Poland's plight has been a tragic one in the past 300 years. Sandwiched between Russia and Germany, the country suffered partition by its neighbours in the last century followed by two destructive wars and a soviet occupation in the present century. Indeed it is little short of a miracle that freedom in 1989 was followed by offers of membership from NATO, the western defensive alliance, and the EU. Both are crucial to Poland if the country's democratic and economic development is to be underpinned for the forseeable future.

There is a broad-based consensus that NATO membership will enable the country to lay to rest its fears of Germany, soon to be Poland's partner in the alliance, and to keep any possible threat in the future from Russia at bay.

Membership of the EU promises to be more problematic. The high majorities in the opinion polls for joining the Union could begin to decline as the clash of interests emerge during continuing membership talks. But there is little doubt that there will be a pro-EU majority in the referendum at the end of the negotiations.

After all, joining the EU will be a sign for most Poles that they have come home to Europe after a spell in the post-war Soviet wilderness.

NATO membership should come to fruition next April at the alliance's 50th anniversary summit in the US. Before then the Poles will have to have put new command and communications systems into place as well as prepare military units which will be ready to join Nato's quick reaction forces. Work will have to be under way on preparing seaport and airport facilities for receiving military reinforcements from abroad should the need arise and aircraft will have to be equipped with identification systems allowing them to distinguish friend from foe.

Work on these tasks is continuing and it is a sign of Poland's new confidence that Premier Jerzy Buzek's government recently pushed for NATO entry as early as January. This would have enabled the Poles to have had a say of sorts in the preparation of NATO's new strategy which is to be accepted at the April summit.

Meanwhile the US has mapped out a foreign policy role for Poland in the east. This is to act as a conduit for and an advocate of the aspirations of its eastern neighbours for membership in the alliance. The precondition for this was that the historic animosities which have in the past bedevilled relations between Poles and Lithuanians and Poles and Ukrainians should be laid to rest.

After all NATO, by enlarging to the east, does not want to get embroiled in bloody internecine strife between unforgiving and unforgetting national minorities.

That this has been avoided is thanks in part to Krzysztof Skubiszewski, the Polish foreign minister in the early 1990s. He took a strictly legalistic approach to the problems of minorities and refused to countenance any talk of border revisions. Soon countries like Lithuania realised that they had all to gain from good relations with Poland if they wanted to join NATO.

THE SAME goes for the Ukraine with which relations are also good. This is in contrast to Russia which still tends to treat Poland as part of its wider sphere of influence making Warsaw react with prickly unease.

Unfortunately the same approach cannot be duplicated through Poland's contacts with the EU. The Brussels-based grouping does not have an eastern policy. Indeed US historian Tim Snyder says: "The member states perceive the enlargement process only through the perspective of their own individual interests."

This means that Poland's development of good relations with the Ukraine, for example, is hampered by EU demands that controls on the frontier should be tightened. This may help controls over illegal immigration and black market trade flows but hampers contacts between the two countries and heightens the Ukrainians' sense of isolation.

After all for many small Ukrainian businessmen Poland's developing consumer society is one of the main signs that a free market works and is worth making sacrifices for.

Foreign and security policy play a much smaller role in Poland's EU membership drive than in its soon to be completed bid for membership of NATO. Indeed the negotiations over details between Poland and the EU sometimes overshadow the strategic picture. This is that EU enlargement to the east marks the end of the post-war division of Europe.

"Enlargement is first and foremost a political question and this is the single most important issue in the whole process," says Jan Kulakowski, Poland's EU negotiator. "Thus it would be absurd if Poland, the biggest and most strategically placed country in the region, were not to join the EU along with the other aspirants," he says.