1
Collective logic conditions morality and social life, mystic logic begets gods and creeds, and intellectual logic gives rise to the discoveries which transform human existence.1
Gustave Le Bon, Psychology of the Great War, 1916
Other times had come. The village woke up because everything was shaking all around. They tell us that there’ll be a Poland and it’s already taking shape, though it’s still a bit weak, but slowly getting stronger. The peasants don’t want to believe it, because we’ve always been told that this here’s Russia and Russia it will be, and now, all of a sudden—hocus-pocus—it’s Poland.2
An anonymous peasant’s memoir on Polish independence in 1918
At the outset of the twentieth century, Central and Eastern Europe was a patchwork of national entities. The problems we face when we try to discern them in the wake of the First World War are untraceably linked with the enigma of identity which academics recently have painstakingly tried to decipher. If we look at the different nationalizing projects of the time from the viewpoint of their subjects, we might be surprised that they for their part did not automatically see themselves as fitting into the categories imposed upon them by the various prophets of nationality. To understand the competing forces and dynamics that were at work when the Central European nation states materialized, we should not take nationality for granted. All borders of the Second Polish Republic crossed regions of ethnic, linguistic, religious, and cultural diversity. National affiliation was not necessarily the first thing their inhabitants had in mind when the gunsmoke of the Great War slowly settled. At these predominantly rural peripheries, regional identities were much more developed than the identification with political constructs of the intellectual elite in the urban centers. Then again, the two phenomena were not mutually exclusive. Identities are never monolithic; in every individual they are a unique mixture of many different features, defined by upbringing, cultural heritage, language, and beliefs, to name just a few of the most defining ones.3 After 1918, Central Europe’s peasants were expected to dispose of their imperial multicultural identity. They had to learn to relate—affirmatively, reluctantly, indifferently, or antagonistically—within the confines of the national constructs in which they found themselves more or less randomly located, as a result of the new borders.
THE HISTORICAL SETTING
Such questions of national consciousness and belonging are of utmost importance in this study because they had a decisive impact on the birth of nations4 in the nineteenth century from the bodies of the aging empires, as well as the political convulsions and armed conflicts they entailed at the outset of the twentieth century. The “old” empires used to function according to two principles: The monarch represented the state: “L’état, c’est moi” (“The state, that’s me”) was the proud absolutist motto attached to the king in seventeenth-century France.5 The people were the king’s subjects, regardless of existing linguistic and cultural differences, which still often enough resulted in unequal treatment and inner tensions, especially if it came to the religious diversity characteristic for these times. Conversely, the two principles of the awakening nation state were formulated along opposite lines: The people were the state and possessed a right of freedom and self-determination. These ideas had entered European intellectual thought with the Enlightenment and the French and American Revolutions, and they opposed monarchial despotism, centralism, and closed-mindedness while praising the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity. In his flaming appeal to the Catholic King Philip II of Spain, who in the sixteenth century had ruled harshly over the Protestant population of the Spanish Netherlands, Marquis De Posa in Friedrich Schiller’s Don Carlos (1787) pleaded: “I live, a citizen of ages yet to come … —but grant us liberty of thought.”6
The fundamental change in the notion of the state’s representation and the nascent nations’ claim for self-determination led to enormous political tension after the restructuring of post-Napoleonic Europe, precisely because those nations often transcended existing state borders. While at the Congress of Vienna in 1814–15 one talked about new state borders, in the course of the century one talked more and more about populations hither and thither of these borders and their rights.7 Furthermore, over the course of the nineteenth century civic loyalties transformed gradually into ethnic nationalism. In order to grant the nations their rights, the European map had to be rearranged according to ethnic rather than political criteria.8 After the First World War, Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe—which for centuries had been divided between multi-ethnic imperial monarchies and dominated by aristocratic nobilities which represented only a fraction of the population—was split up between about a dozen new nation states dominated by one ethnic group, presiding over numerous ethnic minorities. The Second Polish Republic was one of them.
The emancipation of nations in Central Europe in the nineteenth century was surely not the idea of its emperors and their entourage, whose legitimacy it jeopardized. But ironically, any action they took to suppress the awakening nationalism in the post-enlightenment era was only bound to strengthen it: By persecuting national groups—real or imagined—within their empires, by denying them equal rights, questioning their loyalty, separating them from other subjects of the monarchy, and thus inevitably creating martyrs, symbols, and places of commemoration, they arguably helped the national causes in ways any demagogue could only dream of. Another monarchal ploy that ricocheted was the policy of divide et impera: Nurturing the rivalry between different national groups served to distract them from anti-state activities for the moment, but in the long run it encouraged them to move apart and develop ever more distinctive national features. National activists in Central Europe knew well about this undercurrent of governmental repression, and sometimes even used it to their advantage. Finally, by strengthening the national movement representing the ethnic majority of their respective populations—Russians and (to a lesser degree) Ukrainians in Russia, Germans in Prussia and (to a lesser degree) in Austria9—the three Central and Eastern European monarchies accelerated the rise of nationalism, and thus of their own disintegration.10
Two caveats are warranted at this juncture. The first one is that historians have named the large strip of land that stretches from the Baltic to the Balkans and which until the First World War was divided between the Central European empires—Russia, Austria (respectively, after 1867, the Dual Monarchy Austria–Hungary), and Germany (Prussia and, after 1871, the German Reich or Empire)—as “lands between,” “borderlands,” “frontier zones,” “shatter zones of empires,” “no place,” or “cauldron of conflict,” thus underlining the conflicting character of these contact zones prone to cultural, political, and ethnical dynamics.11 But although this geopolitical condition seemed to spell trouble, during the long nineteenth century Central and Eastern Europe was not characterized by a constant antagonism of imperial suppression and national insurrection, as the depiction of Habsburg Austria as a “prison of nations” might suggest.
The recent concept of “nationalizing empires” and “imperial nationalism” accommodates this thought, stressing rather the interdependence and entanglement of imperial and national aspirations. In that light, one might legitimately ask if empire and nation state possibly “corresponded with each other and were far from mutually exclusive”.12 During the long nineteenth century, empires embarked on nationalizing projects, and national movements developed within imperial frameworks. The best example is the German Reich, which in 1871 was founded as a German nation state, but clearly showed imperial ambitions. It was, according to Jürgen Osterhammel, not yet the age of nation states, but of nations and empires.13 The interpretation that empires were not per se “bad” and nation states “good” is strongly supported by the fact that from the moment of their formation in the wake of the Great War, the Central European “self-styled nation states” acted “simply as little empires.”14 At a distance, it seems that the most striking difference between them and the empires they had emerged from was that they were democracies without emperors—although they all notably developed strong tendencies to authoritarian rule in the 1920s, following a continental trend.
