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1. Latvia’s Climate Policy

Author:
Kinga Raś
Publication Date:
04-2020
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
The Polish Institute of International Affairs
Abstract:
At the end of January 2020, the Latvian government approved the country’s climate neutrality strategy until 2050, and in March it supported even more ambitious EU targets for reducing emissions. These declarations are connected with the need for a thorough transformation of the economy. The Latvian authorities combine these changes with the outlook for economic growth, including the development of the newest technologies in the energy sector. Latvia’s approach, subordinated to climate action, coincides with the policy of other countries in the region, but differs from the Polish vision of energy transformation.
Topic:
Climate Change, Environment, Government, Europe Union, and Carbon Emissions
Political Geography:
Europe, Eastern Europe, Poland, and Latvia

2. Climate change and health

Author:
Weronika Michalak and Dr hab. Zbigniew Karaczun
Publication Date:
01-2020
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Warsaw East European Review (WEER)
Institution:
Centre for East European Studies, University of Warsaw
Abstract:
The phenomenon of climate change, observed for years and constantly intensifying, has had a negative impact on health, significantly deteriorating the quality of life of people in many regions of the world, including Poland. Already now we are dealing with increasingly frequent extreme weather phenomena; hurricanes, storms and increasingly longer heat waves no longer surprise us. Unfortunately, this is merely the beginning of the negative effects of climate change. Others will come before long. In the coming years, many other new threats will be observed, such as flooding of ocean islands, desertification of areas exposed to water scarcity or serious loss of biodiversity, which will translate into food security. Unfortunately, it does not end there.1 The greenhouse effect is a process by which radiation from the Earth’s atmosphere warms the planet’s surface to a temperature above what it would be without this atmosphere. We can differentiate short-term solar radiation (0.15-4.0 nm) and long-term radiation. Thermal radiation escapes into the cosmic sphere and heat radiation returns to the ground, being stopped by a layer of GHG – greenhouse gases (CO2, CH4, N2O, SF6, water vapor etc.), which warm up Earth’s athmosphere to a dangerous level – even a 1°C degree increase (in comparison to pre-industrial level, when emissions stared to rise) in the average world temperature can be detrimental to human health and change the conditions of life on this planet (Figure 1). However, we currently face a risk of global warming even up to 3°C degrees, unless GHG emissions are significantly reduced. Any further rise of the global temperature will have deteriorating impact on people and whole humanity, as well as staying at the current level of emissions.
Topic:
Climate Change, Health, Food, and Food Security
Political Geography:
Europe, Poland, and Global Focus

3. What next for NATO? Views from the North-East Flank on Alliance Adaptation

Author:
Michal Baranowski, Linas Kojala, Toms Rostoks, Kalev Stoicescu, and Tony Lawrence
Publication Date:
06-2020
Content Type:
Commentary and Analysis
Institution:
International Centre for Defence and Security - ICDS
Abstract:
NATO leaders have invited Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg to present proposals at their next Summit for measures to reinforce Alliance unity, increase political consultation and coordination between Allies, and strengthen NATO’s political role. To support his reflection process, the Secretary General has appointed a group of ten experts. Only one of these represents the 14 of 30 Allies who have joined NATO since 1999. In this policy paper we set out issues, concerns and expectations about NATO’s future adaptation from the perspective of the three Baltic states and Poland, based on a series of interviews with several senior officials and members of the expert community in each of the four states. While not identical, the views of our interviewees were close. They broadly agreed that while NATO faces a multitude of threats, Russia is by far the most serious. In response, NATO should prioritise—and enhance—its core task of collective defence. However, they recognised, it is essential for NATO to maintain a balance between the security interests of all Allies. They support the 360-degree approach and are ready to back and participate in efforts to deal with threats from other regions too. NATO should also retain its core tasks of crisis management and cooperative security. The Covid-19 pandemic suggests that NATO should re-calibrate the crisis management task to better reflect the need for collective support to the civilian authorities in large-scale efforts to deal with crises on Alliance territory. Our interviewees were generally cautious about otherwise expanding NATO’s roles and responsibilities, arguing that the Alliance should consider where it can add value, while avoiding overreach. They saw, for example, only a modest role for NATO in dealing with the challenge from China. They were, however, supportive of the Alliance developing further its global network of partnerships, both with states such as Australia, Japan and South Korea, and with other international organisations, notably the EU. NATO should also continue its cooperative security efforts with a focus on states in the immediate neighbourhood. And while further NATO enlargement is unlikely at present, the door should certainly remain open. Interviewees in all four states expressed concerns about the tensions within the Alliance and the lack of US leadership. While these tensions persist, it is probably unwise to consider drafting a new strategic concept. Nonetheless, the internal challenges might be eased if the Allies are prepared to use NATO to a greater extent as forum for consultation on a wide range of security issues.
Topic:
Defense Policy, NATO, Regional Cooperation, Alliance, Deterrence, and Interview
Political Geography:
Poland and Baltic States

