"Hah! The Poles are making trouble in the EU now. They got on our nerves too."

My wife, normally not disposed to Schadenfreude, made this remark the other day after hearing a report about Warsaw's opposition to a new voting system for the European Union, which Poland joined in 2004. Under the system advocated by Germany, holder of the EU's rotating presidency until the end of this month, legislation would be passed by a "double majority" of at least 55 percent of the EU member states and 65 percent of the EU population. This would give Germany (pop. 82.4 million), the EU's most populous member by far, more than double the voting clout of Poland (pop. 38.2 million). At present, Poland has 27 votes to Germany's 29. The voting plan is part of a slimmed-down treaty meant to replace the stalled European constitution, rejected by French and Dutch voters in 2005 referendums. Warsaw has threatened to veto the treaty at an EU summit meeting in Brussels today and Friday unless voting in the 27-member bloc is based on the square root of a country's population, which would give Poland six votes in the EU Council of Ministers to Germany's nine.

"Square root or death!" has become a Polish battle cry. Yikes, the Polish cavalry rides again!

Like most Russians, my wife has definite opinions about the Poles, and they're not very positive. The Poles, she says, were the Russians' biggest headache in the Soviet-era Warsaw Pact. The Poles, she says, are cunning. The Poles, she says, complain. Not that this has stopped her from having Polish friends, whose Slavic soulfulness and hospitality she appreciates and shares. And then she married me, a somewhat cunning, sometimes complaining, halfway hospitable soulmate of Polish descent on the paternal side.

My natural sympathies tend to go to famously rebellious Poland in disputes with its biggest, baddest historical enemies, Germany and Russia, which have squeezed it, vice-like, for centuries. Here isn't the place for a long chronicle of woe. Poland hasn't been an innocent victim always, of course, and has got in some good licks too. Remember the Battle of Tannenberg in 1410? But Poland has mostly been on the receiving end, which is why it's so prickly when it feels bullied or belittled, and so alarmed when Germany and Russia team up over its head.

Poland is indignant at Germany's deal with Russia to build a gas pipeline between them under the Baltic Sea, bypassing Poland. Some Poles have even likened it to the 1940 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact dividing up Poland and the Baltic states between the Soviet Union and Germany. The pipeline is just one of several running conflicts that Poland has with Germany and/or Russia. The NATO newcomer has angered Russia by entertaining a U.S. plan to base missile interceptors on its territory. It's blocking talks on a new partnership accord between the EU and Russia because the latter, alleging health concerns, has banned imports of Polish meat and plant products. It recently clashed with Germany over a Berlin exhibit devoted to German expellees from Poland at World War II's end. And so on. And so forth.

And now, "Square root or death!" The cover story in this week's Der Spiegel, the German newsmagazine, is titled "Unloved Neighbors -- How the Poles Get on Europe's Nerves." Highly critical of Poland's pudgy conservative-nationalist president and prime minister, the twin brothers Lech and Jaroslaw Kaczynski (whom another German publication compared to "young Polish potatoes"), the story's authors declare: "Warsaw's pigheadedness is balm for the Polish soul."

Ouch. At the root of Poland's problems with the Fritzes and Ivans, besides being sandwiched between them, is the condescension of both toward the Poles. A well-known Russian rhyme is "Kuritsa ne ptitsa, Pol'sha ne zagranitsa" ("A chicken isn't a bird, and Poland isn't a foreign country") -- in other words, "Poland isn't sovereign." Gigantic Russia has long seen Poland as a midget and a nuisance. A midget that bites. Since 2005, Russia has celebrated National Unity Day on Nov. 4, replacing the Nov. 7 holiday that marked the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. The new holiday commemorates the 1612 expulsion of Polish troops from Moscow, ending Russia's "Time of Troubles."

Nor do the Germans see the Poles as their equals. For many, they are largely a bunch of thieves and prostitutes, unworthy of respect, and a threat as cheap labor. "Kaum gestohlen, schon in Polen," an expression that gained currency in the 1990s, is emblematic of German attitudes. It was aimed at car thefts by Poles in Germany.

According to the Federal Statistical Office, 5 percent of the 6.75 million foreign nationals living in Germany at the end of 2006 were Poles, the third-largest group after Turks (26 percent) and Italians (8 percent). Although big, neighboring, prosperous Germany should be the prime destination for footloose Polish workers, a sluggish -- but now resurgent -- German economy and restricted access to the German labor market have driven hundreds of thousands of them to greener pastures in places like Britain and Ireland.

German asparagus farmers are crying foul. They rely on seasonal laborers from Poland for the backbreaking work of harvesting the highly prized vegetable. This spring they complained that they were 40,000 workers short. A lot of asparagus rotted in the fields.

