Roman Dmowski - Political Outlook

Political Outlook

Throughout his life, Dmowski deeply disliked Piłsudski and everything he stood for. Dmowski came from an impoverished urban background and had little fondness for Poland's traditional social structure. Instead, Dmowski favored a modernizing program and felt Poles should stop looking back nostalgically at the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which Dmowski held in deep contempt and should instead embrace the "modern world". In particular, Dmowski despised the old Commonwealth for its multi-national structure and religious tolerance. He was especially critical of its failure to create a common identity for various ethnic groups, such as Ukrainians and Belarusians. However, he did help to organize an association to support the Uniate Church as a bulwark against Orthodoxy.

Dmowski was a scientist and preferred logic and reason over emotion and passion. He once told Ignacy Jan Paderewski that music was "mere noise". Dmowski felt very strongly that Poles should abandon what he considered to be foolish romantic nationalism and useless gestures of defiance and should instead work hard at becoming businessmen and scientists. Dmowski was very much influenced by Social Darwinist theories, then popular in the Western world, and saw life as a merciless struggle between "strong" nations who dominated and "weak" nations who were dominated. In his view nations could be classified in four categories:

1. Nations on the lowest scale of being able or desiring to become independent and self-governing, for example in Dmowski's view the Belarusians.
2. Nations capable of self-governing themselves with awakened nationalistic aspirations, for example Ukrainians.
3. Nations wishing to regain independence with centuries-old cultures and statehoods past (e.g. Poles).
4. Nations on the highest ladder of social development and tradition, possessing a country currently (e.g. Germans).

In his 1902 book Myśli nowoczesnego Polaka (Thoughts of a Modern Pole), Dmowski denounced all forms of Polish Romantic nationalism and traditional Polish values. He sharply criticized the idea of Poland as a spiritual concept and as a cultural idea. Instead Dmowski argued that Poland was merely a physical entity that needed to be brought into existence through pragmatic bargaining and negotiating, not via what Dmowski considered to be pointless revolts — doomed to failure before they even began — against the partitioning powers. For Dmowski, what the Poles needed was a "healthy national egoism" that would not be guided by what Dmowski regarded as the unrealistic political principles of Christianity. In the same book, Dmowski blamed the fall of the old Commonwealth due to its tradition of tolerance. While critical of Christianity, Dmowski viewed some sub-groups of Christianity (other than Catholicism) as beneficial to certain nations. This was particularly true of Anglicanism and German Protestantism. Later in 1927 he revised this earlier view and renounced his criticism of Catholicism, seeing it as an essential part of the Polish identity. Dmowski saw all minorities as weakening agents within the nation that needed to be purged. In regard to the Jewish minority, in Myśli nowoczesnego Polaka, Dmowski wrote:

...in the character of this race, so many different values strange to our moral constitution and harmful to our life have accumulated that assimilation with a larger number of Jews would destroy us, replacing us with decadent elements, rather than with those young creative foundations upon which we are building the future. —