After Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s recent visit to India , the first by a Polish PM in 16 years, the India-Polish “strategic partnership” is expected to get stronger through better economic and defence cooperation.
A Polish Defence Ministry source also confirmed this development.
This comes two years after Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Poland in 2024, which was the first visit by an Indian PM in 45 years, during which the relationship was elevated to “strategic partnership”. An official from the WB Group, one of the largest private defence manufacturing companies of Poland, told The Hindu that they do not use Chinese critical components. “We use chips from friendly countries like South Korea,” the official said.
It is against this backdrop that Łukasiewicz – ITECH, a research network under the Polish government, held its inaugural conference in Warsaw in October on its ‘Asian Programme’ to strengthen Poland’s cooperation with Asian countries. The initial countries chosen for it are Taiwan, South Korea and India. But this was not always the case. Mr. “So we thought the trade deficit would be narrowed by policies from Beijing. However, it did not materialise. “We need to recognise that Polish foreign policy towards China is based on the fact that Poland is a member of the EU. For the EU, there is a sort of growing disappointment with China. It is not just Poland, but in Germany, France, Italy, etc., there is a structural mismatch between Beijing’s approach to international relations and European expectations,” Mr.
Dominik Mierzejewski, associate professor, Department of Asian Studies, University of Lodz, Poland, said that in 1997, the then-Polish President visited China, and it was sort of an opening of doors for bilateral relations.
Pawel Marczewski, Director of the Department of Strategy and Analysis, Łukasiewicz – ITECH, said the main aim of the programme is to learn from the experiences of like-minded Asian countries about how they support their innovation ecosystem and commercialisation of technological innovation. Mierzejewski said that in 2012 there was the “16+1” cooperation (16 Central and Eastern European [CEE] nations and China) and in 2015, Poland was one of the first countries from Europe to be part of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) of China. And particularly this disappointment came from a lack of Chinese investments in Poland,” he said. Commenting on the current state of the relationship, he said, Poland started distancing from China from February 2022, “when Russia started its war with Ukraine”, he said. Mierzejewski said.
