Intermarium

Polish imperialism (Polish: Międzymorze) took the shape of several projects of the Polish-dominated federation of Poland, Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine. The Polish name may be translated into English as "Tween-Seas" and has been rendered, from the Latin, as "Intermarum" or "Intermarium." The proposed federation was meant to emulate the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, that, from the late 14th to the late 18th century century, had united Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (the latter also incorporating modern Belarus and Ukraine).

The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth precedent

The Polish-Lithuanian alliance had come about as a mutual response to a common threat from the Teutonic Order. It had been cemented by the personal union in 1386 of Poland's Queen Jadwiga and Lithuanian Grand Duke Jogaila, who became King Władysław Jagiełło of Poland. It had been further extended by the 1569 Union of Lublin, when the two states merged into a federation, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which would remain until the late 17th century the largest state in Europe. Its combined resources enabled it to hold its own against the Teutonic Order, the Mongols, the Russians, the Turks and the Swedes, for four centuries until the partitions of the weakened Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth by its neighbors in the late 18th century.

Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski

Between the November and January Uprisings, in 1832-1861, the idea of resurrecting an updated Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was advocated by Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski, residing in exile at the Hôtel Lambert in Paris. A visionary statesman and former friend and confidant of Russia's Tsar Alexander I, Czartoryski acted as the unacknowledged minister of foreign affairs for a nonexistent Poland. He wrote that, "Having extended her sway south and west, and being by the nature of things unreachable from the east and north, Russia becomes a source of constant threat to Europe." He argued that it would have been in Russia's interest, instead, to have surrounded herself with "friend[s rather than] slave[s]." Czartoryski also identified a future threat from Prussia and urged the incorporation of East Prussia into a resurrected Poland. Above all, however, he aspired to reconstitute — with French, British and Turkish support — a Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth federated with the Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, Romanians and all the South Slavs of the future Yugoslavia. Poland, in his concept, could have mediated the conflicts between Hungary and the Slavs, and between Hungary and Romania.

Czartoryski's plan seemed close to realization during the period of national revolutions in 1848-1849 but foundered on lack of western support, on Hungarian intransigence toward the Czechs, Slovaks and Romanians, and on the rise of German nationalism. Nevertheless, his endeavor constituted a vital link between the 16th-century Jagiellon federative prototype and Józef Piłsudski's federative-Prometheist program that was to follow after World War I.

Józef Piłsudski's concept

It was Piłsudski's strategic goal to resurrect a modern form of the old Commonwealth, while working for the disintegration of the Russian Empire, and later the Soviet Union, into its ethnic constituents (the latter was his Prometheist project). The accomplishment of these ends, somewhat approximated, decades later, with the creation of the European Union, and with the abolition of the Soviet Union in 1991, might have transformed much of Central Europe into a "Third Europe" invulnerable to Poland's historic antagonists, Germany and Russia.

Piłsudski's dream faced opposition from virtually all interested parties. The Soviets exerted their influence to thwart it. The western Allies feared that a weakened Germany and Russia might be unable to pay their First World War reparations and obligations, and that the European balance of power might be excessively altered by coordinated action among the newly independent countries. The Lithuanians, Ukrainians and other peoples that were invited to join a federation dreaded any compromise to their own cherished independence; in many cases, they had recently experienced wars and border conflicts with Poland (the Polish-Lithuanian War, Polish-Ukrainian War, and border conflicts between Poland and Czechoslovakia). Finally, many Polish politicians such as Roman Dmowski opposed the idea of a multi-cultural federation, preferring to work toward a nationalistic, ethnically-pure Poland. In the aftermath of the Polish-Soviet War, Piłsudski's concept of a federation of Central and East European countries lost any chance of realization. Less than two decades after he had broached the idea, and only four years after his death, all the countries that had so jealously been guarding their independence would once more be engulfed by their neigbors, Germany and the Soviet Union.

A late version of the concept was attempted by interwar Polish Foreign Minister Józef Beck, a Piłsudski protegé. It envisioned a Central European union as also including Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Scandinavia, the Baltic states, Italy, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Greece: thus stretching not only west-east from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, but north-south from the Arctic Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea. Such a polity, comprising some 150 million central Europeans, with a common foreign policy, might have been a force to be reckoned with by Nazi Germany in the west and the Soviet Union in the east.

World War II and since

The concept of a Central European Union — as a triangular geopolitical entity anchored in the Baltic, Black, and Adriatic or Aegean Seas — was revived in Władysław Sikorski's Polish government in exile during World War II. A first step toward its implementation — discussions between the Polish and Czechoslovak exile governments regarding a prospective Polish-Czechoslovak union — ultimately foundered in Czech hesitation and Allied indifference or hostility.

The concept has more recently, since the demise of Soviet hegemony in east-central Europe, been advocated under various names including "Intermarum" or "Intermarium" (Latin for "Międzymorze"). One version of the idea envisions such a federation as a constituent of the European Union; "Intermarum" could, it is argued, give protection to its member states against domination by the European Union's wealthier, more powerful western members.

References

• Marian Kamil Dziewanowski, "Polski pionier zjednoczonej Europy" ("A Polish Pioneer of a United Europe"), Gwiazda Polarna (Pole Star), vol. 96, no 19 (September 17, 2005), pp. 10-11.
• M.K. Dziewanowski, Czartoryski and His Essai sur la diplomatie, 1971, ASIN: B0072XRK6.
• M.K. Dziewanowski, Joseph Pilsudski: a European Federalist, 1918-1922, Stanford, Hoover Institution, 1979.

See also

• Polish-Lithuanian-Muscovite Commonwealth
• Polish-Lithuanian-Ruthenian Commonwealth