4. Until Something Moves: Reinforcing the Baltic Region in Crisis and War

Author:
Ben Hodges, Tony Lawrence, and Ray Wojcik
Publication Date:
03-2020
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
International Centre for Defence and Security - ICDS
Abstract:
NATO’s ability to efficiently move large and heavy armed forces into and across Europe is a key aspect of its deterrence and defence posture. In establishing the enhanced Forward Presence in Poland and the three Baltic states, NATO leaders acknowledged that credible deterrence would also require these small multinational forces to be underpinned by a robust reinforcement strategy. In this report, we examine this key aspect of NATO’s defence and deterrence posture as it relates to the Baltic region. In a crisis, military movement in Europe is likely to be confronted by legal and procedural obstacles, by the limited capacity of infrastructure, and by issues related to coordination, command and control. The severity of these problems would vary according to the type of crisis. For an operation to restore Alliance territory following an armed attack, the sheer scale and breadth of NATO’s requirements for military movement would present a major challenge to Europe’s transport infrastructure, and to prioritisation and coordination efforts. NATO has had little practice in reinforcing Allies at scale since the end of the Cold War. A preventative deployment to respond to a potential crisis, meanwhile, would put a premium on speed of movement. In this case, legal and procedural obstacles may be more problematic as timescales for dealing with the bureaucracy would be similar to the timescales for the movement itself. NATO and the EU have cooperated widely to mitigate the legal and procedural challenges of moving armed forces across the European continent, but the processes in place remain numerous and complex. NATO and the EU have also collaborated on the harder task of ensuring that transport infrastructure is suited to military needs. Movement would be challenged by both physical constraints, such as weight limits on roads and bridges and traffic volume restrictions for rail transport, and procedural ones, such as the limitations of the contractual arrangements necessary to enable the use of civilian railway wagons and heavy equipment transporters for military purposes. Such constraints, while manageable in peacetime, may make it difficult to meet the armed forces’ requirements for large-scale movement during crisis. Furthermore, the Baltic region also lacks supporting logistics infrastructure, for example for receiving and staging (and sustaining for extended periods) forces that have arrived in the region. A third set of challenges arises from the need for coordination among the multiple agencies involved in the movement of armed forces. Even amongst movement specialists there is no clear picture of how these agencies would work together during crises or of how movements would be prioritised to serve the operational needs of the Joint Force Commander.
Topic:
NATO, War, Military Strategy, Deterrence, and Political Crisis
Political Geography:
Poland and Baltic States

5. Dilemmas of Arms Control: Meeting the Interests of NATO’s North-Eastern Flank

Author:
Artur Kacprzyk and Lukasz Kulesa
Publication Date:
04-2020
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
International Centre for Defence and Security - ICDS
Abstract:
While the countries of NATO’s north-eastern flank—Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland—are correctly putting emphasis in their security policy on strengthening deterrence, they need to take a more proactive stance on arms control. Although current prospects are not promising in the light of Russian violations and circumventions of existing treaties, demand for greater engagement with Russia on arms control is growing among NATO nations. Without a constructive input from the flank countries, NATO’s arms-control agenda and the actions of individual European Allies could become detached from deterrence efforts and weaken NATO cohesion. The north-eastern countries should thus identify and promote balanced solutions that can be used to increase the region’s security.
Topic:
Defense Policy, NATO, Arms Control and Proliferation, and Deterrence
Political Geography:
Europe, Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia

