Stanislaw Komorowski: The Poles are not Europe's poor cousins from the East

From the Jean Monnet Memorial Lecture, given by the Polish ambassador at the European Business School, London

The greatest Briton of all time, Sir Winston Churchill, once said: "There are few virtues that the Poles do not possess – and there are few mistakes they have ever avoided."

He said so in 1945 and we are now at the end of 2002. The natural question is: "Is it still so?"

Let me try to prove that the Poles of 2002 are a nation that knows very well how to avoid major mistakes.

We have transformed a command economy with a small private sector into a fully functioning market economy, which has attracted direct investment from all the leading industrialised countries. We have joined the OECD and Nato and are on the brink of finishing negotiations for accession to the European Union. We will be members in May 2004.

The terms of our accession are important not only for economic and financial reasons but because we have to get the Polish public to agree to them in a referendum. My view is that people are less concerned about financial transfers than they are about being treated as full and equal members of the Union. It was clear to us with the EU Commission's Agenda 2000 that this was not going to be an enlargement characterised by generosity. Nevertheless I regard the long-term arrangements to be fair.

However the terms of accession worry me in the short-term. Not only do we face transition periods in areas like the free movement of labour and farm subsidies, but the financial settlement will cause us budgetary problems in the first years of membership.

The Poles must feel they will be treated as equal partners, not poor cousins from the East. What Poland cannot afford is to join a Union which is shutting its mind to the reforms necessary to keep it competitive and innovative in an increasingly complex global environment. Poland can have no interest in a protectionist, subsidy-dependency culture.

We are strongly against further harmonisation in taxation. We would not want Union laws to spread to morality or social behaviour, which are specific to our different societies, such as euthanasia, or abortion. For Poland, the essential elements of the Union remain the internal market and efficient economic reforms.