing in its domestic record can supply. But it wants the confrontation on its own terms and at its own pace, which in practice means speeches, sanctions and expensive gestures rather than a war that might be lost. The danger now is that the pace will be set by others. A German brigade sits on the Lithuanian border. A Commission headed by a former German defence minister is financing an arms programme explicitly aimed at Russia. A Polish government has shown that it will use the police to remove a court that stands in the way of its integration into that programme. And Britain has signed a treaty promising to help Germany if Germany is attacked, without any means of influencing the policies that might lead to an attack. If an incident on that frontier turns into a war, the decision to go to war will not have been taken in London. We shall be told that our honour is engaged, and that we have no choice, and by then it will be true.

The gates of the Tribunal in Warsaw were chained by the police on the orders of people who believe that they are defending the rule of law. They may even believe it. But the principle they have established is the one Miller described, that whoever has the police is right. In the Europe now being built, Berlin has the money, the army and, through its friends, the police. We should be glad that we are outside it, and we should make very sure that none of the treaties our rulers have signed in our name allows it to have our soldiers as well.