National Minorities and Interwar Territorial Conflicts—Poland

Not only Stalin and Molotov regarded interwar Poland as, to use the lingo of the epoch, a seasonal state. Nor was Poland alone in this category. The border design met with resistance among a great number of Europe’s inhabitants.

It would have been hard for a better result to have come out of the Paris negotiations in 1919, given the continent’s demographics had been taking shape for centuries. The lines of ethnic and religious divisions were carved through many economic and political processes, and the shaping of modern nationalism in the nineteenth century and the collapse of multinational empires during World War One only complicated the situation.

We ought not to succumb to excessive nostalgia for the complex political structures. From the perspective of what happened during World War Two, the Austro-Hungarian Empire or even the Second Reich seem like oases of liberalism and tolerance. Yet this was certainly not how they were perceived by the minorities inhabiting them. At any rate, these oases had begun to dry up even during their time, to mention only the Austrian war crimes on the Ruthenians in 1914, or how the German leadership played Eastern European minorities against one another in the same period.² The nineteenth century also generates major doubts—if it is hard for the contemporary reader to accept waging a war for the “imperial glory of the motherland,” then it will be even harder to grasp the justification of armed aggression for dynastic interests or for offending the crown, as (at least officially) Otto von Bismarck and Napoleon III did in the latter half of the “beautiful century.”

In any event, after World War One, within the lines drawn on the map, substantial “islands” of national minorities had to stay. In 1931, Poles constituted sixty-five per cent of Poland’s citizens. There were also large minorities: Ukrainian (sixteen per cent), Jewish (ten per cent), Belarusian (six per cent), and German (two and a half per cent).³ The Soviet Union hoped to antagonize ethnic groups against a state which it recognized as a pillar of the international capitalist system.⁴ Ukrainian nationalists were hoping to gain independence, so they did not shy from attacking politicians who strove to help the nations coexist (Tadeusz Hołówko). The Lithuanians could not forgive the Poles for having taken Vilnius, which officially was the capital of their state, though it was ethnically dominated by Poles and Jews—the two countries only established diplomatic relations in 1938. In 1918, the Czechs occupied part of Cieszyn—the Poles seized these lands in 1938, taking advantage of Hitler’s pressure on Prague. This did not help neighborly relations, naturally. The Germans, in turn, could not get over the loss of Greater Poland and some of the Pomeranian lands, which led to a tariff war in the 1920s.⁵ Paradoxically, it was Adolf Hitler who eased the diplomatic/economic conflicts, hoping for an anti-Soviet alliance with Poland, joined with minor territorial cessions on Warsaw’s part (after which more demands would likely have come.)⁶ Of course, this placation was temporary—as soon as he saw his plans had misfired, the Chancellor began demographically remodeling Europe on an unprecedented scale.

Among its neighbors, only Romania and Hungary had no border disagreements with Poland.⁷