Great Power of Illusion: The Inluence of the Membership in the European Union on Polandʼs Security Anna Antczak-Barzan*1 University of Finance and Management, Warsaw, Poland The article investigates the extent to which the European Union has contributed to the enhancement of Poland’s security. It achieves this through the analysis of various instruments of the EU within the Common Foreign and Security Policy in order to determine how (or if) they inluenced Poland’s security policy. After the accession to NATO and the EU, Poland could not ind its next strategic objective and was gradually losing its position as a leader in the region. Without national interests clearly deined, it is dificult to beneit from the opportunities the EU is presenting to its members, even if these opportunities are limited. The greatest problem is going from one extremum to the other with the shift of power between the two main opposing political parties––Civic Platform and Law and Justice. Keywords: Poland, European Union, security, power, national interests, international position, defense After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Poland was left in a so-called strategic vacuum, but was also able to shape its own future for the first time in many years. Its natural choice was integration with Western structures, mainly the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union (EU). Both of these goals were inally achieved and were perceived by the government and most of society as a great success. The aim of this paper is to examine whether the accession of Poland to the European Union affected the level of the country’s security. The question is which spheres of Poland’s security policy were influenced by the fact of membership of the European Union, and which areas of the country’s security beneited from this situation. * E-mail: annique@wp.pl The Korean Journal of Defense Analysis Vol. 28, No. 3, September 2016, 351－364 ISSN 1016-3271 print, ISSN 1941-4641 online © 2016 Korea Institute for Defense Analyses http://www.kida.re.kr/kjda