Abstract
The third partition of Poland in 1795 wiped a great power off the map of Europe. In its heyday, the Polish-Lithuanian kingdom had stretched from the Baltic in the north to the Black Sea in the south, and Poland had been known as the land between the seas. In the system of states that existed around the Baltic until it was finally submerged into an all-European system during the Thirty Years War, the Polish-Lithuanian kingdom was a centrally placed great power.1 In 1683, the forces which stopped the Ottoman empire’s penetration into Europe at the gates of Vienna were led by a Pole. At this time, however, Poland-Lithuania was already in decline. At the end of the eighteenth century, as a result of three partitions, the formerly Polish lands were incorporated into Prussia and the Russian and Habsburg empires.
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Notes
Adam Watson, ‘European International Society and Its Expansion’, in Hedley Bull and Adam Watson (eds), The Expansion of International Society (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), pp. 13–32, on p. 17.
Joseph Rothschild, East Central Europe between the Two World Wars (Seattle, WA: A History of East Central Europe, IX, University of Washington Press, 1974).
Piotr S. Wandycz, The Lands of Partitioned Poland, 1795–1918 (Seattle, WA: A History of East Central Europe, VII, University of Wisconsin Press, 1974), p. 263.
Hans Roos, Polen und Europa. Studien zur Polnischen Aussenpolitik 1931–1939 (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, Tübinger Studien zur Geschichte und Politik, 7, 1957), p. 240.
Norman Davies, God’s Playground. A History of Poland, vol. II (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), p. 416.
Quoted in Josef Korbel, Poland between East and West. Soviet and German Diplomacy toward Poland, 1919–1933 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 101.
Piotr S. Wandycz, Soviet-Polish Relations, 1917–1921 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), p. 94.
Also Norman Davies, Heart of Europe. A Short History of Poland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 129–48.
Albert Erich Senn, The Great Powers, Lithuania, and the Vilna Question, 1920–1928 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, Studien zur Geschichte Osteuropas XI, 1966), p. 3.
Dmowski, who thought that Poland might ‘grow to be one of the greatest nations in Europe’, feared that under German tutelage it might dwindle to a ‘narodek’, a disparaging term for a little people alluding to the nineteenth century idea of non-historic nations; Piotr S. Wandycz, ‘Poland’s Place in Europe in the Concepts of Piłsudski and Dmowski’, East European Politics and Societies, IV (1990): 451–69.
Kay Lundgreen-Nielsen, The Polish Problem at the Paris Peace Conference. A Study of the Politics of the Great Powers and the Poles 1918–1919 (Odense: Odense University Press, 1979), p. 35.
Indeed, the war had convinced Piłsudski of the intensity of the new nationalisms: The principle of federation cannot be applied to these lands. Surely we enter them with weapons in our hands which is contrary to the principles of federation. Besides I did not see people there who would want to join such a federation’. Wandycz, Soviet-Polish Relations, 1917–1921, p. 99. In a broader sense, however, Piłsudski’s federalism was built on the premise that the newly liberated countries of Eastern and Central Europe needed each other more than they needed sovereignty. That belief survives in Polish political culture to this day. Cf. below and M. K. Dziewanowski, Joseph Pilsudski. A European Federalist, 1918–22 (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1969), p. 350.
Christoph M. Kimmich, The Free City. Danzig and German Foreign Policy 1919–1934 (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1968).
The classical debate between these two main views is to be found in John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (London: Macmillan, 1920) and
Etienne Mantoux, The Carthagenian Peace. The Economic Consequences of Mr. Keynes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946).
Piotr S. Wandycz, France and Her Eastern Allies 1919–1925. French Czechoslovak-Polish Relations from the Paris Peace Conference to Locarno (Minneapolis, MI: University of Minnesota Press, 1962), p. 22.
Roman Debicki, Foreign Policy of Poland 1919–1939. From the Rebirth of the Polish Republic to World War II (London: Pall Mall Press, 1962) p. 57. However, the pact noted the right to act in self-defence even if the League Council was not agreed.
Western contemporary analysts and earlier generations of historians were inclined to interpret Locarno as a genuine European rapprochement. However, new analyses such as Sally Marks, The Illusion of Peace. International Relations in Europe 1918–1933 (London: Macmillan, 1976) esp. pp. 55–74 and
Jon Jakobson, ‘Is There a New International History of the 19208?’, American History Review, CLXXXVIII (1983): 617–45, are now bringing general Western historiography closer to the bleak picture which arises when one looks at Locarno from the Polish angle.
This ‘in defiance of the old idea that such seats should be reserved for the great Powers’, F. S. Northedge, The League of Nations, Its Life and Times 1920–1946 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1988), p. 102. Brazil and Spain promptly came to the fore with demands of their own. Brazil actually left the organisation when its wish was not fulfilled.
Piotr S. Wandycz, The Twilight of French Eastern Alliances, 1926–1936. French-Czechoslovak-Polish Relations from Locarno to the Remilitarization of the Rhineland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 50.
There were, of course also other reasons, ranging from national character to the perception of the Soviet Union. Interestingly, Sarah Meikiejohn Terry, Poland’s Place in Europe. General Sikorski and the Origin of the Oder-Neisse Line, 1939–1943 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), on p. 26 maintains that since a wedge of German Silesian land came to separate the Polish and Czech indiustrial districts, and since the Poles did not obtain full control over Danzig, the prospects for economic gains from cooperation were substantially diminished.
Although she discusses this episode under the heading ‘The Czechoslovak crisis: The betrayal and its consequences’, Anna M. Cienciala, Poland and the Western Powers 1938–1939. A Study in the Interdependence of Eastern and Western Europe (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968) on p. 148 (cf. also p. 256) points out that ‘it was not only the lack of direct aid but the obvious reluctance of France and Britain even to threaten Germany with an attack in the West which ultimately decided the course of Beck’s policy towards Czechoslovakia’; and indeed, France at one point during the crisis even exerted pressure on Beneš to cede Teschen in return for Polish neutrality.
Carsten Holbraad, Middle Powers in International Politics (London: Macmillan, 1984).
Anton W. DePorte, Europe between the Superpowers. The Enduring Balance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 31.
Christopher Thorne, The Approach of War 1938–39 (London: Macmillan, 1967), p. 129.
Bernard Wood, Middle Powers and the General Interest (Ottawa: The North-South Institute, Middle Powers in the International System, 1988), p. iii.
Flora Lewis, ‘A Smile in Poland, Between Two Worlds’, International Herald Tribune, 19 October 1989.
Jan B. de Weydenthal, ‘Poland and the Soviet Alliance System’, Report on Eastern Europe, 29 June 1990.
Roman Solchanyk, ‘Ukraine and Poland: An Interview with Adam Michnik’, Report on the USSR, 5 January 1990.
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© 1992 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Neumann, I.B. (1992). Poland as a Regional Great Power: the Inter-war Heritage. In: Neumann, I.B. (eds) Regional Great Powers in International Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-12661-3_6
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