Thursday, February 22, 2001

By David Josar
Stuttgart bureau

The president of the Republic of Poland, Aleksander Kwasniewski, will be a guest lecturer Friday at the Marshall Center.

Kwasniewski is the latest in a growing list of top leaders to address students at the Marshall Center for Security Studies in Garmisch-Partenkirchen.

"I think in the two and a half years I’ve been here, the number of high-level speakers has grown," said Steve Stromvall, a Marshall Center spokesman.

FBI director Louis Freeh spoke last year and two top Russian secretaries before that, Stromvall said.

Kwasniewski will give a 30-minute lecture, followed by a 30-minute question and answer session with the 81 students in the current executive program at the Marshall Center.

His subject will be the impact of NATO membership on Polish foreign policy.

Stromvall said the topic is an important one for the senior military officers and civilian defense and foreign policy participants midway through the 15-week executive program.

"They’re going to hear from him about how one of the most successful [former Soviet] bloc countries is dealing with NATO," Stromvall said.

Poland joined NATO on March 12, 1999.

Two of the current students are from Poland and 129 other Poland officials have attended the Marshall Center as students.

Students in the executive program course cover international and national security topics and the classes emphasize the actual practice of defense management and strategy formulation in democracies

The group goes on field-study visits in Europe and the United States with stops at places like the United Nations in New York and NATO Headquarters in Brussels, Belgium.

Kwasniewski, 46, was first elected president in November when he defeated Poland’s first post-Communist president, Lech Walesa.

The Marshall Center, run by an American-German partnership under the U.S. European Command, was created in 1992 to expand defense and security contacts with emerging democracies in Central and Eastern Europe and Eurasia.

The intention was to positively influence the development of security structures that worked in democratic states.

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