Be this as it may, it is important to keep in mind that between the Congress of Vienna and the outbreak of the First World War, Central and Eastern Europe witnessed longer periods of internal and external peace than during the preceding centuries. To imagine Central and Eastern Europe before 1914 as an area shaken by all kinds of armed conflicts simply would be misleading. Physical violence was not a formative experience constantly brutalizing the populace settled in the lands belted by the rivers Danube, Oder, and Dnieper. Although aware of the swift changes of the modern world, most people here lived their lives undisturbed by brutal state intervention or physical attacks by neighbors of different faith, language, political preference, or national affiliation. While the two empires whose territories covered most of the region lost wars outside the borderlands—Austria the Austro-Prussian War in 1866, Russia the Crimean War of 1853–6 and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5—these military defeats made the borderlands themselves an even more important security belt. Particularly on the Austrian side, this led to inner reforms in order to appease the population—a development that even could be observed in the wake of harsh oppressions of inner resistance. Russian policies were certainly more repressive, yet also anxious not to threaten the fragile balance between outer rule and inner cooperation at their western frontier.15
The second caveat is that one must discern between two different interwoven macro-patterns of the gradual shift which marked the passing of the imperial age and the ascension of modernity in Central and Eastern Europe: the striving for national self-determination on the one hand, and for social equality on the other. Representatives of the state administration and owners of latifundia were faced with demands from larger societal groups for political participation and a fairer distribution of land and wealth. The multinational empires pointing to the monarch as the center of gravitation gave way to other causes worth identifying with and struggling for, such as creating an ethnically homogeneous nation state or the levelling of class distinction. In combination, these two new orientations created a coordinated system mapping out potential lines of confrontation which did not necessarily follow the classic separation of the ruling versus the ruled, but rather splintered the population into political and ethnic factions that either cooperated with or opposed, but rarely ignored each other. Because the historically founded ethnic, linguistic, social, and religious diversity of Central and Eastern Europe already existed before the outbreak of the First World War, the potential for instability and bitter conflicts was much higher here than in other parts of the continent. The drastic changes brought to predominantly premodern agrarian societies by education, urbanization, and industrialization caused further ruptures of the social texture.16 The picture was considerably complicated by the inextricably interwoven ethnic and sociopolitical strife in Central and Eastern Europe at the turn of the century.
In the long run, though, it was these rising tensions between the autocratic rule of the imperial centers and the awakening of cultural and ethno-national self-awareness and class-consciousness at the imperial peripheries which constantly charged the region like a giant accumulator. From time to time this led to a surge of voltage and flying sparks, as the uprisings in partition-era Poland, anti-Jewish pogroms in western Russia, peasant and workers unrest, and the first Russian Revolution and its repercussions further to the west all testify. But until the First World War, “in sum, despite profound socio-economic divisions and ethnic animosities, … the borderlands remained largely violence-free.”17 Only in the course of the First World War, when the iron fist of the empires unclenched and a wave of mass violence swept the region, did the overheated accumulator explode. The result was a total political and geographical reorganization of Central and Eastern Europe, with the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 transforming large parts of Eastern Europe into a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and the triumph of the people’s right to self-determination triggering the mushrooming of democratic nation states in Central Europe between 1918 and 1921. The resurrected Polish state was situated right at the conflux of these two major historical currents. It is therefore not surprising that, given the maze of competing political and social agendas in the imperial borderlands, the concept of a nation state as the political embodiment of a “Polish people” did not materialize by default. First it had to be developed, and then it had to be implemented—against all odds.
REMAKING THE POLISH NATION AND STATE
When the First World War broke out, Poland as a state did not even exist. At the end of the eighteenth century, the weakened Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth—which once had been “the largest realm of early modern Europe”18—had been dismantled by its powerful neighbors, Russia, Austria, and Prussia, as the result of one of the biggest robberies in modern European history.19 The euphemistically called “Partitions of Poland” had been the final point of a century’s negative policy pursued by the Russian Empire in order to weaken the adjacent aristocratic republic, its “hereditary enemy.”20 Each of the partitioning powers annexed territories of former Poland, submitting most of its inhabitants (except, of course, the Russian- and German-speaking minorities in the respective partition zones) to foreign rule. The largest share, about 60 percent of the former Polish state (180,000 square miles stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea), became an integral part of the Russian Empire as its “Western Territory” (Zapadnyĭ Kraĭ), bluntly referred to by Polish native speakers as the “Taken Lands” (Ziemie Zabrane).21
During the Napoleonic Wars, a short-lived “Duchy of Warsaw” (1807–15) was established, and the Code Civil was imported and effective there until 1915. In the course of the Congress of Vienna, where after Napoleon’s fall the Central European map was rearranged, three territorial entities came to life which officially were not part of Russian, Austrian, or Prussian state territory, and where forms of Polish statehood continued to exist for some time.22 An at least partly autonomous “Kingdom of Poland” very soon became a Russian puppet state by the grace of the tsar. After 1863, when the last of several unsuccessful Polish uprisings had been crushed, the Russian administration even deleted any reminiscence to the Polish past from the official terminology, referring to it henceforth simply as the “Vistula Lands” (Privislinskiĭ Kraĭ).23 Cracow, which had been made the “Free City of Cracow” in 1815, was annexed by Austria in 1846; a virtually autonomous “Grand Duchy of Poznań” was erected and dissolved by Prussia along the same timeline. Hence, even any appearance of an independent Polish body politic had been eliminated by the mid-nineteenth century. Russia was now in possession of over 80 percent of the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth (the Vistula Lands included), while Austria held a little more than 10 percent and Prussia a little less than 10 percent of its former territory (see Map 1).24
As much as the notion of Austria as the “prison of nations” is exaggerated, it is fair to say that the image of Russian imperial rule in the Vistula Lands had been exacting, certainly, but not thoroughly despotic. Although ethnic Poles—representing about three-quarters of a population of almost 9.5 million—did not fill the higher echelons of the administration, the deputies of the tsar had little choice but to seek the cooperation of the local elites one way or the other. The main instruments to checkmate the awakening Polish national self-confidence and to bolster the Russian one were censorship and pro-Orthodox religious politics, but these were not used for the implementation of an explicit strategy of rigid “Russification.” After all, in 1913, ethnic Russians still made up only a little more than 1 percent of the population.25
