French ambassador to Poland Pierre Ménat talks to Ewa Hancock

You have been the French ambassador to Warsaw for three years. What state are French-Polish relations in? What are the weak and strong points, and how do the two nations see each other?
Over these three years, our relations have deepened in all areas. Poland's accession to the European Union has allowed our authorities to establish a stable dialogue owing to annual summits. The June 14 visit by new French President Nicolas Sarkozy to Poland lent a new impetus to our bilateral relations.

The two countries' economic cooperation is thriving because France is the biggest investor in Poland and its third biggest commercial partner. In the field of culture, our historical links have manifested in prominent events such as the Four Centuries of French Painting exhibition in Warsaw in 2005.

Are there any weak points? I would say that our societies do not know each other well enough. In this field, we have also achieved a lot over the past three years, with events such as a forum promoting employment in France and French language studies this March. Another example is decentralized cooperation at the local government level. In a recent stage of this cooperation, the mayors of France's Rennes, Germany's Hanover and Poland's Poznań met in Poznań June 25. Contrary to popular belief, the French and Poles have a high opinion of each other, as demonstrated by the results of detailed studies published last year. Poland's EU accession has enhanced that even further.

The formation of a new administration in France after presidential and parliamentary elections gave rise to hopes in Poland that bilateral relations would improve. The first signal was President Nicolas Sarkozy's visit to Warsaw. Are Polish-French relations improving?
A month after taking office, President Sarkozy made one of his first foreign trips to Poland. The president clearly stressed the priority character of relations with Poland-a relationship that he intends to turn into a strategic partnership. Earlier, when he was minister of internal affairs, he emphasized the importance of this priority, contributing to Poland's inclusion in the group of the six most prominent EU member states.

This fall there will be another French-Polish summit, held at Jurata at the invitation of Polish President Lech Kaczyński. It will make it possible to strengthen partnership in all fields.

For years France has been the biggest foreign investor in Poland. Trade links between the two countries are booming. Can the situation improve further?
Overall economic relations between France and Poland have definitely been good for more than 10 years now and have improved even further since Poland's EU accession. Bilateral trade has improved at an impressive rate-growing by nearly 55 percent between 2003 and 2006-with especially strong exports from Poland to France. French FDI to Poland has continued to increase, confirming France's status as the number one foreign investor in Poland, with an FDI stock of roughly 16-17 billion euros. Poland is by far the biggest market in the "New Europe," and a thriving business destination, with an economy rapidly catching up with the rest of the EU. It has a large, well trained and efficient work force and consumers eager to enhance their purchasing power. Furthermore, the steady inflow of EU subsidies and the recent choice of Poland and Ukraine to co-host the Euro 2012 UEFA soccer championships create fantastic new opportunities. Needless to say French companies consider Poland, with these decisive comparative advantages, to be a top priority for their expansion to the east of Europe. Hence the fast increase of trade and investments from France to Poland.

A further strengthening of FDI is of paramount importance to the expansion of trade, and this remark applies to France and Poland. For Polish exports to France to keep growing at an annual rate of 30 percent or so, at least some commercial investment is required in France from Polish businesses. And for Poland to remain, in the long term, the preferred choice of French investors in the region, solutions will have to be found to alleviate its two main competitive handicaps-the lack of a good transportation infrastructure and shortages in the labor market due to the recent emigration of 1.5 million skilled workers to the West. But I am confident that these solutions will eventually be found.

Poland and France are among the six largest states of the enlarged European Union of 27 members. What do they have in common in how they see the future of the EU, and what are the differences? Did Paris and Warsaw cooperate at the recent EU summit in Brussels, or did they argue over the further development of European integration?
One of the elements of the EU's wealth is that it includes states and nations that differ a lot, and that different integration concepts co-exist within the bloc. The Poles, who regained their sovereignty less than 20 years ago, are not likely to have a vision of the EU similar to that held by the bloc's founding members, among them France. Europe has managed to make such progress over the last 50 years because its members have always demonstrated a political will sufficient to overcome the differences between them.

We had a good example of that during the last summit of the Council of the European Union June 21-22. It was not easy to secure approval for the EU's new simplified treaty. Eighteen countries have already ratified the constitutional treaty, two-France and the Netherlands-rejected it in national referendums, and five other nations, including Poland, have not yet started the ratification procedure. Owing to the energy and commitment of the German presidency, owing to the efforts of all the parties involved, a compromise was achieved on the mandate for the next intergovernmental conference. And it can be said that Poland and France worked well, both with each other and with other nations, to achieve this.