Roman Dmowski
Roman Stanisław Dmowski was a Polish politician, statesman, and co-founder and chief ideologue of the National Democracy political movement active during the interwar period.
While he never wielded significant political power except for a brief period in 1923 as Minister of Foreign Affairs, Dmowski was one of the most influential Polish ideologues and politicians of his time. A controversial personality most of his life, Dmowski desired a homogeneous, Polish-speaking and Roman Catholic-practicing nation. Throughout most of his life, he was the chief ideological opponent of the Polish military and political leader Józef Piłsudski and of the latter's vision of Prometheism, a multi-ethnic Poland reminiscent of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.
As a result, Dmowski's nationalist rhetoric actively marginalized other ethnic groups living in Poland, particularly those in the Kresy. During the partitions, Dmowski saw the Germanization of Polish territories controlled by the German Empire as the major threat to Polish culture and therefore advocated a degree of accommodation with another power that had partitioned Poland, the Russian Empire. Openly antisemitic throughout his career, Dmowski believed that Poland's Jews were working hand in hand with the Germans to partition Poland and supported economic boycotts and property confiscation against both ethnic groups.
He favored the re-establishment of Polish independence by nonviolent means and supported policies favorable to the Polish middle class. While in Paris during World War I, he was a prominent spokesman for Polish aspirations to the Allies through his Polish National Committee. He was an instrumental figure in the postwar restoration of Poland's independent existence. Dmowski remains a highly polarizing figure. While often denounced as an antisemite, xenophobe, and an admirer of fascism, Dmowski has been highly influential in the history of Polish nationalist movements, and has been frequently referred to as "the father of Polish nationalism".
Early life
Dmowski was born on 9 August 1864 in Kamionek near Warsaw, in the Kingdom of Poland, which three years later became part of the Russian Empire. His father was a road construction worker and later an entrepreneur. Dmowski attended schools in Warsaw, studying biology and zoology at Warsaw University, from which he graduated in 1891. As a student he became active in the Polish Youth Association "Zet", where he was active in opposing socialist activists. The Zet had links with the Liga Polska, which Dmowski joined in 1889. A key concept of the League was Polskość, as opposed to trójlojalizm.He also organized a student street demonstration on the 100th anniversary of the Polish Constitution of For this he was imprisoned by Russian Imperial authorities for five months in the Warsaw Citadel. He was then exiled to Libau and Mitau in Kurland. After 1890 he was also developing as a writer and publicist, publishing political and literary criticism in Głos, where he became close friends with Jan Ludwik Popławski, who would be his mentor. After his release from exile, Dmowski became quite critical of the Liga Polska, accusing it of being controlled by Free Masons and being generally incompetent.
In April 1893, Dmowski co-founded the National League and became its first leader. The group differed from the Liga Polska as Dmowski insisted that there could be one Polish national identity, leading him to attack regionalism as a form of split loyalty that was weakening the Polish nation. The same concept also excluded minorities such as Jews from his projected Polish nation. In November 1893 he was sentenced to exile from the Vistula Land. Dmowski went to Jelgava, and soon afterward in early 1895 to Lemberg, Austria-Hungary, where together with Popławski he began to publish a new magazine, '. In 1897, he co-founded the National-Democratic Party. The Endecja was to serve as a political party, a lobby group and an underground organization that would unite Poles who espoused Dmowski's views into a disciplined and committed political group. In 1899, Dmowski founded the Society for National Education as an ancillary group. From 1898 to 1900, he resided in France and Britain, and travelled to Brazil. In 1901 he took up residence in Kraków, then part of the Austrian partition of Poland. In 1903 he published a book, ', one of the first if not the first nationalist manifesto in European history.
In Myśli nowoczesnego Polaka, Dmowski was harshly critical of the old Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth for exalting the nobility and for its tolerance for minorities, which contradicted his principle of healthy national egoism. He also rejected liberalism and socialism for putting the individual above the nation-state, which for Dmowski was the only unit that really mattered. Dmowski argued that the privileged status of the aristocracy in the old Commonwealth had hindered national development, and what was needed was a strong sense of nationality that would unite the nation into one. He also attacked the Romantic nationalism of the 19th century for viewing Poland as the "Christ of Nations", instead arguing for a hard-headed national egoism. Dmowski opposed revolutionary means of fighting, preferring political struggle, and aimed for independence through increased autonomy. After the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War, Dmowski met with Colonel Akashi Motojiro, the Japanese military attache in Sweden and spy-master for Japanese intelligence activities, in Kraków in March 1904. Although reluctant to collaborate with the Japanese, Dmowski agreed to Akashi's proposal that Polish soldiers in the Russian Army in Manchuria might be encouraged to defect to the Imperial Japanese Army. He travelled to Tokyo to work out the details, and at the same time made a successful effort to prevent the Japanese from aiding a rival Polish political activist, Józef Piłsudski, who wanted assistance for a planned insurrection in Poland, an aspiration which Dmowski felt would be doomed to failure.
