This article is part of the |
Early history of Poland (until 1385) |
The Jagiellon Era |
The Noble Republic |
Partitioned Poland (1795-1914) |
Independence of Poland Regained |
History of Poland (1939-1945) |
People's Republic of Poland |
History of Poland (1989-present) |
| Table of contents |
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2 Interwar Poland
2.3 Formative Years, 1918-21
3 Reference2.4 From Democracy to Authoritarian government 2.5 Poland's International Situation |
After World War I and the collapse of the Russian, German and Austro-Hungarian
Empires, Poland became an independent republic. However, Poland's geographical
position between Germany and Russia meant much fighting and terrific
human and material losses for the Poles between 1914 and 1918.
As the war settled into a long stalemate, the issue of Polish self-rule gained greater urgency. Roman Dmowski spent the war years in Western Europe, hoping to persuade the Allies to unify the Polish lands under Russian rule as an initial step toward liberation. In the meantime, Pilsudski had correctly predicted that the war would ruin all three of the partitioners, a conclusion most people thought highly unlikely before 1918. Pilsudski therefore formed Polish legions to assist the Central Powers in defeating Russia as the first step toward full independence for Poland.
Much of the heavy fighting on the war's Eastern Front took place on
the territory of the former Polish state. In 1914 Russian forces
advanced very close to Krakow before being beaten back. The next
spring, heavy fighting occurred around Gorlice and Przemysl, to the
east of Krakow in Galicia. By the end of 1915, the Germans had
occupied the entire Russian sector, including Warsaw. In 1916 another
Russian offensive in Galicia exacerbated the already desperate
situation of civilians in the war zone; about 1 million Polish
refugees fled eastward behind Russian lines during the war. Although
the Russian offensive of 1916 caught the Germans and Austrians by
surprise, poor communications and logistics prevented the Russians
from taking full advantage of their situation.
A total of 2 million Polish troops fought with the armies of the three
occupying powers, and 450,000 died. Several hundred thousand Polish
civilians were moved to labor camps in Germany. The scorched-earth
retreat strategies of both sides left much of the war zone
uninhabitable.
The defection of Russia from the Allied coalition gave free rein to
the calls of Woodrow Wilson, the American president, to transform the
war into a crusade to spread democracy and liberate the Poles and
other peoples from the suzerainty of the Central Powers. Polish
opinion crystallized in support of the Allied cause. Pilsudski became
a popular hero when Berlin jailed him for insubordination. The Allies
broke the resistance of the Central Powers by autumn 1918, as the
Habsburg monarchy disintegrated and the German imperial government
collapsed. In November 1918, Pilsudski was released from internment in
Germany, proclaimed Poland independent on November 4, returned to Warsaw, and took control as provisional president on November 11
of an independent Poland that had been absent from the map of Europe
for 123 years.
Pilsudski's first task was to reunite the Polish regions that had
assumed various economic and political identities since the partition
in the late eighteenth century, and especially since the advent of
political parties. Pilsudski took immediate steps to consolidate the
Polish regions under a single government with its own currency and
army, but the borders of the Second Polish Republic were not
established until 1921. Between 1921 and 1939, Poland
achieved significant economic growth despite world economic crisis.
The Polish political scene remained chaotic and shifting, however,
especially after Pilsudski's death in 1935.
The German-Polish border were so complicated, that only close collaboration between those countries would let the situation to stay there longer time. (1930 km in comparison to 430 km of Oder-Neisse line.
Military force proved the determinant of Poland's frontiers in the
east (see also Polish-Soviet war), a theater rendered chaotic by the repercussions of the Russian revolutions and civil war. Pilsudski envisioned a new federation with
Lithuania and Polish domination of western Ukraine, centered at Kiev,
forming a Polish-led East European confederation to block Russian
imperialism. Lenin, leader of the new communist government
of Russia, saw Poland as the bridge over which communism would pass
into the labor class of a disorganized postwar Germany. When Pilsudski
carried out a military thrust into Ukraine in 1920, he was met by a
Red Army counterattack that drove into Polish territory almost to
Warsaw. Although many observers marked Poland for extinction and
Bolshevization, Pilsudski halted the Soviet advance before Warsaw and
resumed the offensive. The Poles were not able to exploit their new
advantage fully, however; they signed a compromise peace treaty at
Riga in early 1921 that split disputed territory in Belorussia and
Ukraine between Poland and Soviet Russia. The treaty avoided ceding
historically Polish territory back to the Russians.
In 1922 Poland also officially annexed Central Lithuania after elections won by Polish majority.
In many respects, the Second Republic fell short of the high
expectations of 1918. As happened elsewhere in Central Europe, the
attempt to implant democracy did not succeed. Minority peoples became
increasingly alienated, and antisemitism rose palpably in the general
population. Nevertheless, interwar Poland could justifiably claim some
noteworthy accomplishments: economic advances, the revival of Polish
education and culture after decades of official curbs, and, above all,
reaffirmation of the Polish nationhood that had been disputed so long.
Despite its defects, the Second Republic retained a strong hold on
later generations of Poles as a genuinely independent and authentic
expression of Polish national aspirations.
By far the gravest menace to Poland's longevity came from abroad, not
from internal weaknesses. The center of Poland's postwar foreign
policy was a political and military alliance with France, which
guaranteed Poland's independence and territorial integrity. Although
Poland attempted to join the Little Entente, the French-sponsored
alliance of Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia, Czechoslovak
suspicions of Polish territorial ambitions prevented Polish
membership. Beginning in 1926, Pilsudski's main foreign policy aim was
balancing Poland's still powerful neighbors, the Soviet Union and
Germany. Pilsudski assumed that both powers wished to regain the
Polish territory lost in World War I. Therefore, his approach was to
avoid Polish dependence on either power. Above all, Pilsudski sought
to avoid taking positions that might cause the two countries to take
concerted action against Poland. Accordingly, Poland signed
nonaggression pacts with both countries in the early 1930s. After
Pilsudski's death, his foreign minister Jozef Beck continued this
policy.