Further to the east, St. Petersburg chose a different path. The Russian Western Territory was a giant melting pot of nationalities. Here, ethnic Poles made up only about 6 percent of the population, in comparison to much larger ethnic groups such as Belarusians (almost one-third of the population, but still lacking a coherent notion of national identity), Lithuanians (almost a quarter), or Latvians (15 percent), Ukrainians (4 percent), Russians (a little more than 3 percent), and Germans (less than 3 percent). Ethnic Jews—who were only allowed to live in an area called the “Pale of Settlement” which covered mostly former Polish territory—made up 5 percent of the population, but often formed a majority in larger cities (as did Poles in the northern governorates of Vilnius and Kaunas), whereas the rural elites were dominated by a few noble Polish landowners, ruling over a mass of non-Polish peasants.26 After 1863, “the Western borderland was imagined on mental maps of the imperial bureaucracy as a site of the fiercest struggle between Russianness and Polishness.”27 As an immediate reaction to the last Polish uprising—and in order to contain the influence of the (Catholic) Polish nobility (szlachta) especially in its southwestern borderlands—the Russian government aimed at strengthening the image of a “triune, all-Russian” (Orthodox) nation (narod), composed of Belarusians, Ukrainians, and Russians, in one stroke multiplying the Russian share of the population by more than ten.28 But all in all, the Russian nationality policy at its western frontiers from the mid-nineteenth century until the outbreak of the First World War remained a balancing act between safeguarding a maximum of Russian national interests while granting a minimum of necessary concessions to other nations within the empire, notably the Poles. It was neither tolerant nor tyrannic, but rather pragmatic, and in comparison with Prussian nationality policies even somewhat moderate.29
On the other hand, the Prussian partition zone—a Polish–German contact zone for centuries—from the very start witnessed a wave of “Germanization” which increased with the foundation of the German Empire in 1871. Here, state policies aimed at national distinction and assimilation of ethnic Poles, who represented one out of three town citizens and three out of five country dwellers, within a total population of almost four million which—with the exception of 1 percent Jews—featured no other considerable ethnic groups. But the discriminating measures had only a contrary effect, reinforcing the strongest Polish nation and identity building process of all three partition zones. Nevertheless, the comparably higher standard of living and the organization of Polish modern representations such as clubs, publishing houses, or workers’ unions along the German model distinguished the Poles on Prussian territory materially and alienated them mentally from their co-nationals in Austria and Russia.30
Concurrently, by contrast, the Austrian share of the spoils, the multi-ethnic province of Galicia, was granted autonomous status in 1868 and henceforth ruled by members of the Polish aristocracy loyal to the emperor, with Polish as the official language, tacitly neglecting the wants of the other ethnic group of about the same size, the Ukrainians, and of the remaining 10 percent Jews out of a total population of over seven million. Galicia thus became simultaneously the hotbed of Polish national movements and the arena of Polish–Ukrainian animosities, which were consciously enhanced by a Viennese policy of divide et impera.31 The stronghold of Polish nationalism at their border irritated tsarist militaries to the extent that they openly thought about annexing “Carpathian Ruthenia”—the part of Galicia inhabited mainly by ethnic Ukrainians—to Russia. “The former Polish state collapsed during the course of three partitions,” noted General Staff officer Nikolai Obruchev in 1885, “but the Polish nation did not die … We have not yet managed to break the Polish spirit, neither in Vilnius nor in Kiev … Galicia today is a miniature version of the whole of former Poland, with its Pani [Polish masters] and Jews trading the Russian [Ukrainian] nation like cattle.”32 Nevertheless, recent research relativizes this dark picture. In 1914, a sort of compromise between Poles and Ukrainians was reached in the form of a new electoral law. What is even more important is the fact that ethnic differentiation was rather a side effect of this initiative, which mainly aimed at “preserving and extending both the national and social status quo.” It proved that Galicia was all but a godforsaken region on the lee side of modernity33—that is, before it was heavily hit by the devastations of the First World War.34
When the Polish state re-emerged in the form of the Second Republic in November 1918, not only nationalist zealots might have interpreted it as the result of an unbowed spirit of Polish national unity which had survived even the darkest years of partition and lack of freedom. In reality, visionaries of an independent Polish state at the turn of the century faced extraordinary problems: About fifteen million people who spoke Polish, or who saw themselves or were regarded as Polish, were ruled by one of three non-Polish imperial governments.35 How many of them were loyal to their respective monarch is impossible to say, but virtually none of them had personally experienced a period of Polish sovereignty deserving the name. The partition zones were not only divided geographically by imperial frontiers, but also culturally by over one hundred years of separate development, causing enormous differences regarding for example the state of modernization, literacy, or freedom of speech.36 The overwhelming majority of Poles at that time—about 80 percent—were peasants. We know little of their attitude towards independence and state building at the turn of the century.37 Since literacy often went hand in hand with a certain political engagement, it is not surprising that the memoirs of Polish peasants from the time of the Polish uprisings against the tsarist regime in Poland reflect a dedication to the national cause.38 But when it comes to the overwhelming majority of illiterate peasants, the writing professions face a myriad of intrinsic problems. As Stefan Kieniewicz admits, “our judgements on the national consciousness of the peasant before his liberation will always be more or less hypothetical.”39 Historians in the past have generally accredited a certain dedication of the Polish peasant to the nationalist cause, but have differed regarding its evolution and extent.40 According to the findings of Keely Stauter-Halsted and Kai Struve, Polish peasants in western Galicia were more politicized, while their peers in eastern Galicia were rather indifferent to political matters.41 It is safe to assume that comparable discrepancies were measurable within and between the other partition zones as well. Władysław Reymont’s Nobel Prize-winning novel “Peasants” (Chłopi), published between 1904 and 1909, describes the rural life in the Russian partition zone as dominated by the national progression of seasons. The four parts of the book are named after the seasons of the year. Adding religious rites as another formative pattern of social life, Reymont invites us into a traditional universe of its own, almost devoid of reference to history, politics, or social change, in which a common dialect is the idiom of the characters as well as of the narrator.42
The notion of a nation as a homogeneous group sharing the same language, ideas, values, and political aims is a misinterpretation which confounds the projection with the projected. Of course, the liberal arts have already tagged and tackled this basic problem. The political scientist Benedict Anderson tellingly has named this phenomenon the “imagined communities.” As soon as the concept of the “nation” exceeds the confines of a space where everybody knows everybody, it has to be imagined. In historical praxis, this leads to a constellation where the unity of the many is imagined by a few. National discourses have always been developed by tiny intellectual societal groups, which first tried to define the national mass and then to convince that mass of what it—in their eyes—actually was. The Central European rural masses of the outgoing nineteenth century orientated their lives mostly according to the world as they knew, saw, and understood it. When confronted with the modern national projects of the mostly urban intellectual elites, the reaction often was indifference or even outright rejection.43 The assumption that a nation in a predefined form exists a priori and composes itself quasi-automatically behind its national leaders is usually not much more than their own romantic vision and wishful thinking. This does not mean, though, that nations are only dreams. It does mean—as Timothy Snyder has taught us in his brilliant study on Lithuania, Belarusia, Ukraine, and Poland from early modern to our times—that they do not exist as a natural given, but that they have to be constructed.44
The dream of sovereignty for a Polish nation was primarily preserved within the aristocratic milieu. During the nineteenth century, this group had successfully mutated into an “intelligentsia [that] preserved a uniform code of values and style and a network of social connections across the partition-borders [which] was to prove immensely important.”45 Over the second half of the century, the developing intelligentsia opened up to educated sons of the non-noble urban and rural elites.46 The old conservative elites hoped for concessions and compromised themselves by offering their services to the respective partitioning power. On the other hand, the younger set produced mainly two divergent types of Polish nationalism: one inclusive, looking backwards, and the other exclusive, looking forwards. The first one was oriented towards the pre-partition multi-ethnic Polish Commonwealth with its “nobility of [predominantly] Polish and polonized Lithuanian, Belarusian, Ukrainian, German, and even Tatar, Armenian, and apostate-Jewish stock” which had traditionally and officially communicated in Latin.47
