ECONOMICS AND POLITICS
Mirosław Piotrowski
It was supported by the chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel. She said that, also in Poland, in the European Parliament, it is only business dimension. She has changed her opinion recently. During a press conference, where she gave a speech together with the president of Ukraine, Petro Poroszenko, she noticed that the aforementioned project has a political dimension it brings a harm to the transit role of Ukraine. Another thread of the gas-pipe running on the bottom of the Baltic Sea is a political danger also for Baltic countries and Poland. Other tens of milliards of cubic metres of gas were supposed to be sent directly from Russia to Germany with exclusion of countries of our region. Certainly, everybody has know it very well for a long time that president Władmimir Putin uses transmission networks as a political pressure although the main receiver – Germany did not want to acknowledge it formally. So, something important must have become that the chancellor Merkel changed her opinion. Does it really concern only Ukraine? Probably the key role was played by the United States which has been against building this gas-pipe since the very beginning, considering it as a political project and it threatened that foreign companies connected with it can get under American sanctions. And these companies – the German, Austrian, British-Dutch ones – allegedly took out loans in banks. It was understood that the very announcement of American sanctions would cut off them from financing and the project would fail. And it was lobbied so by the former chancellor of Germany Gerhard Schroder, called the most popular lobbyist of Putin who was opening the European door to Gazprom and overvalued the EU sensitivity. All arguments and grieves of Euro deputies were in vain, who were referring to energetic solidarity written in the Lisbon Treaty. The earlier intergovernmental talks were in vain. The project was to be only economic. Whereas, it became political without any extra substantive circumstances. It was clearly difficult to cope with it on the EU ground of solidarity. Administration of Donald Trump came with help, whose undersecretary of the state said briefly at the end of the last year: ‘The Nord Gas-pipe Stream 2 will not be built….We do not see any chances for its realization’. So, does it look as if politics overcame economy?
Translated by Aneta Amrozik
Niedziela 17/2018 (29 IV 2018)