Double-Track Asymmetry: Alliances of the Republic of Poland in the 21st Century

In the last quarter century, Poland has been one of the foremost beneficiaries of the post-Cold War international order, but its 30 years of uninterrupted development now seem to be drawing to an end. The disadvantageous and largely unpredictable changes in Poland’s internal and external environment impart special relevance to the question about the methods and means to ensure the security of the state in the years to come—security which until now seemed guaranteed. One way to achieve this is to conduct an effective alliance policy, understood as selecting allies and building relations with them is such a way that will add to the security of the state and discourage an enemy from open aggression. Hence the urgent need for Poland to formulate a more sophisticated alliance policy than the existing one. This concerns not so much the choice of allies (in this respect, the room for manoeuvre is relatively limited and the choices fairly obvious) as, first and foremost, the way it functions within existing alliances. The text outlines the determinants to which Poland’s alliance policy will be subjected in years to come and suggests how this policy should be shaped based on the author’s analysis of Poland’s security environment and its foreign policy as well as on his research into the phenomenon of alliances as such.