Since the nation was equivalent to this nobility, but much less so with the peasants and townsfolk, revisions to this antique understanding of the Polish nation were highly necessary. To gain credence in an age of mass participation in politics and warfare, it had to be democratized, or better: socialized. In consequence, the Polish Socialist Party (Polska Partia Socjalistyczna, PPS) under the leadership of the revolutionary and military autodidact Józef Piłsudski headed in the direction of a Socialist Republic dominated by ethnic Poles, but open for participation by other ethnic groups such as Lithuanians, Belarusians, Ukrainians, Jews, or Germans. The more exclusive form of Polish nationalism favored by the Polish National Democracy (Narodowa Demokracja, short “Endecja” after the Polish pronunciation of its acronym ND) headed by the right-wing intellectual politician Roman Dmowski drew on the ideas of social Darwinism which was en vogue all over Western Europe and in the United States by that time. They believed that the multi-ethnic fabric of the old Polish Commonwealth had caused its downfall, and therefore envisaged the modern nation as the entirety of, as an Endecja slogan put it, “Poles of purest blood.” Other ethnic groups were to have no say in a future Polish nation state, and socialists were regarded as “Jews, foreigners and social misfits.”48
After the war broke out, Polish statehood was soon on the agenda once more—not only as a theoretical concept, but as a political option in different layouts. Between 1915 and 1918, the Central Powers replaced Russian rule in Central Europe. The Baltic coast and other parts of the Western Territory were brought under direct rule of the “Supreme Command of All German Forces in the East” (Ober Ost). In the Vistula Lands, a German and an Austrian General Government (based in Warsaw and Lublin respectively) were established, which both allowed for some degree of Polish self-government.49 On November 5, 1916, both emperors even declared the re-erection of a Polish monarchy a political goal. Since, in the same breath, they called their Polish subjects to arms, the “Two Emperors’ Declaration” in favor of a “Kingdom of Poland” exposed itself as a cheap trick which failed to mobilize the masses.50 Still, in 1917 the occupants called into life a Regency Council to run state business until the election of a Polish king. In his earlier New Year’s message, the Russian tsar—who by that time had lost all his prewar Polish possessions—had countered the Central Powers’ propaganda with the promise to reunite the three former patrician zones. In the same month, US President Woodrow Wilson advertised the erection of an independent Polish state as the thirteenth of his Fourteen Points. And while the Allies and the Central Powers were eager to prove how much they cared for future Polish statehood, it was the formation of their own armed forces—the famous Legions and other combat units—that raised the Poles’ hopes to achieve independence not by anybody’s grace, but by their own efforts.
And indeed, after the collapse of the Western Front and the abrupt termination of German and Austrian rule in Central Europe in late 1918, armed clashes sprang up over the redistribution of the Central European map. The conditions were ripe for Piłsudski and Dmowski to partially realize their respective utopian projects for a Polish nation within the borders of a Polish state. Given their contrasting concepts of nationality, they were not partners, but fierce rivals. Both statesmen descended from petty gentry, but Piłsudski’s family roots lay near Vilnius in the Lithuanian part of the former Polish Commonwealth, whereas Dmowski was born in central Poland, in a suburb of Warsaw, to be exact. Piłsudski—a man with a legendary paramilitary and military record—as the Commander in Chief of the Polish armed forces, sought to conquer and secure a territory for a future Polish federal state ideally corresponding to that of the former commonwealth. Dmowski—a political activist who had mastered an impressive number of foreign languages—as the head of the “Polish National Committee” (Komitet Narodowe Polski)51 advocated for international recognition of a Polish core state with a predominantly ethnic Polish population in the couloirs and back rooms of the Paris Peace Conference. Notably, how Dmowski and his fellow campaigners understood the term “ethnicity” was that it mainly encompassed a commonly shared religion, culture, and language. Although they left the door ajar for other ethnic groups willing to assimilate, they practically erected an almost insurmountable boundary around the Polish nation, to which, for example, Jews would never belong.52 Political science today describes both statesmen’s different views on nationalism as a contrast between “civic” and “ethnic” nationalism.53
Nevertheless, the difference between Piłsudski’s and Dmowski’s positions was not so diametrically opposed as it seems at first sight: “Both were anti-communist, both advocated national solidarity, both were lukewarm in their support for liberal democracy, and both desired a strong nation state, based on Catholic traditions, headed by an authoritarian leader.”54 Recent studies have added further evidence that the antagonism between the two statesmen was not as developed as historiography usually has it, especially if it comes to Piłsudski’s role: The concept of his “Belweder camp” for a Central European confederation remained awkwardly shallow in 1918–20, his ambitions were clearly imperialistic, and he never foresaw equal treatment for the federation’s members.55 This means that the supremacy of Poles in a future nation state for both politicians was a matter of course. But Piłsudski and Dmowski never found a common language on how to reach this goal, and to Poland’s misfortune their personal feud impeded its two major political camps from acting united even in times of greatest trouble and danger. “If only they could have been separated in time!” exclaimed later Prime Minister of the Polish Republic in Exile, Stanisław Mackiewicz, in 1941. “The fact that these people coexisted in the same era contributed to a weakened Poland.”56
The Second Polish Republic that evolved from the redistribution battles for the former imperial lands was a crossbreed of Piłsudski’s and Dmowski’s visions. Territorially, it expanded over the region inhabited almost exclusively by ethnic Poles, but a confederation with its neighbors to the north and east failed to see the light of day, and diplomatic relations with Lithuania and Ukraine were instead strained for decades to come. Ethnically, it claimed to represent first and foremost the Polish majority of the population, but it was engaged in enormous inner struggles to come to terms with its large Ukrainian, Jewish, and German minorities, which did not ebb away, but were even aggravated in the 1930s.
WHO IS IN AND WHO IS OUT?
The postwar dilemma of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe was that its materializing states hosted up to a dozen different ethnic groups, but were meant to be the project of and represent only one of them. True enough, there had been attempts at building states for several ethnicities, the two prime examples being Yugoslavia (which translates as “South Slav State”) and Czechoslovakia. Yugoslavia was indeed home to Serbs, Montenegrins, Croats, Bosniaks, Slovenes, Czechs, and Slovaks, which all together made up about 85 percent of the population. But the many other ethnic groups which would not consider themselves as “Slavs” were not reflected in the state’s name.57 In addition, there were long-standing tensions between many of the groups. Serbs and Croats, for example, while representing three-quarters of the Yugoslav people, did not get along well from the very start. Serbs, who had fought the Central Powers, regarded themselves as the winners of the Great War. Croats, on the other hand, who had fought in the ranks of the Habsburg Army, had lost. These two ethnicities were opposites at best and enemies at worst.58 From the beginning, the new republic and its institutions were Serb dominated. From the 1920s, Croats fought a constant battle for federalism, trying to nip in the bud all attempts from Belgrade to centralize the country under Serbian supremacy. Dimitrije Djordjevic has called this paradox of combined ethnic unity and discord “the Yugoslav Phenomenon,” and traced its reverberations into the present: “Bound by South Slavic ethnicity but separated by particular national affiliations, joined by a common language but distinguished by its dialects, united by the need for survival but divided by history, alphabets, religions, and cultures, the Yugoslav phenomenon has been supported and challenged in the past and present by both common and divergent interests of peoples irrevocably mixed, linked as well as opposed to each other.”59 In May 1991, while he was writing these lines, the country was heading into another disastrous civil war which once more revealed the centrifugal forces of ethnic conflict, which are—as our study will show—by no means an exclusive “Yugoslav” phenomenon.
