Autor: Jakub M. Godzimirski, Tomasz Smura, Ole Martin Stormoen, Damian Szacawa, Kacper Szulecki

Presenting the NorPolFactor Project

The aim of the project Norway and Poland as actors in a changing security landscape (NorPolFactor) is to develop enhanced knowledge of the security-related challenges, risks and threats Poland and Norway face in their strategic environment in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Russia’s full-fledged war against Ukraine is a watershed event that has changed perceptions of security in Europe, in the transatlantic context and globally. Since both Poland and Norway border an increasingly assertive Russia and are NATO’s front states on the Eastern and Northern flank, it was important to examine the impact this strategic challenge has had on their foreign, security, and defence policies. We expect that the realisation of this joint Polish-Norwegian project will provide an important input to policymaking in both countries.

The aim is to help national decision-makers to better coordinate their policies in the bilateral context and in various international fora. This cooperative effort also aims to provide support for national and international stakeholders responsible for the formulation and implementation of security and foreign policies in areas of strategic importance for both national Polish and Norwegian policies and for policies of international organisations Poland and Norway are members of or are affiliated with in other ways.

In this working paper, we aim to map mutual perceptions of Poland in Norway and Norway in Poland, the basic ideas informing their approaches to security-related challenges caused by their location in Russia’s neighbourhood as well as what could be termed as areas of cooperation and points of contention in their cooperation.

Broad Understanding of Security – Norwegian and Polish Approaches

Although the main focus of the NorPolFactor project is the impact the Russian war in Ukraine has had on perceptions of hard security in Poland and Norway, this war has also revealed the importance of other security aspects. This explains why, in this project, we have decided to adopt a broad approach to security, including military security and questions related to broadly understood political, economic, societal and even environmental security. Such an approach aligns with the broad approach to
security proposed in the seminal work of Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde that treats security not only as the absence of military threats to the state. Instead they propose a multifaceted conceptualisation of security as a particular type of politics extending beyond traditional military power to include political, economic, environmental, and societal dimensions. In addition, such an approach also expands the referent objects of security beyond the state to include individuals, societies, companies, and more. The ongoing war in Ukraine with Russian massive attacks on civilian infrastructure has demonstrated that this comprehensive and multifaceted approach to security is necessary in a situation when potential adversaries are expected to inflict damage not only to military infrastructure but also to other elements of critical infrastructure that is necessary to secure the smooth functioning of the attacked state and society.

However, we assume that this broad approach to security has been, for various geographical, historical, and societal reasons, received and implemented differently by the national policymaking communities in Norway and Poland. Norway is a relatively small country in demographic terms, peripheral in geographic terms and safely anchored in the NATO alliance since its inception in 1949. In shaping security policy, Norwegian policymakers tend – at least officially – to rely on hard security guarantees provided by their NATO membership and have been, therefore, more willing to adopt a broad approach to security in which military security is viewed as only one element of security spectrum that in addition includes economic, environmental, political, and societal security. In the case of Poland, with its historical experience of being overrun by its more powerful neighbours and with its independence curbed by the forced membership in the Eastern bloc ruled by Moscow, the question of hard military security as a means of securing the existence of the nation and the state has been the main idea informing Polish approach to security. This also explains why Poland defined joining NATO and the EU as the best way of anchoring Poland in the Western community, which would provide hard security guarantees, and thus as the top strategic priority in the first years after regaining independence in 1989.

Perceptions, Self-perceptions and Perceptual Gaps – Operationalising Key Concepts

The NORPOLFACTOR project aims to increase the level and improve the quality of cooperation between Poland and Norway in the broadly understood security field. To achieve this goal, it is therefore important to better understand how these two perceive each other and how similar or different their understandings of security challenges they must deal with are. It is even more critical to examine to what extent the approaches they chose when addressing the security challenges they face can facilitate or hinder their bilateral and multilateral cooperation on security.

In this brief study, we will, therefore, start by exploring how Poland is perceived in the public and expert debate in Norway, as well as how Norway is perceived in the Polish public and expert debate. In the ensuing part, we will also explore how the self-perceptions of Poland and Norway as security actors should be factored in in this examination. They can also influence mutual perceptions and the interest in and ability to strengthen their security cooperation. Finally, in the last two sections of this working paper, we examine how the perceptual gaps identified in the examination of national approaches to security in the previous sections can challenge or facilitate closer strategic cooperation between Poland and Norway.

For instance, until the 2014 annexation of Crimea and occupation of parts of the territory of Ukraine by forces supported by Russia, there was clearly a perceptual gap in the perception of Russia in Poland and Norway. In the case of Poland, because of the historical experience, Russia had been viewed as a highly probable source of a strategic threat to the very existence of an independent Poland, even in the circles that had tried to launch a reset in Polish-Russian relations. In the case of Norway, Russia had been viewed as a potential source of strategic trouble in the High North but not as an existential threat to the very existence of Norway as an independent state. What has happened after 2014 and even more so after the Russian aggression against Ukraine launched on 24 February 2022 has been the apparent convergence of the Polish and Norwegian perception of Russia as a strategic threat, which is one of the factors that can facilitate bilateral cooperation on how to address security challenges caused by Russia’s aggressive behaviour in the strategic neighbourhood both Norway and Poland are a part of.

Read more on NorPolFactor on poject here.