Peace and Security beyond Military Power: The League of Nations and the Polish-Lithuanian Dispute (1920-1923) Chiara Tessaris Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2014 © 2014 Chiara Tessaris All rights reserved ABSTRACT Peace and Security beyond Military Power: The League of Nations and the Polish- Lithuanian Dispute Chiara Tessaris Based on the case study of the mediation of the Polish-Lithuanian dispute from 1920 to 1923, this dissertation explores the League of Nations’ emergence as an agency of modern territorial and ethnic conflict resolution. It argues that in many respects, this organization departed from prewar traditional diplomacy to establish a new, broader concept of security. At first the league tried simply to contain the Polish-Lithuanian conflict by appointing a Military Commission to assist these nations in fixing a final border. But the occupation of Vilna by Polish troops in October 1920 exacerbated Polish-Lithuanian relations, turning the initial border dispute into an ideological conflict over the ethnically mixed region of Vilna, claimed by the Poles on ethnic grounds while the Lithuanians considered it the historical capital of the modern Lithuanian state. The occupation spurred the league to greater involvement via administration of a plebiscite to decide the fate of the disputed territories. When this strategy failed, Geneva resorted to negotiating the so-called Hymans Plan, which aimed to create a Lithuanian federal state and establish political and economic cooperation between Poland and Lithuania. This analysis of the league’s mediation of this dispute walks the reader through the league’s organization of the first international peacekeeping operation, its handling of the challenges of open diplomacy, and its efforts to fulfill its ambitious mandate not just to prevent war but also to uproot its socioeconomic and ethnic causes. The Hymans Plan reflected this ambition as well as commitment to reconciling the tenets of balance of power and territorial status quo with the principle of self-determination and minorities’ protection when drawing new boundaries and creating new states. TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures iii INTRODUCTION 1 The Polish-Lithuanian Dispute, 1918–1920 1 The League of Nations and the Polish-Lithuanian Dispute 5 CHAPTER 1: THE POLISH-LITHUANIAN DISPUTE AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS 39 1.1 The Occupation of Vilna and the Plebiscite Plan 55 1.2 The League’s First Peacekeeping Operation 71 1.3 The Dismissal of the Plebiscite 86 CHAPTER 2: BETWEEN NEW AND OLD DIPLOMACY 105 2.1 Facing the Challenges: International Public Opinion and Traditional Diplomacy 105 2.2 Establishing New Diplomacy and The Quest for Alternatives 129 CHAPTER 3: THE BRUSSELS CONFERENCE 140 3.1 Introduction 140 3.2 The Ideological Debate: Disputed Territories and Contested Statehood 150 3.3 The First Hymans Draft 171 3.4 The Lithuanian Counterproposal and the Cultural Autonomy Trump Card 175 3.5 The Thirteenth Session of the Council and the Second Hymans Draft 176 3.6 The Lithuanian Dilemma 187 CHAPTER 4: THE HYMANS PLAN AND THE MULTINATIONAL VILNA REGION 193 4.1 Cultural Autonomy in Lithuanian Foreign Politics: From Paris to Geneva 200 4.2 The Domestic Dimension: A Difficult Collaboration 207 4.3 The Vilna Minorities’ Petitions and the League of Nations 219 i 4.3.1The Belarusians 219 4.3.2 The Jews 224 4.3.3 The Poles 229 4.4 Managing Conflicting Views: Geneva and Minorities’ Petitions 234 CHAPTER 5: PEACE AND SECURITY AFTER THE HYMANS PLAN 237 5.1 Tension in Vilna 238 5.2 Increasing Violence in the Neutral Zones 245 5.3 The Vilna Elections 251 5.4 Difficult Decisions 261 5.5 Protecting Minorities after the Hymans Plan 268 5.6 The Lithuanian Declaration on Minority Rights 281 5.7 The Aftermath: Facing the Consequences 290 CONCLUSION 304 BIBLIOGRAPHY 321 ii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Map of Polish-Lithuanian Conflict in the Disputed Territories 1919-1920. (41) Figure 2: Map of Expansion of Lithuania in the 13-15th Centuries. (150) Figure 3: Map of Administrative Gubernia of the Northwestern Provinces of the Russian Empire. (151) Figure 4: Map of Linguistic Groups in Lithuania and the Disputed Territories (Russian Census 1897). (153) Figure 5: Polish Election Official Results in Cities and Villages. (271) Figure 6: Polish Election Official Results in the Countryside. (272) Figure 7: Participation of Electoral Groups. (273) Figure 8: Vilna neutral Zone established by the Council Resolution of February 3, 1923. (293) iii INTRODUCTION The Polish-Lithuanian Dispute, 1918–1920 In the wake of the Russian Empire’s disintegration and the great changes wrought by the First World War, the city and region of Vilna became a battlefield between Poland and Lithuania. The Poles insisted the city was Polish in culture, basing their claims on the ethnographic principle, whereas the Lithuanians claimed it as their historical capital.1 The emancipation of the Russian Empire’s serfs in 1861 had