The failure to establish planned alliances in Eastern Europe meant
great reliance on the French, whose enthusiasm for intervention in the
region waned markedly after World War I. The Locarno Pact, signed in
1926 by the major West European powers with the aim of guaranteeing
peace in the region, contained no guarantee of Poland's western
border. Over the next ten years, substantial friction arose between
Poland and France over Polish refusal to compromise with the Germans
and French refusal to resist Adolf Hitler's rise to power in the early
1930s. The Polish nonaggression treaties with Germany and the Soviet
Union resulted from this bilateral deterioration of confidence.
The Polish predicament worsened in the 1930s with the advent of
Hitler's openly expansionist Nazi regime in Germany and the obvious
waning of France's resolve to defend its East European allies.
Pilsudski retained the French connection but had progressively less
faith in its usefulness. As the decade drew to an end, Poland's policy
of equilibrium between potential enemies was failing. Complete Nazi
occupation of Czechoslovakia in early 1939 encircled Poland on three
sides (East Prussia to the northeast had remained German). Hitler's
next move was obvious. By 1939 Hitler had shattered the continental
balance of power by a concerted campaign of armed diplomatic extortion
that brought most of Central Europe into his grasp.
As western appeasement of Germany culminating in the German takeover of neighbouring Czechoslovakia (March 1939) left Poland increasingly vulnerable, the Nazi regime proposed Poland to join Axis. Immediate measures were for territorial concessions to join East Prussia to the rest of Germany, demanding an extraterritorial highway through the middle of Polish territory, but also the return of Danzig, separated from Germany in 1920 as a Free City in a customs union with Poland. However, all concession had to be paid back in conquered terriotories of Lithuania and Ukraine.
After Polish refusal to cede the territories demanded, Germany invaded on September 1, 1939.
World War I
War and the Polish Lands
The war split the ranks of the three partitioning empires, pitting
Russia as defender of Serbia and ally of Britain and France against
the leading members of the Central Powers, Germany and
Austria-Hungary. This circumstance afforded the Poles political
leverage as both sides offered pledges of concessions and future
autonomy in exchange for Polish loyalty and recruits. The Austrians
wanted to incorporate Congress Poland into their territory of Galicia,
so they allowed nationalist organizations to form there. The Russians
recognized the Polish right to autonomy and allowed formation of the
Polish National Committee, which supported the Russian side. In 1916,
attempting to increase Polish support for the Central Powers, the
German and Austrian emperors declared a new kingdom of Poland. The new
kingdom included only a small part of the old commonwealth, however.Recovery of Statehood
In 1917 two separate events decisively changed the character of the
war and set it on a course toward the rebirth of Poland. The United States
entered the conflict on the Allied side, while a process of
revolutionary upheaval in Russia weakened and then removed the
Russians from the Eastern Front, finally bringing the Bolsheviks
to power in that country. After the last Russian advance
into Galicia failed in mid-1917, the Germans went on the offensive
again, the army of revolutionary Russia ceased to be a factor, and the
Russian presence in Polish territory ended for the next twenty-seven
years.Interwar Poland
Formative Years, 1918-21
From its inception, the Second Polish Republic struggled to secure and
maintain its existence in difficult circumstances. The extraordinary
complications of defining frontiers preoccupied the state in its
infancy. To the southwest, Warsaw encountered boundary disputes with
Czechoslovakia. More ominously, an embittered Germany begrudged any
territorial loss to its new eastern neighbor. The 1919 Treaty of Versailles settled the German-Polish borders in the
Baltic region. The port city of Danzig, a city predominantly German
but as economically vital to Poland as it had been in the sixteenth
century, was declared a free city. Allied arbitration divided the
ethnically mixed and highly coveted industrial and mining district of
Silesia between Germany and Poland, with Poland receiving the more
industrialized eastern section in 1922, after series of 3 Silesian Uprisings. From Democracy to Authoritarian government
Reborn Poland faced a host of daunting challenges: extensive war
damage, a ravaged economy, a population one-third composed of wary
national minorities, and a need to reintegrate the three zones kept
forcibly apart during the era of partition. Under these trying
conditions, the experiment with democracy faltered. Formal political
life began in 1921 with adoption of a constitution that designed
Poland as a republic modeled after the French example, vesting most
authority in the legislature. The postwar parliamentary system proved
unstable and erratic. In 1922 disputes with political foes caused
Pilsudski to resign his posts as chief of state and commander of the
armed forces, but in 1926 he assumed power in a coup that followed
four years of ineffectual government. For the next decade, Pilsudski
dominated Polish affairs as strongman of a generally popular centrist
regime. Military in character, the government of Pilsudski mixed
democratic and dictatorial elements while pursuing sanacja, or
national cleansing. After Pilsudski's death in 1935, his protégé
successors drifted toward open authoritarianism.Poland's International Situation
In foreign policy, the republic allied itself with France (February 1921 as a defence against both Germany and Soviet Russia, but in January 1934 concluded a non-aggression pact with Germany's new Nazi government, subsequently rejecting (September 27) French proposals for an Eastern European security pact directed against Germany, partly because the proposed treaty involved no guarantee of Poland's eastern frontier with the Soviet Union. Reference