In Czechoslovakia, which also encompassed the two major ethnic groups—making up two-thirds of the population—in the state’s name, lack of equality was the cause of similar ethnic strife, with the Czechs in the position of the Serbs, and the Slovaks in that of the Croats. However, both unanimously regarded the quarter of the country’s inhabitants which made up the German “minority” rather as a residue of the Habsburg ruling elites—and thus an accomplice of Germany and Austria—than as a part of the national project.60 One is compelled to take the fixation of ethnic brotherhood in the state names of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia either as a naive dream of its founders or as sheer propaganda for the Western Powers whose approval for their independence they direly needed. It probably would have been more honest to just call them “Serbia” and “Czechia.”
All other states that found themselves in the former imperial contact zone at war’s end—Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria—chose or kept a name according to the ethnic majorities (therefore also called the “titular nations”) which would dominate the respective country’s politics and fate through the 1920s and 1930s. In almost all of the aforementioned countries, the ratio between the titular nation and the largest ethnic minority was about ten to one or higher. However, the Second Polish Republic’s statistics deviated significantly from this pattern with a ratio of less than five to one (Poles to Ukrainians), with almost one-third of the population not being Poles.61 Whereas in Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia the sheer number of Croats and Slovaks would ensure them respectively a certain measure of political participation,62 Poland’s minorities were too small to hold their ground against Warsaw’s paternalism, but too large to be marginalized. Thus, it was obvious from the beginning that the formation of an ethnically “Polish” state would not only imply severe external conflicts with the emerging neighbor states, but also internal conflicts with the ethnic minorities, and most probably more so than in the other countries of Central and Eastern Europe. This complex starting situation made it a challenging task to define the citizens of the nascent Second Republic. Who belonged to it, and who was to be regarded as an outsider?
Since the early twentieth century, the National Democrats were unanimous on the matter: In their eyes, in order to survive, a future Polish state had to be founded on the principle of Polish ethnic supremacy. In Roman Dmowski’s words, “our racial material, if it is not used quickly by Polish civilization for the creation of a Polish national identity and Polish political power, will be swept up by neighbouring cultures and remade by them … The surface of the Earth is not a museum for preserving ethnographic specimens intact, whole and each in its own place … Nations, in their struggle to bring out the greatest energy from within themselves, to create the greatest amount of this new sort of life, encountering on the way tribes lacking in individuality and creative abilities, creative as a people and not as individuals, without the resources to take part on their own account in the life of history, absorb them, bring them into their sort of life, using them as material for their own creative energy.”63
By its very nature, the minority question was practically linked to Polish territorial aspirations, especially in the east. In 1918–19, the leadership of the young state from both sides of the political divide unanimously aimed at controlling large tracts of the Polish eastern borderlands (Kresy Wschodnie, short: Kresy), which historically had been part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and hosted large Lithuanian, Belarusian, Ukrainian, and Jewish populations. What they were split over was how to establish Polish supremacy, and how far it should reach. While Piłsudski’s “federal” concept foresaw cooperation with the neighbors in the east under Polish leadership, the “ethnocentrist” concept of the National Committee aimed at their forceful assimilation. As a result, wherever the arm of the Polish military and civil administration actually reached in the Kresy, it was mainly the Endecja which pursued a program of strict Polonization, while Piłsudskites as a rule stood for a moderate and inclusive policy towards the non-Polish ethnic groups.64
These opposed stances led to a paradox which is often overlooked in historiography. Although at first sight the Belweder’s “federal” concept appears tolerant in a modern way, in its core there was an imperialist twist, aimed at expanding its borders as far east as possible. The “ethnocentrist” concept of the National Committee, although chauvinist and outmoded from today’s point of view, aimed at limiting the Polish sphere to areas where the “integration” of minorities was regarded as feasible. Although not genuinely intended, practically this meant national self-determination for many Lithuanians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians outside Poland instead of their forceful assimilation.65 It should not be overlooked, though, that in the west, Dmowski’s national democratic hard-liners abandoned this line of argument and advocated the most fervent anti-German and annexationist measures. In any case, the ethnic composition of the Second Polish Republic was not so much decided by political visions, be they left or right, but by the border struggles between 1918 and 1921. At their end, millions of its new citizens were members of minorities.
To fix citizenship in a future Polish state to the category of “Polishness” alone was highly irrational anyhow, and not only because of the impossibility of clearly defining it, but also because this would have meant to either disenfranchise or expatriate a third of the people living within the new state borders—a terrifying vision, if one thinks about it. Only a few years later, the Greek–Turkish War (1919–22) resulted in a human catastrophe of hitherto unknown dimension. About 1.6 million Greeks and Turks were forced to leave their homes and to cross the new border, as agreed upon in the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. The immediate consequences were disastrous: diseases, horrible living conditions, and high mortality rates amongst the refugees (or better: expellees). Philipp Ther has made it clear that this was not what such events are often called—a breach of civilization. On the contrary, this kind of engineered ethnic cleansing was “clearly a feature of European modernity” and the dreadful, but logical consequence of ethnic nation-state building. It must be remembered that this population exchange was only accepted under the impression of the extreme brutality of the Greek–Turkish War, and it concerned, in a pejorative Western view, “only” the Balkans.66
Such a scenario was unthinkable in the heart of Europe only a few years earlier. In his utopian essay “The National Principle and the Exchange of People” (1917), the German–Jewish journalist Siegfried Lichtenstaedter (who often published under the pseudonym Dr. Mehemed Emin Effendi) had envisaged only the voluntary movement of millions in order to ease ethnic tensions.67 In the case of Poland, furthermore, the number of people who as “non-Poles” would have had to leave Poland for another land after 1918 would have exceeded the numbers in Asia Minor by the factor of five. Apart from the fact that the forced movements of millions of people were yet unheard of in 1918, Poland already faced a refugee catastrophe with millions of people leaving civil-war-torn Russia westward. There was no way of even thinking about actively transporting a part of the population out of the Second Republic’s borders while peace was still pending and the country was dependent on outside help even to feed its people. Trains were fully utilized to transport its soldiers to the front or to evacuate its own population from the advancing enemy armies. On top of that, the material war damage the country had suffered was beyond imagination. Other forms of transportation were limited by the destruction of roads and the lack of fuel.
Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Romania—the three Central and Southeastern European states whose ethnic composition was almost as mixed as the Polish one—equally had to deal with the problem of how to treat the significant number of people who lived within their state’s borders, but who were not part of the titular nation. It soon became apparent that the romantic ideal of one state territory for one nation was impossible to realize in the Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European melting pot as long as the nation was defined by ethnicity. This was a constant bone of contention in Paris, where the future constitution of the nation states which superseded the empires was discussed in 1919–20.