6. Winds of Change, or More of the Same?

Author:
Tomas Jermalavicius, Priit Mändmaa, Emma Hakala, Tomas Janeliūnas, Juris Ozoliņš, and Krystian Kowalewski
Publication Date:
05-2020
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
International Centre for Defence and Security - ICDS
Abstract:
By coincidence perhaps more than design, the ‘winds of change’ in the twelve months between autumn 2018 and 2019 ushered in new governments—whether through national elections or through coalition reshuffling—in five Baltic Sea littoral states: Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland. Yet, amidst sometimes rather turbulent domestic political debates, one key cluster of topics was virtually absent: energy security and climate policy. With the vital exception of Finland—a state with a relatively strong Green movement and long tradition of climate and environmental activism—no country saw climate or energy security targets raised as key campaign issues. To the extent that energy security and climate topics were mentioned at all, they either were minimized due to parties’ fear of alienating key voting blocs (as with the coal mining sector in Poland), confined to energy stakeholders and technical audiences due their complexity (as with electricity desynchronisation in the Baltic countries) or completely assimilated into a cross-party foreign policy consensus (as in the universal opposition in Lithuania to the Astravyets nuclear power plant project in Belarus). While domestic factors—including perceived national interests in ensuring energy self-sufficiency—contributed to a serious case of policy inertia, small and interconnected countries do not of course exist in a vacuum. Accordingly, international factors—from the continuing use of energy policy as an instrument of geopolitical power by Russia, to the growing consensus in the EU in favor of more ambitious climate targets—have done more to raise the salience of these issues, especially after the von der Leyen Commission took office in Brussels at the end of 2019 and put forward the so-called European Green Deal. These exogenous factors have finally, for instance, triggered a broader reassessment in Estonia of that country’s rather leisurely planned phase-out of oil shale power generation, while pushing political leaders in all five countries at least rhetorically to embrace the goal of a carbon-neutral future (albeit with considerable differences in timelines and methodology). Amidst a volatile international economic and geopolitical context that—since the time work began on this report—now includes a major global pandemic and a dramatic fall in fossil fuel demand and prices, the region’s political and economic leaders clearly cannot count on being able to make their policy selections in a vacuum. While the goal of an integrated regional energy market is closer than ever to being achieved, regional cooperation still has much to be desired; differing attitudes to issues both technical (e.g. harmonising natural gas regulations, which has left Lithuania outside a new regional market) or fundamental (importing third-country electricity generated without regard to EU climate or pollution standards) leave all five countries less able to respond to challenges ahead. While the region’s countries have largely relied on Brussels to broker compromises (often with the help of considerable funding), in a post-pandemic world, both the political bandwidth and financial resources will likely be constrained. In its country sections, this report captures a valuable snapshot of the relative inertia as well as the degree of evolution of the energy and climate policies of the five countries in the face of that year’s fairly calm international context. Given the significant economic, human, and political changes underway as a result of the pandemic, however, it is an open question to what extent the region can weather the far more turbulent times ahead. The political and societal willingness to pursue the energy transition to a carbon-neutral future through new—more ambitious and certainly more expensive—energy and climate policies as a response to the climate emergency will very much depend on how the impact of the pandemic plays out globally, in Europe and in the Baltic area. It will also require strong leadership from a new generation of political, business and societal leaders able to see green recovery as a major opportunity for their nations in terms of economic development, social welfare and national security.
Topic:
Security, Energy Policy, Environment, Politics, Governance, European Union, Economy, Sustainability, and Resilience
Political Geography:
Europe, Poland, and Baltic States

7. Covid-19 bends the rules on internal border controls: Yet another crisis undermining the Schengen acquis?

Author:
Saila Heinikoski
Publication Date:
04-2020
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Finnish Institute of International Affairs
Abstract:
Free movement within the Schengen Area has been challenged in recent years by national measures: from internal border checks after the ‘migration crisis’ to the closure of borders in the Covid-19 crisis. This is the first time in the history of Schengen that member states have categorically refused entry to other EU citizens who are not registered residents or cross-border workers. Seventeen Schengen countries have submitted a notification on reintroducing internal border control due to Covid-19: Austria, Belgium, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Lithuania, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain and Switzerland. The use of Schengen provisions was creative: 12 states justified their internal border controls as a case requiring immediate action (Art. 28), France and Denmark expanded their already existing internal border controls (Art. 25), Finland appealed to the ‘foreseeable event’ clause (Art. 25), and Slovakia and Poland introduced ‘healthcare-police measures’ (Art. 23) before launching border controls (Art. 28). The crisis illustrates the need to reform Schengen in order to maintain the legitimacy of commonly agreed rules.
Topic:
Regional Cooperation, European Union, Public Health, Schengen, Pandemic, and COVID-19
Political Geography:
Europe, Finland, Norway, France, Poland, Lithuania, Germany, Estonia, Belgium, Denmark, Hungary, Spain, Switzerland, Portugal, Iceland, Austria, Czech Republic, and Slovakia

