EU to Poland: don't mention the war

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BRUSSELS, June 21 (Reuters) - Don't mention the war.

That was the message many European Union leaders had for Poland on Thursday as they arrived for a summit on the division of power in the 27-nation bloc.

"The idea of basing today's decision on voting rights ... on World War Two is absurd," Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen told reporters.

He was responding to remarks by Polish Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski, who said Poland deserved more voting power in the EU because its population had been decimated by Nazi Germany and would otherwise be much larger now than 38 million.

"We are only demanding one thing, that we get back what was taken from us," Kaczynski said in a radio interview this week.

"If Poland had not had to live through the years of 1939-45, Poland would be today looking at the demographics of a country of 66 million."

Poland is isolated in asking to reopen the so-called double majority system in a proposed treaty to reform EU institutions.

The system requires 55 percent of member states representing 65 percent of the EU population to approve a decision. Warsaw says this gives too much power to big countries, especially Germany, largely at Warsaw's expense.

Austrian Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer said aloud what many EU leaders fear privately. He told a German newspaper he feared Poland's ruling Kaczynski twins were determined to deny German Chancellor Angela Merkel a success at the summit.

Merkel has avoided responding to Poland's references to their tortured history.

But Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker, close to the German leader, voiced the exasperation of many when he said: "Demography is demography. The bitter arguments on the Polish side are not acceptable."

"Germany has never been a better neighbour to Poland than it is today, and all German chancellors since Helmut Kohl have done a lot for Poland," he told German daily Handelsblatt.

CALLS TO LOOK AHEAD

Berlin was the biggest supporter of Polish membership of the European Union, pressing for Warsaw to be included in the first wave of enlargement after the end of the Cold War when some Western European partners were far less enthusiastic.

The leader of the Party of European Socialists, former Danish prime minister Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, urged the Poles to look forward and not dwell on history.

"To all the Polish citizens, please think of the future and not of the past. Understand that we have more in common now than we have had ever," he told reporters.

Poland's neighbours in central Europe, some of which share its history of having been invaded by Germany and then by the Soviet Union at the end of World War Two, said they hoped to persuade the Kaczynskis to overcome their resentments.

"Poland right now is in dispute with Russia as well as Germany. That's nothing new if you know history," Czech Deputy Prime Minister Aleksandr Vondra said this week.

"I think it's in our vital interest that Poland and Germany find a mutually acceptable way into the future." (Additional reporting by Jeff Mason, Axel Bugge and Yves Clarisse)

Keywords: EU TREATY/POLAND