Round table

Barack Obama wraps up his latest European visit at a summit of central and eastern European countries in Warsaw on Friday. At first glance, the 20 countries invited appear to have a lot in common, but despite similarities in their history and geography, analysts say Obama will be facing a surprisingly heterogeneous group.

The unity felt by Central and Eastern European nations shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall - and the accompanying closeness to the US - has long since evaporated. Now, things have returned to normal, and nations in Central and Eastern Europe are following their own interests.

That means the Warsaw summit will be a challenging one for Washington, which is expected to seek common answers to important problems.

"It is a round table with quite a divergent set of views. So it's not clear to me that there's going to be a clear consensus that will emerge from this round table," Ian Brzezinski, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council in Washington, DC, who used to be a Europe analyst for the Pentagon, told Deutsche Welle.

Diverse perspectives

Even when it comes to its relationship to the US, it's impossible to find a common denominator for the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. For example, Poland and the Czech Republic had a particularly close relationship to Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush. But that's not the case for Hungary or Slovakia.

Those differences will make it particularly difficult for the assembled countries to come up with a clear statement about the relationship between central Europeans and the United States, said Petr Drulak, the director of the Institute of International Relations in Prague.

"With Obama you have some people who are disappointed because Obama clearly is not George W. Bush. But other people see it actually as an important opportunity to revive the relationship," Drulak told Deutsche Welle.

Brzezinski and Drulak both said they don't expect any far-reaching decisions to emerge from the Warsaw summit meeting; discussion points will include how to promote democratization at the edges of Europe, and particularly, how to deal with the increasingly aggressive demeanor of the Lukashenko regime in Belarus.

A further topic will be which of the lessons learned from Central and Eastern Europe's transition from communism to democracy can be applied to the changes currently underway in the Arab world.

If concrete results are likely to come anywhere, it could be in bilateral questions between the US and host country Poland. For Warsaw, a key, symbolic issue on the agenda of the US President's first visit to Poland is the question of easing visa requirements.

Poland is the only one of 25 so-called Schengen states whose citizens must apply for a US travel visa. Warsaw has been pressuring Washington for a change for a long time, and Obama has promised to take care of the matter. For the Polish government, an announcement that the visa requirement has been lifted would be a welcome event.

US military presence in Poland

Similarly symbolic - but much more relevant in terms of foreign policy - is Warsaw's insistent push for a US Air Force presence in Poland.

"You have talk in the lead-up to the Warsaw summit of perhaps having a small contingent of US Air Force ground personnel being stationed in Poland," Brzezinski said. "This would do a lot to facilitate more extensive air force-to-air force cooperation -- not just between Poland and the US but also between the US and regional players of Central Europe."

As far as Warsaw is concerned, it would be even better if the US would station F-16 fighter jets in Poland.

Positioning American hardware on Polish territory, "is again very important for Poland in symbolic terms," said Drulak. From the Poles' point of view, this would cement ties and commitments between Washington and Warsaw with a military underpinning - and it would annoy Moscow to boot.

Whether the US actually moves fighter jets from Aviano, Italy, to Poland, and whether they would be temporarily or permanently stationed there, are among the few truly interesting questions that will be addressed at the Warsaw summit.

Author: Michael Knigge (jen)
Editor: Rob Mudge