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Interwar
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Preface: DOMESTIC PROBLEMS AND FOREIGN POLICIES OF INTERWAR EAST EUROPEAN STATES
These
problems and policies should be viewed within
(a)
the context of the beliefs/perceptions of
historians today, and
(b) the realities of E.Europe at this time.
(a) Current western beliefs/perceptions.
1
Under the impact of the internecine ethnic/religious wars of the 1990s in the lands of former
2.
In this context, some contemporary western
historians condemn President Woodrow Wilson for his insistence on the principle
of self-determination in 1919. At the same time, these historians condemn the peace makers in
3.
Finally, some western historians view federalization as the best solution
for East Central European Danubian states in 1919-20,
and thus condemn its rejection when offered by Emperor Charles for
Austria and Michael Karolyi for Hungary in Nov-Dec.
1918, also later rejections of similar projects.
(b)
These views may seem attractive but they are out of touch with East European
realities of the time and therefore unrealistic. To start with the last view :
1.
The majority of non- German/Austrian and non-Magyar
peoples rejected the federal solution in either
2.
Ethnic-national states were not created by Woodrow Wilson or the peace
settlement of 1919; nor were they an East
European aberration. This process was, in fact, the
continuation of the national unification movements that had already taken
place in Western Europe, especially in
3.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, most of the new borders of East European
countries were not fixed by western statesmen drawing maps in
4.
Of course, it was impossible to establish
borders satisfactory to every ethnic nationality because of the inter-mixing of
peoples in the past, and esp. because of long foreign rule. The natural outcome
of this state of affairs in 1919 was that the nations which had opposed the
Central Powers in the war: the Poles, Czechs, Serbs, Romanians, who also
had sufficient armed forces at their disposal, were able to include territories
with significant minorities within their borders. The Poles were able to do
this in the east because of their victory over the Red Army.
Keeping
the above realities in mind, let us look at the East European States of the
interwar period.
General
Characteristics and Problems.
The
interwar period was short, lasting just over 20 years if we start in Jan .1919,
or a few months longer if the starting point is November 1918. However, this short
period had enormous significance for these countries because: (a) they could
develop their own politics, administration, economies,
education, and culture; (b) their very existence legitimized them in the eyes
of the world. After this period, they could not be obliterated either by Nazi
Germany or the Stalinist USSR.
Joseph Rothschild (d. Dec.1999) , an American political scientist and author of books on
Eastern Europe, wrote that even communist historians joined
"bourgeois" emigre scholars "in valuing
highly the sheer fact of interwar state-independence, and judging it to be a
historic advance over the area’s pre-World War I political status." He
also gave a balanced judgment on these countries' performance in the interwar
period:
Thus, despite major and avoidable
failings (too little area-wide solidarity, too much over-politicization of
human relations, too little strategic government intervention in the economy,
too much petty government interference with the society), thanks to the
political performance of the interwar era it is impossible today to conceive of
East Central Europe without its at least formally independent states. In
retrospect, one must assign greater responsibility for the catastrophes of
1939-41 to the malevolence, indifference, or incompetence of the Great Powers
than to the admittedly costly mistakes of these states. *
*[Joseph Rotschild, East
Central Europe Between the Wars, Seattle, WA. 1974, and reprints, pp.
24-25; bold italics, AMC].
We
must bear in mind that the interwar East European states faced enormous
problems, most of which could not be solved in twenty years, especially in view
of the paucity of foreign capital investment before the Great Depression struck
in 1930, and virtually none after that. Furthermore, they faced the growing
threat of Nazi Germany from 1935 onward.
Many problems of East European states were inherited
from the former empires, a fact acknowledged by the British historian Hugh
Seton-Watson, whose negative evaluation of interwar
*[Hugh
Seton-Watson, Eastern Europe between the Wars, 1918-1941, Preface to 3rd
edition revised, Harper Torchbooks, New York, 1967.].
Unfortunately,
few people bother to read prefaces, and this is a case in point.
In
fact, the problems were much more numerous than those listed by Rothschild. There
were 10 key problems:
(1).economic backwardness; (2). agrarian,
unmechanized economies; (3). overpopulation
on the land; (4).peasant poverty; (5).bad roads and insufficient railway track;
(6).lack of a middle class; (7). lack of adequate
numbers of trained bureaucrats; (8). widesrpread
illiteracy; (9). lack of experience, or restricted
experience with parliamentary politics and participation in any kind of
government; (10). lack of investment capital.