lent the Lithuanian national movement its initial momentum. At first it consisted only of intellectuals, many of whom spoke Polish as well as Lithuanian, which was generally the language of the peasantry. As most of Lithuania’s landed nobility were culturally Polish, national conflicts merged with social and economic disputes as Lithuanian nationalists called for land reform. A nationalist segment of the clergy sought to free the Church of Polish control, and Lithuanian scientific and cultural societies competed with their Polish counterparts.2 During the First World War, the Germans held the region until their military collapse in autumn 1918. On February 16, 1918, still under German occupation, the Lithuanian State Council in Vilna proclaimed Lithuania’s independence but had to retreat to Kaunas when the 1 When Vilna was founded in the early fourteenth century, it lay at the heart of the original Grand Duchy of Lithuania Proper, a term designating the ethnographic nucleus of the Lithuanian nation. This area consisted of the principality of Samogitia, which coincided with the region of Kaunas, and of the two palatinates of Vilna and Trakai. The city was the capital of the Lithuanian Empire, which expanded in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to include vast Ukrainian and Belarusian territories. In 1386 Lithuania and Poland formed a personal union that in 1569 became a federation between the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Kingdom of Poland. This political entity lasted until the third partition of Poland in 1795, when Russia annexed all Lithuania except the part on the left bank of the Niemen River, which was taken by Prussia. Lithuania Proper remained under Russia and was reorganized in a separate unit first called the Lithuanian Government of Vilna and Grodno and then the Northwestern Province of Russia, of which Kaunas, Vilna, and Grodno formed three provinces, or governments, with the city of Vilna as their administrative center. Sarah Wambaugh, Plebiscites since the World War (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1933) 2: 289–291. 2 Alfred Eric Senn, The Great Powers, Lithuania and the Vilna Question 1920–1928 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1966), 5. 1 Bolshevik army entered the city in January 1919. Under the command of Josef Pilsudski, the Polish army assumed the offensive and successfully drove the Bolsheviks back, entering Vilna on April 20, 1919, taking over the administration, and declaring inhabitants of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania free to determine their internal, national, and religious affairs through representatives selected by universal, secret suffrage.3 The Lithuanian government vehemently protested, regarding this as a seizure of its capital. Some fighting took place between the Lithuanian and Polish armies, and the Allies in Paris tried to diffuse the situation by drawing several provisional demarcation lines that nevertheless did not bring peace to the region.4 Wishing to postpone the final fixing of Poland’s eastern frontier until the Russians could take part, the Principal Allied and Associated Powers, in Article 87 of the Treaty of Versailles, reserved the right to fix borders not specified in the treaty at a later date. The question persisted, however, and the Polish delegation proposed separating the Vilna districts from Lithuania along ethnic lines and regulating the matter via plebiscite. On September 29, 1919, the Lithuanian nationalist leader Augustinas Voldemaras replied to the Supreme War Council that a plebiscite could not express the people’s will under the abnormal conditions of war and Polish occupation.5 The Bolsheviks advanced on December 8, 1919, and the Supreme Council temporarily ended the unsettled state of the Polish frontier by fixing a provisional line and authorizing the Polish government to organize a provisional administration to its west. Called the Curzon line, in contradistinction to the Foch line and others the Paris Peace Conference had drawn for strategic purposes, it ran south from Russia’s western border, leaving the city 3 Wambaugh, Plebiscites since the World War, 302. 4 W. J. Brockenlabank, “The Vilna Dispute,” The American Journal of International Law 3 (June 1926): 483. 5 Wambaugh, Plebiscites since the World War, 303. 2 of Grodno and the entire Vilna district to the east and granting Poland some small bits of the territory claimed by Lithuania. The Allies regarded the Curzon line as baseline roughly defining a territory with an indisputably Polish ethnic minority. The Lithuanian government, having been neither consulted nor notified about its establishment, did not recognize the Curzon line. The line also failed to please the Poles, for Pilsudski advocated the creation of three buffer states between Poland and Russia: the Ukraine, Belorussia, and finally Lithuania, which would eventually enter into a federal union with Poland.6 Himself a native of Vilna, Pilsudski aimed at restoring the Polish-Lithuanian union.