Roman Dmowski - After The First World War

After The First World War

At the end of World War I, two governments claimed to be the legitimate governments of Poland: Dmowski's in Paris and Piłsudski's in Warsaw. To put an end to the rival claims of Piłsudski and Dmowski, the composer Ignacy Jan Paderewski met with both men and persuaded them to reluctantly join forces. Both men had something that the other needed. Piłsudski was in possession of Poland after the war, but as the Pole who had fought with the Austrians for the Central Powers against the Russians, he was distrusted by the Allies. Piłsudski's newly reborn Polish Army needed arms from the Allies, something that only Dmowski could persuade the Allies to deliver upon. Beyond that, the French were planning to send the Blue Army of General Józef Haller — loyal to Dmowski — back to Poland. The fear was that if Piłsudski and Dmowski did not put aside their differences, a civil war might break out between the partisans of Piłsudski and Dmowski. Paderewski was successful in working out a compromise in which Dmowski and himself were to represent Poland at the Paris Peace Conference while Piłsudski was to serve as provisional president of Poland.

As a Polish delegate at the Paris Peace Conference and a signatory of the Versailles Treaty, Dmowski exerted a substantial influence on the Treaty's favorable decisions regarding Poland. On January 29, 1919, Dmowski met with the Supreme Council of the Allies for the first time. At the meeting, Dmowski stated that he had little interest in laying claim to areas of Ukraine and Lithuania that were formerly part of Poland, but no longer had a Polish majority. At the same time Dmowski strongly pressed for the return of Polish territories with Polish-speaking majorities taken by Prussia from Poland in 1790s. Dmowski himself admitted that from a purely historical point of view, the Polish claims to Silesia were not entirely strong, but he claimed it for Poland on economic grounds, especially the coal fields. Moreover, Dmowski claimed that German statistics had lied about the number of ethnic Poles living in eastern Germany and that, "these Poles were some of the most educated and highly cultured in the nation, with a strong sense of nationality and men of progressive ideas". In addition, Dmowski, with the strong backing of the French, wanted to send the "Blue Army" to Poland via Danzig, Germany (modern Gdańsk, Poland); it was the intention of both Dmowski and the French that the Blue Army create a territorial fait accompli. This proposal created much opposition from the Germans, the British and the Americans, and finally the Blue Army was sent to Poland in April 1919 via land. Piłsudski was opposed to needlessly annoying the Allies, and it has been suggested that he did not care much about the Danzig issue.

In regard to Lithuania, Dmowski didn't view Lithuanians as having a strong national identity, and viewed their social organisation as tribal. Those areas of Lithuania that had either Polish majorities or minorities were claimed by Dmowski on the grounds of self-determination. In the areas with Polish minorities, the Poles would act as a civilizing influence; only the northern part of Lithuania, which had a solid Lithuanian majority, was Dmowski willing to concede to the Lithuanians. These claims caused Dmowski to have very acrimonious disputes with the Lithuanian delegation at Paris. With regard to the former Austrian province of East Galicia, Dmowski claimed that the local Ukrainians were quite incapable of ruling themselves and also required the civilizing influence of Polish leadership. In addition, Dmowski wished to acquire the oil fields of Galicia. However, only the French supported Polish claims to Galica wholeheartedly. In the end, it was the actual fighting on the ground in Galicia, and not the decisions of the diplomats in Paris, that decided that the region would be part of Poland. The French did not back Dmowski's aspirations in the Cieszyn Silesia region, and instead supported the claims of Czechoslovakia.

Dmowski himself was disappointed with the Treaty of Versailles, partly because he was strongly opposed to the Minorities Treaty imposed on Poland and partly because he wanted the German-Polish border to be somewhat farther to the west than what the Versailles had allowed. Both of these disappointments Dmowski blamed on what he claimed was the "international Jewish conspiracy". Throughout his life, Dmowski maintained that the British Prime Minister David Lloyd George had been bribed by a syndicate of German-Jewish financiers to give Poland what Dmowski considered to be an unfavourable frontier with Germany. His relations with Lloyd George were very poor. Dmowski found Lloyd George to be arrogant, unscrupulous and a consistent advocate of ruling against Polish claims to the West and the East. Dmowski was very offended by Lloyd George's ignorance of Polish affairs and in particular was enraged by his lack of knowledge about river traffic on the Vistula. Dmowski called Lloyd George "the agent of the Jews". Lloyd George in turn claimed in 1939 that “Poland had deserved its fate”.

A political opponent of Józef Piłsudski, Dmowski favored what he called a "national state," a state in which the citizens would speak Polish and be of the Roman Catholic faith. If Piłsudski's vision of Poland was based on the historical multiethnic state that had existed under the Jagiellonian dynasty, which he hoped to recreate with a multinational federation (Międzymorze federation), Dmowski's vision was the earlier Polish kingdom ruled by the Piast dynasty, ethnically and religiously homogeneous. Piłsudski believed in a wide definition of Polish citizenship in which peoples of different languages, cultures and faiths were to be united by a common loyalty to the reborn Polish state. Dmowski regarded Piłsudski's views as dangerous nonsense, and felt that the presence of large number of ethnic minorities would undermine the security of Polish state. At the Paris Peace Conference, he argued strenuously against the Minority Rights Treaty forced on Poland by the Allies.