The
exception to all these problems was Czechoslovakia, where the western
Czech lands of Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia had a highly developed
industry, a prosperous agriculture, an excellent road and rail network, a
highly literate population, a numerous and well trained bureaucracy, experience
in parliamentary government and considerable capital resources. However, of the
other two constituent parts of the country,
Two
other problems which most E.European countries had in
common were either multi-ethnic/national populations or/and
significant ethnic/national minorities whose loyalties belonged to, or
leaned toward neighboring national states. In
This
state of affairs, though inevitable at the time, deepened the general feeling
of insecurity. Indeed, the discrimination against the constituent
or so-called ruling nationalities in Czechoslovakia (Slovaks and Rusyns), Yugoslavia (non-Serbs), and the discrimination or
oppression of national minorities in most East European countries, stemmed
primarily from fear that constituent nationalities as well as minorities,
could, and probably would given the chance, undermine the sovereignty of
the countries in which they were resentful citizens, and lead to the reduction
of their territory or even their destruction. We must bear this insecurity
in mind when we look at minority policies in the interwar East European states.
The
above fears were intensified by the general, international insecurity in the
1930s, which made territorial disputes more threatening than they would have
been otherwise. Thus, the states allied with France: Poland and
Czechoslovakia, feared
The
largest state in the region,
Political
systems.
The
general trend of East Central European political
development was from parliamentary democracy, including strong Socialist
parties at the outset, to various kinds of authoritarian government.
But it should be noted that while fascist parties or groups existed in each
country, no interwar East European state had a fascist party in power as was
the case in Germany, Italy, Spain and Portugal, while a totalitarian communist.
system existed in the
Click
on the map for better resolution:
Interwar
(i)
Politics.
Polish
political life was dominated in 1918-23 and 1926-35 by Jozef
Pilsudski (1867-1935), but he was bitterly opposed by his rival, Roman Dmowski (1864-1939), leader of the National Democratic movment. This was a right wing, Roman Catholic and anti-semitic movement supported by a significant part of the
Polish intelligentsia [educated people of gentry
descent, mostly in the civil and military service but also in the liberal
professions] and the growing middle class [business people, entrepreneurs].
Pilsudski
was "Head of State" until December 1922, when the Seym
[Parliament] elected the first President, Gabriel Narutowicz
(1865-1922) after Pilsudski had declined the
post because it had no power. Narutowicz, an engineer
and former minister, was supported by Pilsudski. His election was bitterly
resented by the National Democrats because he had won the presidency in a Seym[parliament]
election with the votes of deputies representing the national minorities,
including the Jews who made up 10% of the whole population. Therefore, the N.
Democrats claimed that Narutowicz was not a Polish
President and incited the
[Pictures
from Richard M.Watt, Bitter Glory,
The Polish political system, as it existed in 1921-26, was modeled on
The
multi-party system was the source of political instability because, unlike the
French model which included a professional bureaucracy unaffected by changes of
power (except for ministerial positions), in Poland most of the civil service
jobs changed hands with each new government, which distributed them as
political patronage. (As in most East European countries, the civil service
employed most of the country's Intelligentsia, or educated people). In 1923, a
National Democrat-Peasant Party coalition politicised military appointments, which Pilsudski protested by
resigning from all his positions in July of that year and going into
retirement. He distributed his marshal's pension to charities and lived from
his writings and lectures.
The
years 1923-24 witnessed great economic- financial instability in
Recovery
seemed in the offing with the establishment of a new Polish currency, the zloty
(meaning golden), in 1924, but a year later
The
situation was bad for
In fact, these treaties of mutual assistance weakened the existing French
alliances with
Pilsudski's Coup d'Etat, May 12, 1926.
Against
the background of this insecurity, in spring 1926 Prime Minister Wincenty Witos
(1874-1945), the leader of the right wing Peasant Party "Piast", entered into a coalition with the National
Democrats, and publicly dared Pilsudski to take power. Witos even threatened to establish a right-wing
dictatorship of the N.Dem. and
Peasant Parties, while the N.D. leader Roman Dmowski
was thinking of a dictatorship along Italian lines (Mussolini).