However, by that time, this was already the prevailing definition all over the Western hemisphere, and therefore a point of no return. In North America, the descendants of European settlers had even killed most of the native Indians and obstinately kept Black Americans from achieving citizens’ rights, while Britons, French, and Italians established this kind of racist rule first and foremost in their colonies all over the globe. The Western powers could simply not argue against a principle they had so much internalized and were still implementing themselves. Nevertheless, they foresaw trouble and the danger of future wars in the middle of the European continent if the gap between citizenship and nationality was not bridged, because there, as Dieter Gosewinkel has stated lately, “the determination of state affiliation, whether as self-designation or as an attribution, inevitably triggered conflicts of decision and loyalty, as well as cultural tensions, in the face of conflicting neighbors. It forced political confessions and options, if necessary to leave an old country or to adapt to a new, culturally and linguistically foreign statehood.”68 Such conflicts, which were prone to threaten the hard-won peace, had to be domesticized one way or another.
What the “Big Four”—the United States, England, France, and Italy—finally came up with was a legal construct commonly known as the “Minority Treaties” for Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Romania, which they had to ratify in order to gain international recognition.69 The treaties were a rather pragmatic attempt to solve the paradox of the nation state of several nations and level ethnic difference by jurisdiction. The signatory Central and Southeastern European states were obliged to accept all persons who lived within their frontiers as citizens, and those persons who did not want to become citizens of the state they were living in had to leave the country within the course of two years. Special clauses protected those citizens who chose to stay but did not belong to the titular nation—the minorities—against discrimination and state persecution, and granted them a certain amount of autonomy in the fields of education, use of language, customs, and religious practices. These rights were guaranteed by the international community, and breaches of the clauses could be brought before its newly founded body, the League of Nations.70 The Big Four themselves obviously regarded it as superfluous to commit themselves to similar regulations, a fact that unsurprisingly incurred their Central and Southeastern European partners’ deep disapproval.
1 Gustave LeBon, Psychology of the Great War: The First World War and Its Origins (London: Transaction Publishers, 1999) (first pub. 1916), 27.
2 Memoir of a peasant from the Łask district, 1933, published as memoir no. 7 in Ludwik Krzywicki (ed.), Pamiętniki chłopów, 2 vols (Warsaw: Instytut Gospodarstwa Społecznego, 1935–6), vol. 2, 62–79, quote: 72.
3 Ralph Schattkowsky, “Eine Autonomie mit Nachwirkungen: Regionale Identitäten in Galizien 1867–1918,” in Regionale Bewegungen und Regionalismen in europäischen Zwischenräumen seit der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts, edited by Philipp Ther and Holm Sundhaussen (Marburg: Herder-Institut, 2003), 43–61; Ralph Schattkowsky and Michael G. Müller (eds), Identitätenwandel und nationale Mobilisierung in Regionen ethnischer Diversität: Ein regionaler Vergleich zwischen Westpreußen und Galizien am Ende des 19. und Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts (Marburg: Herder-Institut, 2004); Sheila Fitzpatrick, Tear Off the Masks!: Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); James E. Bjork, Neither German nor Pole: Catholicism and National Indifference in a Central European Borderland (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2008); Andrii Danylenko, “Iazychie and Surzhyk: Mixing Languages and Identities in the Ukrainian Borderlands,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Slavic Languages, Identities and Borders, edited by Tomasz Kamusella, Motoki Nomachi, and Catherine Gibson (Baskingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 81–100; Tomasz Kamusella, “The Changing Lattice of Languages, Borders, and Identities in Silesia,” in ibid., 185–205.
4 The term stems from the Latin word nation (birth), as the Polish word for nation, naród, stems from the verb narodzić (to give birth to).
5 Although the origin of the quote is unclear, it is often—probably erroneously—attributed to Louis XIV of France (1638–1715), who upon his death told his followers: “I am going away, but the State will always remain” (Je m’en vais, mais l’État demeurera toujours); see Philippe de Courcillon, Mémoire sur la mort de Louis XIV (Paris: Libraire Firmin Didot Frères, Fils & Cie, 1858), 24. He thus rather saw the state represented in the royal court and its institutions than in his body; see Klaus Malettke, Ludwig XIV. von Frankreich: Leben, Politik und Leistung (Göttingen: Muster-Schmidt, 1994), 69–70. Three-quarters of a century later, the French Revolution proved his last words wrong.
6 Frederick [Friedrich] Schiller, The Works: Historical Dramas etc. (London: George Bell & Sons, 1885), 109, 113.
7 Eric D. Weitz, “From the Vienna to the Paris System: International Politics and the Entangled Histories of Human Rights, Forced Deportations, and Civilizing Missions,” American Historical Review 113, no. 5 (2008): 1313–43.
8 Brian Porter, When Nationalism Began to Hate: Imagining Modern Politics in Nineteenth-Century Poland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
9 Andrea Komlosy, “Imperial Cohesion, Nation-Building, and Regional Integration in the Habsburg Monarchy,” in Nationalizing Empires, edited by Stefan Berger and Alexei Miller (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2015), 369–427.
10 Aviel Roshwald, Ethnic Nationalism and the Fall of Empires: Central Europe, the Middle East and Russia (London: Routledge, 2000), 7–33.
11 Alan Palmer, The Lands Between: A History of East-Central Europe Since the Congress of Vienna (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1970); Alexander Victor Prusin, The Lands Between: Conflict in the East European Borderlands, 1870–1992 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Prusin, Nationalizing a Borderland; Wilson, Frontiers of Violence; Julia Eichenberg and John Paul Newman, “Aftershocks: Violence in Dissolving Empires after the First World War,” Contemporary European History 19, no. 3 (2010): 183–94; Omer Bartov and Eric D. Weitz (eds), Shatterzone of Empires: Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013); Kate Brown, A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderlands to Soviet Heartland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Edward D. Wynot, Caldron of Conflict: Eastern Europe, 1918–1945 (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1999).
12 Joachim von Puttkamer, review of Berger and Miller (eds), Nationalizing Empires, in Hungarian Historical Review 5, no. 2 (2016): 438–41, here: 438.
13 Jörn Leonhard and Ulrike von Hirschhausen (eds), Comparing Empires: Encounters and Transfers in the Long Nineteenth Century (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012); Stefan Berger and Alexei Miller, “Building Nations In and Within Empires: A Reassessment,” in Berger and Miller (eds), Nationalizing Empires, 1–30; Philipp Ther, “‘Imperial Nationalism’ as Challenge for the Study of Nationalism,” in ibid., 573–91; Stefan Berger, “Building the Nation Among Visions of German Empire,” in ibid., 247–308; Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 392–468.
14 Judson, The Habsburg Empire, 451, referring to a line of argumentation that has been developed already by contemporaries; see Oscar Jászi, The Dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966) (first pub. 1929), 453–4.
15 Prusin, The Lands Between, 18–27.
16 Borodziej, Geschichte Polens im 20. Jahrhundert, 13–23.
17 Prusin, The Lands Between, 34, quote: 40.
18 Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 1.
