Miejsce Polski w zmieniającej się Unii Europejskiej – proces integracji krajów UE

The article attempts to define what Poland has achieved to date in the political arena of the European Union, as well as the challenges that the country will have to face in relation to the new institutional and legal structure of the Union that is being formed. The advantageous position in the EU, which our country has managed to achieved over the first years after the accession, has not been given for good, especially that the Union is now undergoing structural changes whose impact on the shape of the integration, especially in the EU’s cohesiveness, is at this point difficult to define clearly. Consequently, the European Union in the form that is being established now, soon will not be the same as the Union that Poland joined in 2004. This may, at least partially, ruin the effects of Poland’s efforts to be in the Union’s decision-making centre. The future position of Warsaw in the EU will depend on how long, and to what extent, the key states of the Eurozone will consider our country an important element of Europe’s political scene. And it depends, to a large extent, on our readiness to join the efforts related to the reconstruction of the institutional infrastructure of the integration (the banking union) and, first of all, on the perspective of Poland’s joining the Eurozone.