Pilsudski had the support of the Socialists and the Left-wing Peasant Party
in opposing a right wing dictatorship. He demanded that the President dismiss
the government and appoint a new one, and he threatened to use military force
to this end if necessary. On 12 May 1926, when he marched on
It should be noted that Pilsudski’s action was not a classic military
coup because he had the support of Polish socialists and even the communists,
who feared a right wing coup. Indeed, except for the
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*[Pictures from Watt, Bitter
Glory. For a detailed
Pilsudski
denied that he wanted to be a dictator, and said his goal was to bring the
country back to health. This was the origin of the name given to his political
group: "Sanacja" (pron.
Saanatsiiaa, from the French assainir
= to heal). His main objective was to give the Presidency strong executive
power. He managed to expand presidential power with parliamentary support in
1926-27, but when parliament opposed him, he appointed governments of
"experts" which issued decrees on the assumption that parliament
would approve them. When parliament resisted, tensions grew. Pilsudski was
twice Prime Minister, but devoted most of his attention to defense and foreign
affairs. He was the Inspector General of the Armed Forces and Minister of War
from 1926 until his death in May 1935.
In
1927 a pro-government bloc was created, the" Bezpartyjny
Blok Wspolpracy z Rzadem."
(The Non-Party Bloc of Cooperation with the Government, known by its acronym:
BBWR. In fact, it was created to balance the N.Dem.
"Oboz Wielkiej Polski" (Camp of Great Poland -OWP), created by Dmowski in 1926 as an umbrella organization for various
right wing parties affiliated with the N.Democrats.
Political
tensions worsened under the impact of the Great Depression which hit
The
imprisonment and trial of political opponents was a black mark for
In
April 1935, Pilsudski’s supporters used a trick to pass a new
constitution. The opposition deputies were not told when the vote would be
taken and most were absent. (Pilsudski expressed his disapproval of this
trick). The "April Constitution" gave very extensive powers to
the president. (Some historians compare Pilsudski with Charles De Gaulle,
who obtained extensive presidential powers in
Pilsudski’s successors continued the political system established by the April
constitution. They controlled parliament and passed a new electoral law (July
1935), which allowed the government party to hand pick deputies to run for
parliament. In reply, opposition parties boycotted the next elections.
The
post- Pilsudski governments are sometimes called "the governments of
colonels," but they were not military juntas in the Latin American
style. They consisted mostly of politicians who had served in Pilsudski’s
Legions in WW I and held the rank of colonel, though the vast majority were
colonels in the reserve. Their program was the same as Pilsudski’s: to make
In
1937, the BBWR was dissolved and replaced by the "Oboz
Zjednoczenia Narodowego"
(OZON = Camp of National Unity), led by Col. Adam Koc.
OZON made anti-semitic gestures to gain the National
Democrats’ support for the government. However, it did not go far enough for
the N. Democrats, for unlike Romania and Hungary, no anti-Jewish legislation
was ever passed in Poland, except for the prohibition of Jewish ritual
slaughter of animals (which continued anyway because Polish butchers
would have gone broke without Jewish purchase of beef). The restriction on
Jewish student enrollment called the "numerus clausus" or closed number,
was not sanctioned by law (see under minorities below). Nor was OZON effective in
building up popular support for the government. In fact, the Municipal
Elections of December 1938 returned many oppositionists. President Ignacy Moscicki
(1867-1946, pron: Eegnaatsy
Moshtseetskee, President 1926-39) promised electoral
reform, but it was not implemented because the government party did not want to
share power with the opposition..
The second most important person in the state after the President was
the Inspector General of the Army, Marshal Edward Rydz-Smigly
(or Smigly- Rydz,
1886-1941, Marshal November 1936), but he was not a politician. However,
he did support the modernization of the Polish Army, which began in earnest
after Pilsudski's death.
The key foreign policy maker was Foreign Minister Jozef
Beck (1894-1944, For. Minister 1932-39), hand picked for the position by Pilsudski. He had been a Pilsudski legionnaire
in World War I, and served in Military Intelligence, 1920. In the early 1920s
he was Military Attache in
As
Foreign Minsiter, Beck followed Pilsudski’s policy of
maintaining the alliance with
The
National Democrats, the Socialists, and both the left and right wing Peasant
Parties were in the opposition after 1928, and boycotted the elections held
under the electoral law of July 1935. Nevertheless, they retained and even
gained followers.
There was a small fascist group, the "Falanga."
that split off from the N. Democrats, It was led by Boleslaw Piasecki who admired Mussolini and was strongly anti-semitic. But this group was insignificant in Polish
political life. (Piasecki served Polish communist
governments after WW II).The majority of Pilsudskiites
successfully resisted the idea, advanced by a few of their number, of
establishing a dictatorship along fascist lines and Pilsudski never envisaged
it.
