Like two Spitfires tipping their wings in the sky, Britain and Poland are beginning to fly in different directions. The Polish pilot is heading for Berlin, not to strafe it but to join it. The British pilot is steering out into the Atlantic. Their old friendship is strained. Each country’s choice is influenced as much by history, politics and emotion as it is by any cool calculation of self-interest. Both flight paths carry risks that the pilots may not see clearly enough from the cockpit – and both may yet change course.

The tensions became apparent at a sometimes emotional meeting of the Polish-British Round Table in Krakow last week, very different in tone from the shared optimism of our first encounter in Poland’s former royal capital six years ago. A Polish participant said ‘our friendship is getting harder these days’ and deplored the British government’s ‘transactional approach’ to the EU. A British politician wondered why the Poles were not more grateful for everything the UK had done for them – including Tony Blair’s extraordinary opening of the British labour market to what turned out to be up to a million Poles. (Polish is now the most-spoken foreign language in Britain.)

Yes, replied a Polish politician, that helped when there was high unemployment in Poland and a Polish referendum on joining the EU. But Britain had no right to expect eternal gratitude - and not everything Britain had done in history had been so positive for Poland. (The word ‘Yalta’ was not spoken, except by me in a whisper, but hung heavy in the Polish air.) And after all, it was a British statesman, Lord Palmerston, who said that Britain has no eternal allies, only eternal interests. Poland, too. But you will be worse off without us, cried the Brits. Asked one: ‘Do you want to be left alone … I don’t want to use the phrase … at the mercy of the Germany?’ To which a Polish participant replied ‘If the UK leaves, it’s not the German demons we’re afraid of – it’s the Southerners, the French demons…’ For Poland wants to be part of a strong, disciplined northern Europe. Having escaped from Soviet-dominated eastern Europe and reinvented itself as part of central Europe, Poland now sometimes speaks of itself as a north European country.

Meanwhile, this week 130 members of the British House of Commons voted to express their regret that prime minister David Cameron’s commitment to a 2017 referendum on Britain’s membership in the EU was not included in the government’s legislative programme for this parliamentary session. (The Conservatives’ coalition partner, the Liberal Democrats, would not allow it.) 114 of the rebels were Cameron’s own backbenchers. One of them will now introduce the proposed law as a so-called ‘private member’s bill’, with the full support of the Conservative party.

‘Very well, alone!’ they cry, like the British soldier standing atop the white cliffs of Dover in a famous 1940 cartoon. Britain’s ‘Island Story’ will be carried forward much better if we Brits are freed from the shackles binding us to a sclerotic continent and sick eurozone. Contrast the latest US growth figures with those for the eurozone. There is a whole world of dynamic, emerging economies out there, which post-imperial Britain, speaking the world language of English, is well-placed to embrace. Remarkably, two big-hitting former Conservative cabinet ministers, Nigel Lawson, who as Chancellor of the Exchequer wanted to bring Britain closer to the European monetary system, and the half-Spanish Michael Portillo, have already said they would for Britain to leave the EU in an in-or-out referendum.

By contrast, Poland’s current government will do everything it can to be at the very heart of Europe. Here too, history and emotion play a large role. After decades of being cut off from the West by the iron curtain, and centuries of feeling itself to be on the periphery of the ancient Carolingian core of Europe – ‘a suburb of Europe’, as the Polish historian Jerzy Jedlicki titled his book about nineteenth century Polish attitudes to Western civilisation – the Poles want to seize their chance to be in the hard core at last. And if that means being part of a German Europe, well, so be it. For anyone who knows Poland’s twentieth century history – Krakow’s buildings are replete with memorial tablets to those who died under the Nazi occupation, and Auschwitz is just down the road – this is amazing.

It is also explicable. Poland’s elites judge Germany’s economic model to be a lot more solid than Britain’s. A quarter of the country’s trade is with Germany. Germany is a powerful friend in the EU. Berlin also contributes most to an EU budget from which Poland is – and, under the seven-year deal agreed in February, will continue to be – by far the largest single beneficiary. History, shmistory: getting a load of money from Brussels certainly helps a nation to love the EU. And the very fact that past enemies have become partners generates a positive emotional charge, in a way that the old but neglected friendship with Britain does not.

So while the British-educated Polish foreign minister Radek Sikorski calls for more German leadership in the eurozone, he says that Britain is a country of ‘special concern’. (The Polish phrase sounds almost like ‘special needs’, as used of children with learning difficulties.) And he argues that if Poland gets into the eurozone, it could be part of a leading group of three to five countries from which Britain is currently resiling itself.

Yet the fact that planes tip their wings in opposite directions does not mean they will forever continue on diverging flight paths. Most Poles like their country’s membership in the EU but only one in three of them currently wants it to join the euro. Polish experts have learned from the examples of Spain and Italy that you have to be very well prepared before you join that club. If Germany does the necessary to enable the eurozone to grow again, I think Poland will be right to join – but it will take many more years and tough, careful preparation. (At our first Krakow meeting, in 2008, we were told Poland’s target date for euro membership was 2012.)

Meanwhile, as the British debate gets slightly more real, the risks of leaving the EU become more apparent. It is already extraordinary that so much euro-denominated financial business is done outside the euro currency area, in London. The chairman of TheCityUK, representing Britain’s financial services industry, says the idea that the City could thrive outside the EU is ‘poppycock’.

So maybe the British and Polish Spitfires will end up flying in roughly the same direction after all, albeit at different ends of a rather widely spread squadron, and with a friendly Messerschmitt in between.

timothygartonash.com

Timothy Garton Ash is Professor of European Studies at Oxford University, where he directs www.freespeechdebate.com, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is the author, most recently, of Facts are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade Without a Name