ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book analyses the political, economic and social dynamics of the bilateral relations between Poland and Germany at the national and subnational levels while considering their intersections with the supranational level, constituted by the European Union. It identifies the supporting and impeding factors of bilateral cooperation. The book argues that asymmetry has the strongest explanatory power for the German–Polish relationship. It examines the cooperation in security and defence, climate and energy, and monetary policy showed that a strong asymmetry, in its multiple dimensions, is an obstacle to a close cooperation. The book shows, the Poles are generally more reluctant to become involved in the deepening of European integration than the Germans, who are traditionally tied to multilateralism and embeddedness in international fora. It describes the characteristic feature of the Polish–German bilateralisms is not its embeddedness but the asymmetry.
