In 1386, the last pagan ruler of Lithuania, Jogaila, married the child queen of Poland, Jadwiga, then in her early teens. The marriage created a political union between Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which encompassed large parts of today’s Belarus and Ukraine. By doing so, it solved a twofold problem. One, it helped bring the vast Eastern European territories, including lands of the former Kyivan Rus’, into the fold of Western Christendom. Two, the union addressed the immediate security concern facing both Poles and Lithuanians: the threat of Teutonic Knights.
The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth would go on to become one of the largest countries in Europe and a fascinating laboratory of political governance, studied in some detail by the United States’ founding fathers, particularly in the Federalist Papers. After the end of the Jagiellonian dynasty, it transformed into an electoral monarchy, similar to the city-states of Italy yet operating on a vastly larger scale. The commonwealth’s legislature and local diets followed the principle of unanimity—not unlike the European Council does on many issues today. The commonwealth’s atmosphere of religious tolerance and freedom enjoyed by its nobility provided a stark counterpoint to the absolutist monarchies of Western Europe—not to speak of the tragic history that followed the commonwealth’s demise in 1795.
What if a similar political solution were available to the problems facing Ukraine and Poland today?
The argument for an explicit political union between the two countries is not based on nostalgia but on shared interests. To be sure, due to four centuries of common history within the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, much of today’s Ukraine (and Belarus) shares far more of its past with Poland than it does with Russia, notwithstanding claims of Russian propagandists to the contrary and notwithstanding the fact that the relationship was oftentimes highly complicated, as illustrated by events of the 17th-century Deluge—most prominently by the Khmelnytsky uprising and its conflicting interpretations by Poles and Ukrainians.
Fast-forward to the present and to the near future, however. Both countries are facing a threat from Russia. Today, Poland is a member in good standing of the EU and NATO, while Ukraine is keen to join both organizations—not unlike the Grand Duchy of yesteryear, eager to become part of mainstream, Christianized Europe. Even if Ukraine’s war against Russia ends with a decisive Ukrainian victory, driving degraded Russian forces out of the country, Kyiv faces a potentially decades long struggle to join the EU, not to speak of obtaining credible security guarantees from the United States. The poorly governed, unstable countries of the Western Balkans, prone to Russian and Chinese interference, provide a warning about where prolonged “candidate status” and European indecision might lead. A militarized Ukrainian nation, embittered at the EU because of its inaction, and perhaps aggrieved by an unsatisfactory conclusion of the war with Russia, could easily become a liability for the West.
Imagine instead that, at the end of the war, Poland and Ukraine form a common federal or confederal state, merging their foreign and defense policies and bringing Ukraine into the EU and NATO almost instantly. The Polish-Ukrainian Union would become the second-largest country in the EU and arguably its largest military power, providing more than an adequate counterweight to the Franco-German tandem—something that the EU is sorely missing after Brexit.
For the United States and Western Europe, the union would be a permanent way of securing Europe’s eastern flank from Russian aggression. Instead of a rambling, somewhat chaotic country of 43 million lingering in no-man’s land, Western Europe would be buffered from Russia by a formidable country with a very clear understanding of the Russian threat. “Without an independent Ukraine, there cannot be an independent Poland,” Poland’s interwar leader, Jozef Pilsudski, famously claimed, advocating a Polish-led Eastern European federation including Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine—basically a recreation of the medieval commonwealth.
This is not fantasy talk. Early on during the war, Poland passed legislation allowing Ukrainian refugees to obtain Polish ID numbers, giving them thus access to a host of social and healthcare benefits normally reserved for Polish nationals. The Ukrainian government vowed to reciprocate, extending to Poles in Ukraine a special legal status not available to other foreigners. With over 3 million Ukrainians living in Poland – including a sizeable pre-war population – the cultural, social, and personal ties between the two nations are growing stronger every day.
There is also one obvious precedent for a political union that significantly upended the balance of power in the EU and jumped through many of the obstacles that a prospective Polish-Ukrainian Union would face: German reunification. Following the first free election in East Germany in March 1990, the new Christian Democratic government quickly negotiated a treaty establishing a monetary, economic, and social union between East and West Germany, effective July 1 of that year. Not only did the Deutsche mark become legal tender in East Germany, but East Germany also adopted West German legislation governing economic activity—from antitrust, labor, and environmental regulation to consumer protection—and proceeded to dismantle any lingering remnants of communist rule.
