Weimar triangle
The Weimar Triangle is a loose foreign policy discussion and consultation forum for Germany , France and Poland . Its aim is to coordinate the policies of the three countries and to strengthen European integration without excluding other countries.
founding
The establishment of the Weimar Triangle goes back to a meeting of the foreign ministers of the three countries Hans-Dietrich Genscher , Roland Dumas and Krzysztof Skubiszewski on August 28 and 29, 1991 in Weimar , Thuringia . In their 10-point "Joint Declaration on the Future of Europe", the three ministers emphasized that Poles, Germans and French bear a major responsibility for the success of sustainable structures in a European neighborhood. The cooperation in the 'Weimar format' was intended from the outset to bring not only Poland but also the other new democracies in Central and Eastern Europe closer to the European Community.
After the eastward expansion of the European Union in 2004, the Weimar Triangle increasingly became a forum for discussion between equal partners on current European political issues.
Work and results
In the course of the 1990s, the forms of cooperation between the three countries were expanded. Since 1998, summits of the heads of state and government as well as meetings of various ministers have taken place. The first informal meeting took place in Gdansk in 1993 on the occasion of the honorary doctorate of Presidents Lech Wałęsa , François Mitterrand and Richard von Weizsäcker by the University of Gdansk, followed by summits in 1998 in Poznan , 1999 in Nancy , 2001 in Neustadt an der Weinstrasse , 2003 in Wroclaw , 2005 again in Nancy, 2006 in Mettlach and 2011 in Warsaw .
At the fifth summit of the heads of state and government on 19 May 2005 in Nancy , France , the three partners exchanged views on the following topics: compliance with budgetary discipline within the European Union, maintaining the common agricultural policy , solving the problem of the “ British discount ”, relations between the European Union and the Russian Federation and Ukraine , the situation in the Middle East , the continuation of the European social model and the United Nations summits .
At the beginning of 2006, the then Polish President Lech Kaczyński questioned the sense and purpose of the trilateral debate within the framework of the Weimar Triangle, as it could not come up with concrete results. Kaczyński canceled the summit meeting with Angela Merkel and Jacques Chirac planned for July 3, 2006 at short notice because of a sudden upset stomach. The meeting was rescheduled on December 5, 2006 at the Saarschleife in Mettlach in the Saarland . The three heads of state and government of the Weimar Triangle mainly exchanged views on current European and international issues.
On November 23, 2007, the newly elected Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk campaigned for a revival of the Weimar Triangle in his first government declaration. During the state visit by President Bronislaw Komorowski to Paris on May 7, 2013, the Presidents of France and Poland - with explicit reference to the support of Chancellor Angela Merkel - announced their intention to revive the Weimar Triangle. The Weimar Triangle has occasionally opened up through the participation of guests from third countries in foreign ministerial meetings: in 2010 the Russian foreign minister took part in the trilateral ministerial meeting in Paris, in 2010 the Ukrainian foreign minister in Bonn, and in 2011 the foreign minister of Moldova in Bydgoszcz (Bromberg). At the height of the Ukraine crisis, the Foreign Ministers of the Weimar Triangle met in Kiev on February 21, 2014 with the President of Ukraine and with leaders of the opposition. The last meeting of the Foreign Ministers with the French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius , his Polish counterpart Radosław Sikorski and the German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier took place from March 31 to April 1, 2014 in Berlin and Weimar .
At parliamentary level, after 2016 in France and 2018 in Poland, the last meeting of parliamentarians from all three nations took place on May 13, 2019 in Berlin.
Political importance
Zbigniew Brzeziński attaches great geopolitical importance to the Weimar Triangle. It "created a potentially significant geopolitical axis on the European continent, comprising around 180 million people from three nations with highly developed national consciousness. On the one hand, this strengthened Germany's dominant role in Central Europe, on the other hand, through the participation of France and Poland the three-way dialogue was again somewhat balanced. " ( The single world power , p. 108) "Although Poland depends on German support to join NATO (and France resents its reluctance to expand), once it becomes an ally, it will be more likely to do so open up a joint Franco-Polish perspective. " (The only world power, p. 119)
The Committee for the Promotion of German-French-Polish Cooperation eV ('Weimar Triangle'), founded in 2002, and the Weimar Triangle Association, founded in 2010, have set themselves the task of strengthening cooperation between the three states on the civil society level and thus the dialogue on the political level to complete.
See also
- Blaesheim process for the regular, informal Franco-German meetings
literature
- Rafał Ulatowski: The Weimar Triangle. A transnational topic in the German and Polish public , in: Revue d'Allemagne et des pays de langue Allemande , vol. 48/1, Strasbourg 2017, ISSN 0035-0974 , pp. 357-370 ( table of contents of the journal )
- Heiner Timmermann (Ed.): The Weimar Triangle. Discontinued model or revival? , Lit-Verlag, Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3-643138-45-3
- Wolfram Hilz u. Catherine Robert (Ed.): France - Germany - Poland. Partnership in the heart of Europe , ZEI, Bonn 2010, ISBN 978-3-941928-01-5
- Klaus-Heinrich Standke (Ed.): The Weimar Triangle in Europe. German-French-Polish cooperation. Origin - Potentials - Perspectives , Marszałek, Toruń 2009, ISBN 978-83-7611-574-0
Web links
- The Weimar Triangle on the website of the Federal Foreign Office
- Weimar Triangle , a registered association
- Committee for the Promotion of German-French-Polish Cooperation
- The Weimar Triangle - Study by the Center for European Integration Research (PDF file) (420 kB)
Individual evidence
- ↑ http://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/de/landerinformationen_1/polen_21/index.html
- ↑ VII. Summit on the Weimar Triangle - Joint Declaration (December 5, 2006)
- ^ "Tusk wants to improve its neighborhood with Germany" ( Memento from July 24, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Tagesschau , November 23, 2007
- ↑ Do not jeopardize overcoming the division of Europe. In: bundestag.de. German Bundestag , May 13, 2019, accessed on June 12, 2019 .