Chief of Poland’s Ruling Party Claims Germany Wants to Build Fourth Reich Out of EU

The idea of a ‘Fourth Reich’, or a successor to Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich, has often been used as a pejorative by politicians and pundits to express fears of excessive German control over Europe. One popular theory is that German banking interests helped foster the European Union in its current form to boost Berlin’s economic might.

Poland is not interested in the construction of a German “Fourth Reich” using the EU as a jumping off point, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, Polish deputy prime minister, leader and cofounder of the ruling Law and Justice Party, has said.

Some countries “are not enthusiastic about the prospect of a German Fourth Reich being built on the basis of the EU,” Kaczynski said, speaking to the Polish newspaper Gazeta Polska Codziennie.

Kaczynski insisted that the term “Fourth Reich” is in itself “not reprehensible, it is not about the Third Reich, but a reference to the first,” that is, the Holy Roman Empire of 962-1806. “I think it reflects the directions of these changes quite well,” he said.

He warned however that Warsaw cannot submit to the idea, arguing that “if we Poles agreed with this kind of modern-day submission we would be degraded in various ways.”

Kaczynski’s comments were a response to the creation of a new coalition agreement in Germany in November, which lists the desire to expand the EU into a “federal European state” as a key foreign policy objective.

Commenting on the escalating conflict between Poland and the European Union over the Polish constitutional tribunal’s rulings challenging the primacy of EU law over national law, Kaczynski suggested that “we did not cause it, and we did not want it.”

“We were faced with a fundamental choice which essentially boils down to a basic question: Do we want to continue to be a sovereign state, or do we accept that our sovereignty be treated as a decades-old incident in the history of our continent? For us, the choice is unambiguous,” the politician said. “Poland is and will continue to be a sovereign and independent state deciding on its own policy,” he stressed.

Kaczynski, the co-founder of the Law and Justice Party, has been a key figure in Polish and European politics for nearly two decades. Under the party’s leadership, Poland has taken a eurosceptical stance on the EU (while continuing to accept multi-billion euro grants from Brussels) and rejected most efforts to more closely integrate with the bloc.

Kaczynski is no stranger to making controversial claims. After the death of his twin brother President Lech Kaczynski in a plane crash in Smolensk, Russia in April 2010, Jaroslaw and his Law and Justice allies have spent years alleging that his Lech was “assassinated” by Russia. Official Polish and Russian investigations into the incident found no evidence to back up these claims.