German-Polish relations need cultivating.

The Swiss are getting fed up with Germans, it seems. Tens of thousands of the latter have moved to Switzerland (pop. 7.5 million) in recent years to escape high unemployment and sinking real wages at home (pop. 82.4 million). Almost 25,000 arrived last year alone, bringing the total to more than 170,000. Riding the rising wave of Teuton trashing in Switzerland, the Zürich-based tabloid Blick, the country's second-biggest newspaper, recently ran a series of reports titled "How Many Germans Can Switzerland Stand?"

The Swiss, and not only the Swiss, often fault Germans for being loud, impolite, arrogant and aggressive. Their not-so-nice names for natives of what they call the "big northern canton" include Sauschwab (Schwab, or Swabian, is a Swiss term for a German), Nazikopf, and even Gashahn (gas tap; the reference should be clear).

At the root of the Swiss fear and loathing of Germans is an old sense of inferiority. Two Swiss are in a restaurant, a typical joke goes. At the adjacent table are two Germans. The Swiss are served, and one finds that his food isn't salty enough. He reaches for the salt shaker, which happens to be plugged up. After watching the Swiss struggle with the shaker for a while, one of the Germans comes over and says, "May I?" then takes out a pocketknife and sharpens a matchstick, which he pokes into the holes of the shaker, unplugging it. After the German has returned to his table, the Swiss turns to his friend and says, "I can't stand Germans, you know, but you've got to hand it to them: Technologically they're superior."

The Swiss inferiority complex is largely linguistic. Schwyzerdütsch (Schweizerdeutsch, Swiss German), the Alemannic dialects spoken in the "German-speaking" part of Switzerland (about 65 percent of the country), are so far removed from standard -- or High -- German that they're dubbed or subtitled on German television. The official -- and written -- language (along with French and Italian) is standard German (with minor Swiss differences), which is used in certain formal settings and with outsiders. Most "German-speaking" Swiss don't speak standard German well and even regard it as foreign. "There are more and more Germans at my place of work," Blick quoted a young Swiss woman as saying. "I can hardly have a conversation in Swiss German with anyone anymore."

Speaking of durned German-speaking foreigners, what about Adolf Hitler? A politician in the German city of Braunschweig made news this month by proposing that the Austrian-born Führer be stripped of his German citizenship. Hitler was naturalized in Braunschweig in 1932, enabling him to hold political office in Germany. Revoking Hitler's citizenship -- a bit late, isn't it? -- would be a "symbolic step" meant to wash Braunschweig's hands of the odious fellow, who's been dead for almost 62 years.

Actually, Austrians are no less German than Bavarians, Berliners, Rhinelanders, Mecklenburgers, etc. Only the vagaries of history -- and the schemes of Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck -- kept Austrians outside of Germany (except from 1938 to 1945, thanks to Hitler).

Austria, with a population and gross domestic product 10 times smaller than those of Germany, also has an inferiority complex vis-a-vis its big northern neighbor. The complex goes back to the days when Austria's imperial armies regularly lost battles to the no-nonsense Prussians. Austrians often joke about how disorderly and happy-go-lucky they are compared with the Germans. In Berlin, things are often serious but never hopeless, Austrians say; in Vienna, though, things have often been hopeless but seldom serious.

The Swiss are boring in the eyes of Austrians (and not just Austrians). It's been said that Vienna's huge Central Cemetery, which holds the remains of some 3 million people (including those of composers Ludwig van Beethoven, Johannes Brahms, Johann Strauss senior and junior, Franz Schubert, and Arnold Schönberg), is half as big as Zürich and twice as much fun.

But Austrians have strong historical ties to halcyon, humdrum "Heidiland." The Habsburgs, the dynasty that ruled Austria from 1282 until 1918, originated in what is now Switzerland, which, ironically enough, was formed in 1291 by an alliance of cantons against the Habsburg dynasty.

In short, the main German-speaking countries are a muddle. But then, so is Europe as a whole.

llwwka jrfpohm

Germany has been in an uproar since Günter Grass, 78, Nobel Prize-winning author and "bleeding heart icon of the German left" (Britain's The Sunday Times), revealed in an interview last Saturday before publication of his autobiography that he was a member of the Waffen SS at 17. Grass had previously said he was a conscripted helper in an antiaircraft unit in the final months of World War II. Die Mutter Teresa -- 'ne Prostituierte?! So ging es dem Land, Als der G.G. gestand: "Ich war Mitglied der Waffen-SS." He'd hounded his nation: "Come clean, closet Nazis!" His own guilt, it seems, Drove him to extremes, But by no means, in truth, to excess. lkhsjd