day visit to the Kingdom and the UAE, along with a large group of businessmen and officials, should not be dismissed as simply one more trade mission. Poland and Saudi Arabia have much to offer each other. Poland, with its population of 38 million, is currently one of the European Union's few economic success stories. The regional recession has hardly impacted the Polish and it was Warsaw's good fortune not to have been able to join the eurozone in time for the current crisis with the single currency. The country's finance minister stated this week that it was now unthinkable that the Poles would adopt the euro until the eurozone had sorted itself out. Poland was unique among the former communist countries of Eastern Europe in not seeking immediately to impose rigid controls on the growth of a free market economy. Thus in the very early years, for businessmen at least, anything that was not specifically forbidden was allowed. This laissez-faire attitude inevitably brought some failures, but it also engendered in the re-emerging Polish free market economy a strong spirit of entrepreneurialism and a very American-style can-do attitude. Indeed quite a few of the country's post-communist business pioneers were Polish Americans returning to the old country. Despite a series of revolving-door governments and apparent political instability, Poland has prospered and set an enviable example to its former Soviet bloc neighbors, all of whom, not least Hungary and Slovakia, have become mired in some degree of economic crisis. Last month a Polish company, KGHM, already one of the world's largest copper producers, acquired truly global scale when it bought a Canadian rival with abundant copper reserves in Canada, the US and Chile. This was the largest foreign acquisition ever made by a Polish company and has been greeted with some pride by Poles. Yet a sign of the country's free market maturity is that there is little concern that the ailing national airline LOT is very probably going to be acquired by a rapidly expanding Turkish Airlines. Unlike their fellow EU members, Germany and France, Poland clearly has no problems with Turkey. On an economic level, closer relations between Riyadh and Warsaw will open up major opportunities in the Kingdom's rapid infrastructural expansion to Polish companies. Meanwhile Saudi businessmen and investors can look to a reliable base in northern Europe, from which the markets of Scandinavia and central and eastern Europe can be easily reached. On a political level, Poland, which joined the EU in 2004, has emerged as a quiet and often conservative influence on debates in Brussels. The closer relationship with Warsaw will mean that Saudi Arabia will have a further channel through which to express its views in the EU's corridors of power. The visit by Prime Minister Tusk and his government and business colleagues is therefore highly opportune and welcome. __