(ii)Interwar
Like
most countries of E. Europe,
(b) in the 1920s Gt.
Nevertheless, the Poles managed in just a few years to integrate the economies
of Russian, Austrian and Prussian Poland and to create a uniform legal system,
which was no mean achievement. Furthermore,
(1)
(2)
In 1939,
(3)
The city of
[ Many foreigners, mostly English and German, were guests in our
home, and I remember seeing father off at the airport on some of his business
trips. I also remember being taken by him to visit an English merchant ship,
which had a Chinese cook with a pigtail, and the
new Polish ocean liners of the Gdynia-America Line, which sailed
regularly on the
[
(2).
The other great economic development of interwar
[
Land Reform.
In
1919, 35% of the arable land in
The Great Depression, which hit Europe in
1930, lowered the price of agricultural goods while at the same time the rural
overpopulation could not be absorbed by
Education.
There
was great progress in this field due to free and compulsory education at the
primary/ elementary and middle school levels, so tha tilliteracy was almost wiped out by 1939. There were 28,000
primary schools and 770 secondary schools, but only one High School was free of
charge. By 1939,
[
Social Services
These were very good in the
towns. Workers paid a little toward medical care while employers paid the rest.
There was also government subsidized housing for the workers. However, with the
onset of the depression, unemployment grew, as it did elsewhere in Europe and
the
[
Women.
A
few educated Polish women had begun to go into other professions than school
teaching before 1914. In the interwar period, there were Polish women doctors
and dentists, also engineers and architects, but they were still a small
minority compared to men. There were some Polish policewomen, mainly
directing traffic. There was also voluntary paramilitary training for
women. Women had the right to vote since the rebirth of the Polish state
in November 1918.
[
The Arts.
The
interwar period saw a great flourishing of art, literature and theater in
While
only the composer and musician Karol M. Szymanowski
(1882-1937) and the great pianist and composer Ignacy
Paderewski (1860-1941, Prime Minister, then Foreign Minister January
-November 1919), managed to attain world fame, there were many other great
artists and writers who are still recognized and admired by Poles today.*
*[For
literature and theater, see: Czeslaw Milosz, The
History of Polish Literature London, 1969, and reprints, chapter X, Independent
Poland. On the arts, see: Janina Hoskins, Visual
Arts in Poland. An Annotated Bibliography of Selected Holdings in the
Library of Congress, Library of Congress, Washington, 1993; the vast majority of the works listed here are
in Polish].
(iii) Minorities
As
mentioned earlier, national or ethnic minorities amounted to some 30% of the
total population. This was one of the problems faced by the Polish state, but
it was not a major problem, and was certainly less serious than that faced by
the multinational states of
According to the last prewar census, held in 1931, the
nationalities inhabiting
by mother tongue
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In millions |
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Polish |
21,993,400..... ....68.9% |
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Ukrainian |
4, 442,000.*.13.9% |
|
Jewish |
2,
732,600*...... 8.6% |
|
Belorussian |
990,000......... 3.1% |
|
German |
741,000*...2.3%
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Russian |
139,000..........0.4% |
|
Lithuanian |
83,000..........0,3% |
|
Czech |
38,000...........0.1%
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"Local"(tutejsi)** |
707,000..........2,2% |
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Others |
11,000..........0.1%. |
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TOTAL |
31,916,000........100% |
[*disputed figures; ** locals]
adjusted by religion
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Polish |
20,644,000.........64.7 % |
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Ukrainian |
5,114,000 ........ 16 .% |
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Jewish |
3,114,000............9.8% |
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Belorussian |
1,954,000...........6.1% |
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German |
780,000............2.4% |
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Russian |
139.000............0.4% |
|
Lithuanian |
83,000..............0.3% |
|
Czech |
38,000............... 0.1% |
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Local.(tutejsi)* |
- - |
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Other |
11,000...............0.1% |
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Not given |
39,000..............0.1% |
For the official figures according to mother tongue. see the Concise
Statistical Yearbook of
For the figures given in the second table, as adjusted by Professor Janusz Tomaszewski in his book
about the multinational
*
Local (tutejsi) was declared mostly by people living
in
The
total population of
The
Germans lived mostly in western
The
Ukrainians lived in former
Some
west Ukrainians had fought the Poles for an independent Ukrainian state with
its capital in Lviv (P. Lwow)
in 1918-19 and lost, leaving bitter feelings on both sides. Some Ukrainian
intellectuals emigrated to Soviet Ukraine and participated in the cultural
renaissance there in the early 1920s, but most were later imprisoned or killed
in Stalin's crackdown on "nationalism" which began in 1926. Later,
millions of Ukrainians died in Stalin's man-made famine of 1930, which he used
to break Ukrainian peasant opposition to his collectivization of agriculture.