In 1905, Dmowski moved to Warsaw, back in the Russian partition of Poland, where he continued to play a growing role in the Endecja faction. During the Russian Revolution of 1905, Dmowski favoured co-operation with the Imperial Russian authorities and welcomed Nicholas II's October Manifesto of 1905 as a stepping stone on the road towards renewed Polish autonomy. During the revolt in Łódź in June 1905, the Endeks, acting under Dmowski's orders, opposed the uprising led by Piłsudski's Polish Socialist Party. During the course of the June Days, as the Łódź uprising is known, a miniature civil war raged between Endecja and the PPS. As a result of the elections to the First Duma, which were boycotted by the PPS, the National Democrats won 34 of the 55 seats allotted to Poland. Dmowski and the Endecja saw the Duma as a way of improving Congress Poland's position within the Russian Empire as he considered guerrilla war to be impractical. Dmowski himself was elected a deputy to the Second and Third Dumas and was president of the Polish caucus within it. He was seen as a conservative, and despite being a Polish caucus leader, he often had more influence on the Russian than the Polish deputies. Between October 1905 and early 1906, over 2000 Poles were killed by Russian police or military and an additional 1000 were sentenced to death. Even though Dmowski was often denounced as a sellout, he maintained that he was undertaking the only realistic course of action for Poland under the circumstances.
Over time, Dmowski became more receptive to Russian overtures, particularly neoslavism, warming up to the idea that Poland and Russia may have a common future, particularly due to Germany being their common enemy. In light of what he regarded as Russian cultural inferiority, Dmowski felt that a strong Russia was more acceptable than a strong Germany. In Dmowski's view, the Russian policy of Russification would not succeed in subjugating the Poles, while the Germans would be far more successful with their Germanisation policies. He explained those views in his book Niemcy, Rosja i kwestia Polska, published in 1908. This was not a universally popular attitude, and in 1909 Dmowski resigned his deputy mandate to focus on an internal political struggle within Endecja. He lost the election to the Fourth Duma in 1912 to a socialist politician, Eugeniusz Jagiełło from the Polish Socialist Party – Left, who won with the support of the Jewish vote. Dmowski viewed this as a personal insult; in exchange, he organized a successful boycott of Jewish businesses throughout much of Poland.
World War I
In 1914, Dmowski praised the Grand Duke Nicholas's Manifesto to the Polish Nation of 14 August, which vaguely assured the Tsar's Polish subjects that there would be greater autonomy for "Congress Poland" after the war and that the Austrian provinces of East and West Galicia, together with the Pomerania province of Prussia, would be annexed to the Kingdom of Poland when the German Empire and Austria-Hungary were defeated. However, subsequent attempts on the part of Dmowski to have the Russians make firmer commitments along the lines of the Grand Duke Nicholas's manifesto were met with elusive answers. Nonetheless, Dmowski's pro-Russian and anti-German propaganda succeeded in frustrating Piłsudski's plans of causing an anti-Russian uprising, and bolstered his position as an important Polish political figure on the international scene, especially with the Triple Entente. In November he became one of the active members of the Polish National Committee.In 1915, Dmowski, increasingly convinced of Russia's impending defeat, decided that to support the cause of Polish independence he should go abroad to campaign on behalf of Poland in the capitals of the western Allies. During his lobbying efforts, his friends included such opinion makers as the British journalist Wickham Steed. In particular, Dmowski was very successful in France, where he made a very favourable impression on public opinion. He gave a series of lectures at Cambridge University, which impressed the local faculty enough that he was given an honorary doctorate. In August 1917, in Paris, he created a new Polish National Committee aimed at rebuilding a Polish state. That year he also published, at his own expense, Problems of Central and Eastern Europe, that he soon distributed among numerous English speaking diplomats. He was a vocal critic of Austro-Hungary, and campaigned for the creation of a number of Slavic states in its place. Within the Polish political community, he opposed those who supported allying themselves with Germany and Austria-Hungary, including supporters of a vague German proposal for a Regency Kingdom of Poland, with undefined borders, that Germany promised to create after World War I.
In 1917, Dmowski laid out a plan for the borders of a re-created Polish state; it would include Greater Poland, Pomerania with Gdańsk, Upper Silesia, south strip of East Prussia and Cieszyn Silesia. In September that year, Dmowski's National Committee was recognized by the French as the legitimate government of Poland. The British and the Americans were less enthusiastic about Dmowski's National Committee, but likewise recognized it as Poland's government a year later. However, the Americans refused to provide backing for what they regarded as Dmowski's excessive territorial claims. The American President Woodrow Wilson reported, "I saw Mr. Dmowski and Mr. Paderewski in Washington, and I asked them to define Poland for me, as they understood it, and they presented me with a map in which they claimed a large part of the earth."
In part, Wilson's objections stemmed from the dislike of Dmowski personally. One British diplomat stated, "He was a clever man, and clever men are distrusted; he was logical in his political theories and we hate logic; and he was persistent with a tenacity which was calculated to drive everybody mad." Another area of objection to Dmowski was with his antisemitic remarks, as in a speech he delivered at a dinner organized by the writer Gilbert Keith Chesterton, that began with the words, "My religion came from Jesus Christ, who was murdered by the Jews." When British Prime Minister David Lloyd George criticized Dmowski and the committee, Dmowski saw this as a result of Lloyd George's representation of Jewish interests. He refused to admit a single Polish Jew to the National Committee, despite support for such a proposal from Paderewski. A number of American and British Jewish organizations campaigned during the war against their governments recognizing the National Committee. Another leading critic of Dmowski was the historian Sir Lewis Namier, a Jew who served as the British Foreign Office's resident expert on Poland during the war, and who claimed to be personally offended by antisemitic remarks made by Dmowski. Namier fought hard against British recognition of Dmowski and "his chauvinist gang". In turn, Dmowski's experiences at that time convinced him of the existence of an international "Judeo-Masonic conspiracy, unfriendly towards Poland and intransigently hostile to his party".