8. Is a bubble inflating on Poland’s housing market?

Author:
Adam Czerniak and Stefan Kawalec
Publication Date:
03-2020
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Center for Social and Economic Research - CASE
Abstract:
The year 2019 brought double-digit growth in Polish housing prices, for both new and existing homes. In some cities, real prices for residential real estate have reached the highest levels in history, even higher than at the peak of the boom in 2008. As a result, some are saying that there is a growing price bubble. But thus far no research has been produced that would comprehensively verify this hypothesis on the basis of data from 2006-2019. This work aims to fill that gap. This is exceptionally important, because assessing the likelihood that a housing price bubble is emerging is key for the conduct of monetary and macroprudential policy in Poland. Because if we’re really dealing with growth in macroeconomic imbalances, then taking pre-emptive action to limit further price growth and prepare the economy (including the financial sector) for a potential collapse in housing prices is essential for limiting fluctuations in growth.
Topic:
Markets, Economic growth, Trade, and Housing
Political Geography:
Eastern Europe and Poland

9. Our Europe: 15 Years of Poland in the European Union

Author:
Jerzy Wilkin, Joanna Konieczna-Sałamatin, Mirosława Marody, Maja Sawicka, Paweł Kaczmarczyk, Jan J. Michałek, Andrzej Halesiak, Stanisława Golinowska, Irena Topińska, Anna Fornalczyk, Richard Woodward, Grzegorz Gorzelak, Andrzej Kwieciński, Katarzyna Zawalińska, Przemysław Kowalski, Anna Malinowska, Wiesława Kozek, Magdalena Kąkol, Maciej Nowicki, Grzegorz Wiśniewski, Andrzej Cylwik, Tomasz Komornicki, Urszula Sztanderska, Jacek Liwiński, Dorota Ilczuk, Anna Karpińska, Przemysław Kowalski, Mateusz Szczurek, Stanisław Gomułka, and Paweł Wojciechowski
Publication Date:
02-2020
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Center for Social and Economic Research - CASE
Abstract:
This report is the result of the joint work of a number of experts from various fields who have been - for many years – analysing the multidimensional effects of EU institutions and cooperation with Member States pursuant to European values and mechanisms. The authors summarise the benefits of Poland’s membership in the EU based on facts; however, they do not hide their own views and reflections. They also demonstrate the barriers and challenges to further European integration. This report was prepared by CASE, one of the oldest independent think tanks in Central and Eastern Europe, utilising its nearly 30 years of experience in providing objective analyses and recommendations with respect to socioeconomic topics. It is both an expression of concern about Poland’s future in the EU, as well as the authors’ contribution to the debate on further European integration.
Topic:
Climate Change, Demographics, Energy Policy, Labor Issues, Economic growth, Regional Integration, Social Policy, Fiscal Policy, Innovation, and Trade
Political Geography:
Europe, Eastern Europe, and Poland

10. Estonian corporate tax: Lessons for Poland

Author:
Aleksandr Łożykowski, Anna Leszczyłowska, and Dmitri Jegorov
Publication Date:
04-2020
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Center for Social and Economic Research - CASE
Abstract:
Estonia has Europe’s most transparent tax system (while Poland is second-to-last, in 35th place), and is also known for its pioneering approach to taxation of legal persons’ income. Since 2000, payers of Estonian corporate tax don’t pay tax on their profits as long as they don’t realize them. In principle, this approach should make access to capital easier, spark investment by companies and contribute to faster economic growth. Are these and other positive effects really noticeable in Estonia? Have other countries followed in this country’s footsteps? Would deferment of income tax be possible and beneficial for Poland? How would this affect revenue from tax on corporate profits? Would investors come to see Poland as a tax haven? Does the Estonian system limit tax avoidance and evasion, or actually the opposite? Is such a system fair? Are intermediate solutions possible, which would combine the strengths or limit the weaknesses of the classical and Estonian models of profit tax? These questions are discussed in the mBank-CASE seminar Proceeding no. 163, written by Dmitri Jegorov, deputy general secretary of the Estonian Finance Ministry, who directs the country’s tax and customs policy, Dr. Anna Leszczyłowska of the Poznań University of Economics and Business and Aleksander Łożykowski of the Warsaw School of Economics.
Topic:
Governance, Tax Systems, Investment, Fiscal Policy, and Corporate Tax
Political Geography:
Eurasia, Poland, and Estonia