19 Norman Davies, God’s Playground: A History of Poland, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), vol. 1: The Origins to 1795, 386.
20 Rolf, Imperiale Herrschaft im Weichselland, 25.
21 Borodziej, Geschichte Polens im 20. Jahrhundert, 24; Andrzej Jezierski, Historia Polski w liczbach, 2 vols (Warsaw: Zakład Wydawnistw Statystycznych, 2003), vol. 1: Państwo—Społeczeństwo, 21, 147.
22 Eberhard Straub, Der Wiener Kongress: Das große Fest und die Neuordnung Europas (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2014), 118–20. The special issue of the Zeitschrift für Weltgeschichte 16, no. 2 (2015) focuses on the global dimensions of the Congress of Vienna and not on its immediate impact on Central Europe.
23 Rolf, Imperiale Herrschaft im Weichselland, 39–82.
24 Borodziej, Geschichte Polens im 20. Jahrhundert, 24; Jezierski, Historia Polski w liczbach, vol. 1, 21, 147.
25 Rolf, Imperiale Herrschaft im Weichselland, 415–25; Borodziej, Geschichte Polens im 20. Jahrhundert, 28.
26 Figures according to Prusin, The Lands Between, 14, table 1.1. (without Bessarabia).
27 Alexei Miller, “The Romanov Empire and the Russian Nation,” in Berger and Miller (eds), Nationalizing Empires, 309–68, 330.
28 Faith Hillis, “Ukrainophile Activism and Imperial Governance in Russia’s Southwestern Borderlands,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 13, no. 2 (2012): 301–26.
29 Theodore R. Weeks, Nation and State in Late Imperial Russia: Nationalism and Russification on the Western Frontier, 1863–1914 (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2008), 198.
30 Borodziej, Geschichte Polens im 20. Jahrhundert, 39–42; Berger, “Building the Nation Among Visions of German Empire,” 252–3; Volkmann, Die Polenpolitik des Kaiserreichs.
31 Borodziej, Geschichte Polens im 20. Jahrhundert, 14, 34–5; Komlosy, “Imperial Cohesion, Nation-Building, and Regional Integration in the Habsburg Monarchy,” 400–1; Schattkowsky, “Eine Autonomie mit Nachwirkungen”; Serhy Yekelchyk, Ukraine: Birth of a Modern Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 61–4.
32 Memorandum of Nikolai Obruchev, 1885, discussion and extracts (translated into Polish) in Igor Torbakow, “IV Rozbiór Polski w końcu XIX wieku,” Zeszyty Historyczne, no. 122 (1997): 230–6, quote: 233–4; Russian original in Istochnik. Documents of Russian History 13, no. 6 (1994): 4–21, quote: 7–8.
33 Börries Kuzmany, “Der Galizische Ausgleich als Beispiel moderner Nationalitätenpolitik?,” in Galizien. Peripherie der Moderne—Moderne der Peripherie?, edited by Elisabeth Haid, Stephanie Weismann, and Burkhard Wöller (Marburg: Herder-Institut, 2013), 123–41, quote: 140.
34 Tomasz Kargol, Odbudowa Galicji ze zniszczeń wojennych w latach 1914–1918 (Cracow: Historia Iagellonica, 2012).
35 Prusin, The Lands Between, 14, table 1.1; Borodziej, Geschichte Polens im 20. Jahrhundert, 28; Rudolf A. Mark, Galizien unter österreichischer Herrschaft: Verwaltung, Kirche, Bevölkerung (Marburg: Herder-Institut, 1994), 80; Kaiserliches Statistisches Amt (ed.), Die Volkszählung am 1. Dezember 1900 im Deutschen Reich, 2 vols (Berlin: Puttkammer & Mülbrecht, 1903), vol. 1, 117.
36 Borodziej, Geschichte Polens im 20. Jahrhundert, 23–52.
37 Jan Molenda, “Transformations in the Social Structure and in the Consciousness and Aspirations of the Polish Peasants at the Turn of the 20th Century,” Acta Poloniae Historica 57 (1988): 117–36.
38 Krzysztof Dunin-Wąsowicz, “Świadomość narodowa chłopów w świetle pamiętników w okresie powstań narodowowyzwoleńczych,” Acta Universitatis Lodziensis—Folia Historica 45 (1992): 87–93.
39 Stefan Kieniewicz, “Le développement de la conscience nationale polonaise au XIXe siècle,” Acta Poloniae Historica 19 (1968): 37–48, here: 43.
40 Stanisław Grabski, Myśli o dziejowej drodze Polski (Glasgow: Książnica Polska, 1944), 154–5; Molenda, Chłopi, naród, niepodległość.
41 Keely Stauter-Halsted, The Nation in the Village: The Genesis of Peasant National Identity in Austrian Poland, 1848–1914 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); Kai Struve, Bauern und Nation in Galizien: Über Zugehörigkeit und soziale Emanzipation im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005); Kai Struve, “Polish Peasants in Eastern Galicia: Indifferent to the Nation or Pillars of Polishness?: National Attitudes in the Light of Józef Chałasiński’s Collection of Peasant Youth Memoirs,” Acta Poloniae Historica 109 (2014): 37–59.
42 Władysław Stanisław Reymont, The Peasants (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1925).
43 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006); Tara Zahra, “Imagined Non-Communities: National Indifference as a Category of Historical Analysis,” Slavic Review 69, no. 1 (2010): 93–119.
44 Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations.
45 Joseph Rothschild, East Central Europe Between the Two World Wars (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1992), 28.
46 More details on the development of a Polish national consciousness in the nineteenth century are given by Tadeusz Łepkowski, “La formation de la nation polonaise moderne dans les conditions d’un pays démembré,” Acta Poloniae Historica 19 (1968): 18–36.
47 Rothschild, East Central Europe Between the Two World Wars, 27. For more on nation building in the Polish part of the confederation, see Sławomir Gawlas, “Die mittelalterliche Nationenbildung am Beispiel Polens,” in Mittelalterliche nationes—neuzeitliche Nationen. Probleme der Nationenbildung in Europa, edited by Almut Bues and Rex Rexheuser (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1995), 121–43; for the Lithuanian part, see Mathias Niendorf, Das Großfürstentum Litauen: Studien zur Nationsbildung in der Frühen Neuzeit (1569–1795) (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2010).
48 Kossert, “Founding Father of Modern Poland and Nationalistic Antisemite: Roman Dmowski,” 92, 96. For a more detailed analysis of Piłsudski’s and Dmowski’s differing concepts of Polish nationalism prior to 1914 see Roshwald, Ethnic Nationalism and the Fall of Empires, 36–42.
