Intermarium

Intermarium (, ) was a post-World War I geopolitical plan conceived by Józef Piłsudski to unite former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth lands within a single polity. The plan went through several iterations, some of which anticipated the inclusion of neighbouring states. The proposed multinational polity would have incorporated territories lying between the Baltic, Black, and Adriatic Seas, hence the name ''Intermarium'' (Latin for "Between-Seas").

Prospectively a federation of Central and Eastern European countries, the post-World War I Intermarium plan pursued by Piłsudski sought to recruit to the proposed federation the Baltic states (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia), Finland, Belarus, Ukraine, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia. The Polish name ''Międzymorze'' (from ''między'', "between"; and ''morze'', "sea"), meaning "Between-Seas", was rendered into Latin as Intermarium.

The proposed federation was meant to emulate the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, that, from the end of the 16th century to the end of the 18th, had united the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Intermarium complemented Piłsudski's other geopolitical vision, Prometheism, whose goal was the dismemberment of the Russian Empire and that Empire's divestment of its territorial acquisitions.
* "Józef Pilsudski, Polish revolutionary and statesman, the first chief of state (1918–22) of the newly independent Poland established in November 1918."
"Józef Pilsudski"
Encyclopædia Britannica)
* "Released in November 1918, iłsudskireturned to Warsaw, assumed command of the Polish armies, and proclaimed an independent Polish republic, which he headed."
"Piłsudski, Joseph"
Columbia Encyclopedia)
* Timothy Snyder, ''Covert Polish missions across the Soviet Ukrainian border, 1928–1933''
p. 55p. 56p. 57p. 58p. 59
in ''Cofini'', Silvia Salvatici, Rubbettino, 2005).
* Timothy Snyder, ''Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist's Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine'', Yale University Press, 2005, ,
p. 41p. 42p. 43
"Pilsudski hoped to build not merely a Polish nation state but a greater federation of peoples under the aegis of Poland which would replace Russia as the great power of Eastern Europe. Lithuania, Belorussia and Ukraine were all to be included. His plan called for a truncated and vastly reduced Russia, a plan which excluded negotiations prior to military victory." Richard K Debo, ''Survival and Consolidation: The Foreign Policy of Soviet Russia, 1918–1992''
p. 59
McGill-Queen's Press, 1992, ."Pilsudski's program for a federation of independent states centered on Poland; in opposing the imperial power of both Russia and Germany it was in many ways a throwback to the romantic Mazzinian nationalism of Young Poland in the early nineteenth century." James H. Billington
''Fire in the Minds of Men''
p. 432, Transaction Publishers,

Intermarium was perceived by some Lithuanians as a threat to their newly established independence, and by some Ukrainians as a threat to their aspirations for independence,Oleksa Pidlutsky, "Figures of the 20th century. Józef Piłsudski: the Chief who Created a State for Himself", '' Zerkalo Nedeli'' 'Mirror Weekly'' 3–9 February 2001, available onlin
in Russian
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in Ukrainian
.Roman Szporluk, ''Imperiia ta natsii'', Kyiv, Dukh i Litera, 2001,

and while France backed the proposal, it was opposed by the Soviet Union and by most other Western powers."Between Imperial Temptation And Anti-Imperial Function In Eastern European Politics: Poland From The Eighteenth To Twenty-First Century"
Andrzej Nowak. Accessed September 14, 2007. Within two decades of the failure of Piłsudski's grand scheme, all the countries that he had viewed as candidates for membership in the Intermarium federation had fallen to the Soviet Union or to Nazi Germany, except for Finland (which suffered some territorial losses in the 1939–40 Winter War with the Soviet Union).

Precedents

Commonwealth

A Polish–Lithuanian union and military alliance had come about as a mutual response to common threats posed by the Teutonic Order, the Golden Horde, and the Grand Duchy of Moscow. The alliance was first established in 1385 by the Union of Krewo, solemnized by the marriage of Poland's Queen Jadwiga and Lithuania's Grand Duke Jogaila of the Gediminid dynasty, who became King Władysław II Jagiełło of Poland.

A longer-lasting federation subsequently came about in 1569 in the form of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, an arrangement that lasted until 1795, i.e., until the Third Partition of the Poland.

The Polish–Lithuanian alliance thus lasted a total of 410 years, and constituted at times the largest state in Europe.

