Polish Deputy Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski, who functions as his country’s “grey cardinal”, accused Germany of creating a Fourth Reich through the EU in a recent interview that was released in late December. He clarified that he wasn’t referring to the Third Reich of Nazi genocidal infamy, but a reference to the First Reich that was implied to be the Holy Roman Empire. Nevertheless, he warned that Germany is trying to impose a modern-day system of “serfdom” onto Poles, which “would mean that our citizens would be poorer in a few years than they are now” if it isn’t stopped.

His comments came during Poland’s sizzling dispute with the EU over its so-called “rule of law violations” connected to that country’s judicial reforms and unwillingness to agree to the bloc’s migrant quotas, among other issues. The aspiring Central European leader is attempting to assemble a bloc of regional countries under its aegis opposed to the EU’s centralization processes that Warsaw regards as an illegal overreach into the internal affairs of its member states. It hopes that this EuroRealist conservative-nationalist coalition can counteract the ruling EuroLiberal’s liberal-globalist plots.

Regardless of however one feels about this politician’s domestic vision and rabid Russophobia, he’s correct in calling out Germany’s Fourth Reich plans through the EU. That country unquestionably rules the bloc and is thus responsible for all of the overreaches that Poland and others have criticized it for in recent years. Without firing a shot, Germany managed to control most of Europe through its masterful leveraging of the comparatively more “peaceful” Neo-Liberal model of International Relations instead of the much more aggressive one connected to the Neo-Realistic model that the Nazis embraced.

The consequence of Europe’s institutional, economic, and ultimately political capture by Germany and its continental proxies is that its many states are no longer sovereign in any substantive way. They’ve surrendered most of their independent decision making to the EU’s German-controlled bureaucracy that’s increasingly centralizing in contradiction of the EU’s official spirit. Poland’s ruling conservative-nationalist “Law & Justice” party (PiS per its Polish abbreviation) fears that Poles will once again be oppressed by Germany, not in the physical sense like during World War II, but in others.

Kaczynski particularly fears that they’ll risk losing their precious national identity that kept their ethnos alive during the 123 years of tripartite partition between its neighboring empires at the time if the German-led EU’s radical liberal-globalist demands are successfully imposed upon his people through migrant quotas, “gender theory”, and the like. He’s also very concerned that Poland will forever remain an economic appendage of “Greater Germany”, which will curtail his country’s ambitions to independently lead a regional network of EuroRealist states opposed to the bloc’s centralization.

When talking about Germany’s Fourth Reich, it’s crucial to issue the clarification that Kaczynski did that this neo-imperialist model isn’t the same as its World War II-era genocidal predecessor lest one’s genuine criticisms of that country be dismissed as a “conspiracy theory”. Germany isn’t physically enslaving the people under its influence across the continent, nor actively exterminating them like before, but it’s indeed exercising excessive influence over their most sensitive socio-cultural, economic, and judicial affairs for ideological, strategic, and ultimately hegemonic reasons.

The Reich model is simply Germany’s historical imperialist model that’s evolved with time. The Fourth Reich coincidentally concerns the same “sphere of influence” that the Third one tried to genocidally carve out (in some cases it even exceeds it with respect to the Iberian Peninsula and Scandinavia), but it’s being implemented in a much more peaceful way through Neo-Liberalism as opposed to Neo-Realism. Nevertheless, a Reich is still a Reich, and Poland is right to draw attention to Germany’s modern-day imperialism in Europe.