A Nobel Offering

So President Barack Obama is to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. And thoroughly merited it is too. One only has to recall his unstinting efforts that finally brought a durable peace to the Middle East, his agreement with President Medvedev to eliminate all American and Russian nuclear weapons, the leadership he provided during the international negotiations that led to a universal treaty that will drastically reduce global carbon emissions, and the fact that through the sheer force of his personal diplomacy he persuaded both Kim Jong Il of North Korea and President Ahmadinejad of Iran to abandon their nuclear weapons programmes.

Or at least the award would be merited had even one these events actually taken taken place. Instead, President Obama has received this award barely half a year into his presidency, having to date achieved only modest foreign policy successes. Even Mr Obama's supporters concede that the Prize is something of a surprise and might even - if handled badly - cause him political difficulties at home.

On the other hand, when set against past-winners of the award, maybe President Obama isn't such a bad choice. One thinks of Henry Kissinger, responsible for the vast bombing campaign over North Vietnam, or even Al Gore, who did little more than turn his PowerPoint display into a film that said global warming was a Bad Thing.

To date, though, Mr Obama's foreign policy has promised much but delivered little. This, of course, is hardly surprising. The guy has only been in the job for half a year - you're not going to bring peace to the Middle East in that kind of time frame. Moreover, the foreign policy decisions the president has made have certainly been encouraging. The effort to try and put relations with Russia on a sounder footing and ignore the less than wholly liberal nature of its current government is probably, on balance, correct, as long as the US is extracting some concessions from Russia in return. In a similar vein, the cancellation of the missile defence system that was due to be installed in East-Central Europe was another bold foreign policy move. The decision is unpopular in this part of the world mainly because the current Polish government had reluctantly acquiesced to the Bush administration's plans despite their unpopularity in Poland. Having taken a political risk, there is now resentment that the US is retreating from their plans, and there is a feeling that Poland is being treated once again as a pawn in the great power diplomacy between Russia and America. Yet the Obama administration, adopting a coldly realist approach, no doubt concluded that the missile shield was more trouble than it was worth. If President Obama can find a politically feasible way of extricating America from the morass that is Afghanistan, he has the beginnings of a good foreign policy record.

Even so, the best one can say about the Nobel Committee's decision is that it is extraordinarily premature. Mr Obama has the potential to be a great foreign policy president, if he possesses the political guile, nerve and of course luck to overcome all the foreign policy pitfalls that he faces. Had the Committee awarded the prize towards the end of Mr Obama's second term, when he had achieved several significant foreign policy breakthroughs, it would at least have been comprehensible. To award it to him now, though, has only resulted in a general feeling of bemusement.

David Cameron's European buddies

There's been much discussion in the British press over the UK Conservative Party's decision to invite the Polish politician, Michał Kamiński, to a fringe meeting at their conference. To put it mildly, Mr Kamiński is a controversial figure. In Poland, he's best known for having been President Lech Kaczyński's official spokesman. He has, at least according to several articles in the British press, something of a chequered history. It's been alleged that Mr Kamiński has been a member of the Polish neo-Nazi organisation, National Revival - although Mr Kamiński himself states that he only belonged to the youth organisation, and has attempted to downplay his links with it. His public denials that Poles bore any responsibility for the atrocities committed against the Jews in the Polish town of Jedwabne in 1941 are even more controversial.

But how big a political impact is all of this going to have? In terms of damaging the Conservative Party's electoral prospects, my guess is very little. Mr Kamiński, after all, has participated in a fringe debate; it's not as though he has shared a public platform with David Cameron, the Connservative Party leader. And while the whole incident has whipped the Conservatives' left-wing critics into paroxysms of rage, I doubt that it has resonated particularly strongly among the public at large.

Of greater significance, perhaps, is the damage this might do to the Conservatives' relations with other European parties, particulary those on the centre-right. The Conservatives are now part of a new Eurosceptic bloc in the European Parliament, which includes Prawo i Sprawiedliwóść (Law and Justice), the party to which Mr Kamiński belongs. It's worth noting that PiS itself is not even the largest centre-right party in Poland. The current governing party, Platforma Obywatelska (Civic Platform) has in recent years been the main opponent of PiS. Ideologically, PO is more economically liberal, more pro-European, less nationalistic and generally less populist than PiS. In fact PO would not look out of place in most Western European parliaments. This serves to emphasize that even in Poland itself, to say nothing of Europe as a whole, PiS is hardly a dominating force.

The danger for Mr Cameron is that his new European buddies will damage (or perhaps already have damaged) his relations with other centre-right European parties. Given that Angela Merkel is the German Chancellor, and France has President Sarkozy, this might well cause some significant diplomatic problems for Mr Cameron if (and it looks likely) he becomes prime minister next year. This may well lead to less influence within the EU itself. It's quite possible that the Conservative leader may well live to regret his panderings to the Eurosceptic wing of his party. His new friends could become something of a mill-stone around the neck of the next Conservative government.

Central European Considerations

The first post of my new blog! I would like to offer a brief description of who I am and an introduction to some of the stuff that I'm going to write about in the coming weeks, months, maybe even years!

First, I'm a Brit who lives and works in Poland, who has a strong interest in politics and history. In this blog I would like to discuss some of the issues and stories that are making the contemporary headlines. These will be largely (but probably not exclusively) related (even if only tangentially) to Central Europe. The postings, I expect, will probably be reasonably succinct (a couple of hundred words), but I hope that they might stimulate further debate.

Thanks for coming to my blog, and I hope you become a regular reader!