Under the Commonwealth, proposals were advanced to establish expanded, Polish–Lithuanian-''Muscovite'' or Polish–Lithuanian–''Ruthenian'' Commonwealths. Though the Commonwealth temporarily controlled parts of Russia and governed much of Ruthenia for centuries, these proposals were never implemented at a constitutional level.

Adam Czartoryski's plan

Between the November and January Uprisings, in the period between 1832 and 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.

In his youth, Czartoryski had fought against Russia in the Polish–Russian War of 1792; he would have done so again in the Kościuszko Uprising of 1794 had he not been arrested at Brussels on his way back to Poland. Subsequently, in 1795, he and his younger brother had been commanded to enter the Imperial Russian Army, and Catherine the Great had been so favourably impressed with them that she had restored to them part of their confiscated estates. Adam Czartoryski subsequently served the Russian emperors Paul and Alexander I as a diplomat and foreign minister, establishing an anti-French coalition during the Napoleonic Wars. Czartoryski, one of the leaders of the Polish November 1830 Uprising, had been sentenced to death after its suppression by Russia, but was eventually allowed to go into exile in France.

In Paris the "visionary" statesman and former friend, confidant, and ''de facto'' foreign minister of Alexander I acted as the "uncrowned king and unacknowledged foreign minister" of a nonexistent Poland.

In his book, ''Essai sur la diplomatie'' (Essay on Diplomacy), completed in 1827 but published only in 1830, Czartoryski observed 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 Russia would have done better cultivating "friends rather than slaves". He also identified a future threat from Prussia and urged the incorporation of East Prussia into a resurrected Poland.

Czartoryski's diplomatic efforts anticipated Piłsudski's Prometheist project in linking efforts for Polish independence with similar movements of other subjugated nations in Europe, as far east as the Caucasus Mountains, most notably in Georgia.

Czartoryski aspired above all to reconstitute—with French, British, and Ottoman support—a sort of "pan-Slavic" 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. Dziewanowski, "''Polski pionier zjednoczonej Europy''," p. 11. The plan seemed achievable during the period of national revolutions in 1848–49 but foundered on lack of western support, on Hungarian intransigence toward the Czechs, Slovaks, and Romanians, and on the rise of German nationalism.

Marian Kamil Dziewanowski writes that "the Prince's endeavour constitutes a itallink etweenthe 16th-century Jagiellon ederative prototypeand Józef Piłsudski's federative-Prometheist program hat was to follow after World War I"

Józef Piłsudski's ''Międzymorze''

Józef Piłsudski's strategic goal was to resurrect an updated, democratic form of the Polish–Lithuanian 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.) Piłsudski saw an Intermarium federation as a counterweight to Russian and German imperialism.

According to Dziewanowski, the plan was never expressed in systematic fashion but instead relied on Piłsudski's pragmatic instincts. According to British scholar George Sanford, about the time of the Polish–Soviet War of 1920 Piłsudski recognised that the plan was not feasible. George Sanford
''Democratic Government in Poland: Constitutional Politics since 1989''
Palgrave Macmillan 2002. . pp. 5–6.

Opposition

Piłsudski's plan faced opposition from virtually all quarters. The Soviets, whose sphere of influence was directly threatened, worked to thwart the Intermarium agenda. The Allied Powers assumed that Bolshevism was only a temporary threat and did not want to see their important (from the balance-of-power viewpoint) traditional ally, Russia, weakened. They resented Piłsudski's refusal to aid their White allies, viewed Piłsudski with suspicion, saw his plans as unrealistic, and urged Poland to confine itself to areas of clear-cut Polish ethnicity. Adam Bruno Ulam, ''Stalin: The Man and His Era'', Beacon Press, 1989,
p. 185
/ref>
. Accessed September 30, 2007.Norman Davies, ''White Eagle, Red Star'', Polish edition, Wydawnictwo Znak, 1997, , p.228 The Lithuanians,Piotr Łossowski, ''Konflikt polsko-litewski 1918–1920'', Książka i Wiedza, 1995, , p.13–16 and p. 36 who had re-established their independence in 1918, were unwilling to join; the Ukrainians, similarly seeking independence, likewise feared that Poland might again subjugate them; and the Belarusians, though nearly not as interested in independence as Ukraine, were still fearful of Polish domination. The chances for Piłsudski's scheme were not enhanced by a series of post-World War I wars and border conflicts between Poland and its neighbors in disputed territories—the Polish–Soviet War, the Polish–Lithuanian War, the Polish–Ukrainian War, and border conflicts between Poland and Czechoslovakia.