Some Ukrainian exiles lived in
The
official leader of Ukrainians in
The
Ukrainians had many elementary and middle Ukr. lang. schools, and developed
a network of highly prosperous cooperative shops selling agricultural produce.
They had legal political parties whose deputies were elected to the Polish
parliament.
However,
there was an extreme nationalist organization, the OUN
(Organization of Ukrainian Nationalist), established in
In September 1930, the OUN launched organized attacks on Poles in
The
Belorussians were divided between Roman Catholic, Uniate,
and Greek Orthodox, and did not have a strongly developed national identity.
However, grinding poverty lent appeal to communist propaganda, so the
Belorussian peasant party "Hromada,"
established in 1925, cooperated with the Belorussian Communist Party, an
affiliate of the Polish Communist Party. Therefore, the Hromada
was delegalized in 1927; its leaders were tried in
The Jews of
Most
Polish Jews were orthodox, that is, Hasidic Jews. Most were poor and
worked in crafts and retail trade. Some were money lenders in small towns and
villages, mainly in the central and eastern areas which had been former Russian
Poland and the southern areas which had been
Jews
and Poles had lived alongside each other for centuries, but in separate
communities. Thus, they lived together but apart. The Jews preserved their
identity through their religion, customs, and languages (Yiddish and Hebrew),
but this obviously differentiated them from the Poles, as well as Ukrainians, Belorussians, and Russians.
Assimilated Jews made up some 5 % of the whole Jewish population of about
3,500,000 (1939), but they gave
[Note: At this time, a 10% admission ceiling for Jewish students was the
unwritten rule at Harvard, and probably other
N.Democratic students frequently attacked their
Jewish colleagues, or restricted them to back benches, but the extent to which
this was practiced depended on the university administration.
Quite
a few members of the assimilated Polish-Jewish Intelligentsia was
politically left-wing and sympathized with Communism or joined the Polish
Communist Party, whose visible leadership was preponderantly Jewish. This added
fuel to the N.Democratic brand of anti-semitism.
Finally, there were very few Jews in the Polish civil and foreign service, except for a few totally assimilated Polish
Jews. There was one general (Mond) of Jewish origin
in the army, but most Jewish officers - 10% of the officer corps - were in the
medical branch of the service.
It
is worth noting that the Jews of
*[For
a photographic record of Jewish life in
After
the Depression hit, the Polish government sought to reduce the number of Jews
in
*[See Laurence Weinbaum, A MARRIAGE OF
CONVENIENCE. The New Zionist Organization and the Polish Government, 1936-1939,
East European Monographs No. CCCLXIX (369), Boulder Co. and
The
Polish government tried to find areas of settlement for Polish Jews in French
colonies, especially
Conclusion.
The treatment of minorities
in interwar
But despite the injustices,
despite the terrorism by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and
the counter-terror resorted to by the Polish State, despite the systematic Polonization of the school system and conversion of
Orthodox churches into Roman Catholic ones under phony pretexts, despite numerus clausus and
the exclusion of Jews from the professions - despite all this and more, the
material, spiritual, and political life of the national minorities in interwar
Poland was richer and more complex than ever before or after.
In support
of this claim, the author cites the following statistics: in 1931, there were
in Poland 920 Jewish non-periodical publications, mainly in Yiddish,but
211 in Hebrew; 342 Ukrainian non-periodical publications, of which 264 appeared
in the Lwow (L’viv) voevodship; and 33 Belorussian non-periodical publications
in the Wilno (Vilnius) voevodship.
Wilno was the second most lively
Jewish publishing center after
*[Jan
Gross, Revolution from Abroad. The Soviet Conquest of Poland’s Western Ukraine and
Western Belorussia,
Princeton, N.J., 1988, pp..6-7. Here, the author also
cites 1939 Ukrainian, Jewish and Belorussian publication figures for the
territories annexed by the
Originally published at
http://www.ku.edu/~eceurope/hist557/lect14a.htm