49 On German rule in Ober Ost see Vejas G. Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity and German Occupation in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Robert Nelson, “Utopias of Open Space: Forced Population Transfer Fantasies during the First World War,” in Legacies of Violence: Eastern Europe’s First World War, edited by Jochen Böhler, Włodzimierz Borodziej, and Joachim von Puttkamer (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2014), 113–27. On the territory of former Congress Poland see Jonathan E. Gumz, “Losing Control: The Norm of Occupation in Eastern Europe during the First World War,” in ibid., 69–87; Stephan Lehnstaedt, “Fluctuating between ‘Utilisation’ and Exploitation: Occupied East Central Europe during the First World War,” in ibid., 89–112; Cezary Król, “Besatzungsherrschaft in Polen im Ersten und im Zweiten Weltkrieg: Charakteristik und Wahrnehmung,” in Erster Weltkrieg, Zweiter Weltkrieg. Ein Vergleich, edited by Bruno Thoss and Hans-Erich Volkmann (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2002), 577–91; Arkadiusz Stempin, “Deutsche Besatzungsmacht und Zivilbevölkerung in Polen: Juden und Deutsche im Vergleich,” in Besetzt, interniert, deportiert. Der Erste Weltkrieg und die deutsche, jüdische, polnische und ukrainische Zivilbevölkerung im östlichen Europa, edited by Alfred Eisfeld (Essen: Klartext, 2013), 153–72.
50 Jan Snopko, “Werbunek do Wojska Polskiego na terenie Królestwa po akcie 5 listopada 1916 roku (XI 1916 – V 1917),” Studia i Materiały do Historii Wojskowości 42 (2005): 133–53.
51 The first legitimate representation of Polish statehood, founded in 1917 in Lausanne by the Endecja.
52 Porter, When Nationalism Began to Hate, 189–232; Krzywiec, Chauvinism, Polish Style, 93–140; Piotr Madajczyk, Marzenie o narodzie doskonałym: Między biopolityką a etnopolityką (Warsaw: Neriton, 2017), 57–8, 68–9. Marek J. Chodakiewicz, Wojciech J. Muszyński, and Jolanta Mysiakowska-Muszyńska (eds), Polska dla Polakow!: Kim byli i są polscy narodowcy (Poznań: Zysk i S-ka, 2015) argue more from the Endecja’s perspective, but omit the movements anti-Semitic stance.
53 Brykczynski, “A Poland for the Poles?”
54 Kossert, “Founding Father of Modern Poland and Nationalistic Antisemite: Roman Dmowski,” 97.
55 Conrad, “Vom Ende der Föderation.”
56 Stanisław Mackiewicz, Historja Polski od 11 listopada 1918 r. do 17 września 1939 r. (London: Kolin, 1941), 34, equally cited in Ryszard Kaczmarski, “Romana Dmowskiego spotkania z Józefem Piłsudskim,” Glaukopis no. 5–6 (2006): 222–37, here: 222.
57 Rothschild, East Central Europe Between the Two World Wars, 203, lists Germans, Magyars, Romanians and Vlachs, Albanians, Turks, Gypsies, and “Other.”
58 John Paul Newman, Yugoslavia in the Shadow of War: Veterans and the Limits of State Building, 1903–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 147–84.
59 Dimitrije Djordjevic, “The Yugoslav Phenomen,” in The Columbia History of Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century, edited by Joseph Held (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 306–44, here: 316–19, quote: 306. Percentages according to Rothschild, East Central Europe Between the Two World Wars, 203.
60 Sharon L. Wolchik, “Czechoslovakia,” in Held (ed.), The Columbia History of Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century, 119–63, here: 124–7; Roshwald, Ethnic Nationalism and the Fall of Empires, 42–6. Percentages according to Rothschild, East Central Europe Between the Two World Wars, 89.
61 Lithuania (1923) 11.1:1 (1,701,863 Lithuanians to 153,743 Jews); Estonia (1922) 10.6:1 (969,976 Estonians to 91,109 Russians); Latvia (1920) 12.6:1 (1,161,404 Latvians to 91,477 Russians); Hungary (1920) 13:1 (7,156,727 Magyars to 551,624 Germans); Romania (1930) 9.1:1 (12,981,324 Romanians to 1,425,507 Magyars). The ratio was lower in Bulgaria (1920) 7.5:1 (4,041,276 Bulgarians to 542,904 Turks), but still significantly higher than in Poland (1921) 4.8:1 (18,814,239 Poles to 3,898,431 Ukrainians/Ruthenians).
62 Yugoslavia (1918): 1.6:1 (4,665,851 Serbs to 2,856,551 Croats). There are no detailed statistics for the ratio between Czechs and Slovaks in interwar Czechoslovakia, which was roughly 2:1, see Charles Krupnick, Almost NATO: Partners and Players in Central and Eastern European Security (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 48. The census deliberately did not differentiate between both ethnic groups to underline the special status of the “state forming people” in contrast to, for example, the Germans, who even outnumbered the Slovaks in 1921; see Mary Heimann, Czechoslovakia: The State that Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 65.
63 Roman Dmowski, Myśli nowoczesnego Polaka (Lwów: Altenberg, 1907) (first pub. 1903), 126, 200. English translation according to Krzywiec, Chauvinism, Polish Style, 436–7.
64 Joanna Gierowska-Kałłaur, Zarząd Cywilny Ziem Wschodnich, 19 lutego 1919–9 września 1920 (Warsaw: Neriton, 2003), 49–55.
65 The issue was discussed at length during the session of the National Committee in Paris on March 2, 1919; see protocol and annex in Marek Jabłonowski (ed.), Komitet Narodowy Polski: Protokoły posiedzeń 1917–1919 (Warsaw: Wyższa Szkoła Humanistyczna Pułtusk, 2007), 692–715. See also Kawalec, Roman Dmowski, 335–8.
66 Philipp Ther, “Pre-negotiated Violence: Ethnic Cleansing in the ‘Long’ First World War,” in Böhler, Borodziej, and von Puttkamer (eds), Legacies of Violence, 259–84, here: 277–82; quote: Philipp Ther, The Dark Side of Nation-States: Ethnic Cleansing in Modern Europe (New York: Berghahn Books, 2014), 249.
67 Siegfried Lichtenstaedter [Mehemed Emin Efendi], Nationalitätsprinzip und Bevölkerungsaustausch: Eine Studie für den Friedensschluß (Dresden: Giesecke, 1917). See also Ther, “Pre-negotiated Violence,” 268, with a reference to Mihran Dabag, “National-koloniale Konstruktionen in politischen Entwürfen des Deutschen Reiches um 1900,” in Kolonialismus. Kolonialdiskurs und Genozid, edited by Mihran Dabag, Horst Gründer, and Uwe-Karsten Ketelsen (Munich: Fink, 2004), 19–66, here: 62.
68 Dieter Gosewinkel, Schutz und Freiheit?: Staatsbürgerschaft in Europa im 20. und 21. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2016), 137. For the relation between citizenship and minority rights in the wake of the First World War see Dietmar Müller, “Staasbürgerschaft und Minderheitenschutz: ‘Managing Diversity’ im östlichen und westlichen Europa,” Themenportal Europäische Geschichte (2006), http://www.europa.clio-online.de/essay/id/artikel-3309, accessed May 14, 2018.
69 Greece—which lies beyond the geographical scope of this book—was the fifth signatory state.
70 Carole Fink, Defending the Rights of Others: The Great Powers, the Jews, and International Minority Protection, 1878–1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Zara S. Steiner, The Lights that Failed: European International History, 1919–1933 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).