Piłsudski's concept was opposed within Poland itself, where National Democracy leader Roman Dmowski"Wojna polsko-bolszewicka"
. ''Internetowa encyklopedia PWN''. Accessed 27 October 2006."Pilsudski dreamed of drawing all the nations situated between Germany and Russia into an enormous federation in which Poland, by virtue of its size, would be the leader, while Dmowski wanted to see a unitary Polish state, in which other Slav peoples would become assimilated." Andrzej Paczkowski
''The Spring Will Be Ours: Poland and the Poles from Occupation to Freedom''
p. 10, Penn State Press, 2003, argued for an ethnically homogeneous Poland in which minorities would be Polonised.Manfred F. Boemeke, Gerald D. Feldman, Elisabeth Glaser, ''The Treaty of Versailles: A Reassessment After 75 Years'', Cambridge University Press, 1998,
p.314
/ref>Roman Dmowski has been quoted as saying: "Wherever we can multiply our forces and our civilizational efforts, absorbing other elements, no law can prohibit us from doing so, as such actions are our duty." J. Tomaszewski, , vol. 6, Warsaw, 1988, p. 101. Cited in Oleksandr Derhachov, ''ibid.'' Many Polish politicians, including Dmowski, opposed the idea of a multiethnic federation, preferring instead to work for a unitary Polish nation state. Sanford has described Piłsudski's policies after his resumption of power in 1926 as similarly focusing on the Polonisation of the country's Eastern Slavic minorities and on the centralisation of power.

While some scholars accept at face value the democratic principles claimed by Piłsudski for his federative plan, Aviel Roshwald, ''Ethnic Nationalism and the Fall of Empires: Central Europe, the Middle East and Russia, 1914–1923'', 2001, Routledge (UK),
p. 49
/ref> others view such claims with skepticism, pointing out a coup d'état in 1926 when Piłsudski assumed nearly dictatorial powers. Yohanan Cohen, ''Small Nations in Times of Crisis and Confrontation'', SUNY Press, 1989,
p. 65
/ref> In particular, his project is viewed unfavourably by most Ukrainian historians, with Oleksandr Derhachov arguing that the federation would have created a greater Poland in which the interests of non-Poles, especially Ukrainians, would have received short shrift."The essence of ózef Piłsudski's 'federalist' programwas that after the overthrow of tsardom and the disintegration of the Russian empire, a large, strong and mighty Poland was to be created in Eastern Europe. It would be the reincarnation of the ''Rzeczpospolita'' on 'federative' principles. It was to include the Polish, Lithuanian, Belarusian and Ukrainian lands. The leading role, of course, was to be given to the Polish ethnic, political, economic and cultural element. ... As such two influential and popular political doctrines with regard to Ukraine—the 'incorporationist' and the 'federalist'—even before the creation of Polish statehood, were based on ignoring the right of the Ukrainian people to self-determination and put forward claims to rule over the Ukrainian territories ..." "Ukraine in Polish concepts of foreign policy", in Oleksandr Derhachov (ed.), ''Ukrainian Statehood in the Twentieth Century: Historical and Political Analysis'', Kyiv, 1996, .

Some historians hold that Piłsudski, who argued that "There can be no independent Poland without an independent Ukraine", may have been more interested in splitting Ukraine from Russia than in assuring Ukrainians' welfare."The newly founded Polish state cared much more about the expansion of its borders to the east and southeast ('between the seas') than about helping the dying krainianstate of which Petlura was ''de facto'' dictator." "A Belated Idealist", '' Zerkalo Nedeli'' 'Mirror Weekly'' 22–28 May 2004. Available onlin
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. Piłsudski is quoted to have said: "After Polish independence we will see about Poland's size." (ibid)A month before his death, Pilsudski told an aide: "My life is lost. I failed to create a Ukraine free of the Russians." Oleksa Pidlutskyi, "Józef Piłsudski: The Chief who Created Himself a State", in ''Postati XX stolittia'' 'Figures of the 20th century'' Kyiv, 2004, , . reprinted in '' Zerkalo Nedeli'' 'Mirror Weekly'' Kyiv, 3–9 February 2001
in Russian
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. He did not hesitate to use military force to expand Poland's borders to Galicia and Volhynia, crushing a Ukrainian attempt at self-determination in disputed territories east of the Bug River