PARIS 1919: POLISH POSITION PAPER

War Experience

For more than a century, Poland had existed only in the memories and dreams of patriots, in the work of the nation’s great writers and composers. Through a series of partitions in 1772, 1793, and 1795, Russia, Austria and Prussia wiped the ancient republic off the map. Most rational observers believed that the passage of time was solidifying this division forever. The Poles of Germany, perhaps 3 million out of a total population of 56 million, shared in the prosperity of one of the most developed nations in Europe. While maintaining part of their language, they were culturally increasingly German. The Poles of Austria-Hungary, concentrated in Austrian Galicia, lagged far behind. Corrupt, poor, and the most backwards region of a decaying empire, Galicia became a byword for misery. Those who could, emigrated, many of them to North America. The rest of Europe’s Poles, about half the total number, suffered under Russian rule, the most suppressive and incompetent of all. When the First World War began, the Poles were caught in the middle, some fighting for Austria-Hungary and Germany, while others took up arms for Russia. One man who assumed a decisive role in the rebirth of Poland was the political and military leader Jozef Pilsudski (1867- 1935). Pilsudski had spent much of his life attempting to re-create his country. In his youth, he had gained knowledge of his country’s tragic history, of the great days of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the formidable Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth extended from the Baltic almost to the Black Sea, including much of what later became Germany and Russia. He learned how Polish republican government, learning centers, and cities were the admiration of Europe, of the partitions at the end of the eighteenth century when Poland vanished at the hand of its more powerful neighbors, and of the many bloody and failed uprisings ever since. Although becoming a radical socialist, he was, above all, a Polish nationalist. Arrested for the first time in 1887 for participating in a plot organized by V.I. Lenin’s older brother to assassinate the tsar, he eventually served a five-year sentence in Siberia. When war broke out, Pilsudski supported Austria-Hungary. His calculation was quite straightforward: Russia was the chief obstacle to polish aspirations. With Russia collapsed in 1917, he viewed with alarm how Austria-Hungary became ever shakier, for he feared a powerful Germany. When he refused to place his Polish legions under German command, Pilsudski landed in prison once again. Germany’s collapse gave Pilsudski back his freedom; on November 10, 1918, he arrived back in the old Polish capital of Warsaw. Possessing one of the few coherent military forces left in Central Europe, he seized power form German occupation authorities in the name of Poland. The obstacles facing Pilsudski were daunting. At the beginning of 1919, all of Poland’s borders were in question and enemies lurked all around: surviving units of the German Army (many of them continuing to fight as Freikorps members in the east), Russians (Bolsheviks or anti- Bolshevik), none of whom wanted an independent Poland, as well as various other nationalists competing for the same territory: Lithuanians in the north, Ukrainians to the east, and Czechs and Slovaks in the south. To make matters worse, Poland had few natural defenses (Between 1918 and 1920, Pilsudski was to fight six different wars). The First World War had destroyed as much as 10% of Poland’s wealth. The Germans had ransacked Polish territories during their occupation. Upon assuming control, Pilsudski had to weld together varying economies, laws,

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and bureaucracies. He had to rationalize nine separate legislative systems and reduce five different currencies to one (without even the means to print banknotes). Railways emerged a veritable nightmare, with 66 kinds of rails, 165 types of locomotives, and a complicated patchwork of signaling systems. Pilsudski also had to watch his own back. Radicals to the left wished him to usher in socialism. To the right, Dmowski emerged as his most prominent challenger. The latter claimed to speak for the Poles, and in 1918 the French government actually agreed that an army of Polish exiles in France should come under its control. When the First World War ended, Poland had two potential governments, one in Paris and one in Warsaw, and two rival leaders, each with his own armed forces. Negotiations between Dmowski’s Polish National Committee and Pilsudski, with the world-renowned Polish pianist and composer Ignacy Jan Paderewski acting as mediator, eventually resulted in an agreement providing for Pilsudski as head of state and commander-in- chief of the armed forces and Paderewski as prime minister at the head of a coalition government as well as Poland’s chief delegate to the Peace Conference alongside Dmowski. Conference Expectations The Polish delegation in Paris talked of securing the frontiers of 1772, when Poland included most of today’s Lithuania and Belarus, and much of Ukraine. The Polish National Committee aimed to promote a robust Poland as a check on both Germany and Bolshevism. Such a Poland would have significant minorities of Germans Ukrainians, Byelorussians, and Lithuanians-40% of the total population-all under firm control of the Poles. While Dmowski prepared to speak the language of self-determination to the Allies, Pilsudski realized the limitations of such designs on the grounds. He, too, wanted a strong Poland, but he was prepared to accept less. Indeed, Pilsudski was even willing to contemplate a federation, in which the Lithuanians, perhaps, or the Ukrainians, would collaborate with Poles as equals. All Poles did agree on the need for access to the Baltic. Danzig, at the mouth of the Vistula, was the obvious choice for a port. It had, after all, once been a great free and prosperous city under Polish rule. Since the 1790s, however, it had been under German rule. In 1919, its population was over 90% German, although much of the surrounding countryside was heavily Polish.’ Already before the Versailles Conference commenced, the Allies agreed on the need of an independent Poland. The British, however, feared that Poland could become a liability. Who would defend it if its neighbors, Germany and Russia in particular, attacked? Moreover, the British did not particularly care for either Polish faction, for Pilsudski had fought against them and was a dangerous radical, while Dmowski seemed too right-wing. Moved by the sufferings of Poland, Americans were supportive of a revival of a Polish nation-state. Wilson, however, was noncommittal concerning its borders. The French supported the Polish cause with the most enthusiasm. In the autumn of 1917, it had already declared support for an independent Poland, several months before either Britain or the United States. French policy towards Poland was a mixture of the romantic and practical. Poland was a cause for both devout Catholics and good liberals. Lovers of history remembered Maria Walewska, the beautiful mistress of Napoleon, of melancholic Polish exiles in Paris, and the Polish volunteers who fought with France against Prussia in 1870-71. More importantly, however, France no longer had Russia to counterbalance Germany, but a strong Poland, allied to Czechoslovakia and Rumania could perhaps fill that role.

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