Une armée soviétique dans l’OTAN ? Retour sur dix années de transformation des forces armées polonaises (1989-1999)

Abstract

Central and Eastern European defence and security issues are not widely addressed in French political science and are still primarily approached through the prism of Russian-Western rivalries. Therefore, this paper aims to focus on the transformation of the Polish armed forces in the 1990s, which accompanied Poland's transition from the Warsaw Pact to NATO in less than a decade. By retracing the main stages of this process, I evaluate whether the Polish armed forces successfully transitioned from a Soviet to an Atlantic model, or whether Poland's accession to NATO was based more on political than on military considerations.