At all events, one may rejoice in the fact that, in spite of the risks involved, the Peace Conference had the courage to carry through a Polish-German settlement based on principle and not upon expediency or selfish convenience, a settlement which, in Mr. Lloyd George’s phrase, “leaves Germany no just grievance,” and which does right a great wrong from which the conscience of Europe has suffered for one hundred and fifty years.
Turning to the territories that belonged to the late Hapsburg monarchy, we may note that Poland has had an unhappy dispute with Czecho-Slovakia over the duchy of Teschen and the small territories of Zips and Arva, which lie south of the Carpathians. After two weeks of fighting and nine months of negotiation, it has now been settled that the populations of these districts are to decide by plebiscite to which of the two new republics they wish to belong.
Much more serious and difficult has been the problem presented by Galicia. The western part of this province was from the earliest times an integral part of Poland and is overwhelmingly Polish today. There is no real question here, and the possession of Western Galicia has already been assured to Poland. But with the remaining two-thirds of the province, the case is altogether different.
Eastern Galicia was originally settled by a population historically known, and still commonly known as Ruthenians. They are a branch of that Little Russian race for which the general name Ukrainian is now coming into use. After belonging to various Ruthenian principalities in the early middle ages, Eastern Galicia was conquered by Poland in 1340; it remained a part of the Polish state down to 1772; and even under the Austrian rule the Poles have continued to be the dominant nation. Today the ethnographic situation in Eastern Galicia may be summarized by saying that the Ruthenians make up 59% of the total population, the Poles 27%, and the Jews 13%. Although usually in the minority, the Poles are found in large numbers in almost every part of the territory. Lemberg, the capital of the province, and most of the other large towns are mainly Polish and Jewish in population; and there are several large rural districts of Polish-speaking majority.
Socially and intellectually there is a striking contrast between the two rival races. The Ruthenians are almost entirely a peasant population, with only a small educated class of priests, lawyers, doctors, etc. The Poles are fairly evenly and normally divided among the various occupations and social classes. The difference may be shown by the fact that about 91% of the Ruthenian population is dependent upon agriculture for a living, and only 44% of the Poles; 39% of the Poles live by commerce and industry, but only 7% of the Ruthenians; 17% of the Poles are engaged in the liberal professions, but only 1% of the Ruthenians; 62% of the Ruthenians are illiterate, but only 23% of the Poles. In other words, the Poles are socially, economically, and intellectually the strongest element in the country, although in numbers they are considerably inferior to their rivals.
During the five or six centuries in which the two races have lived side by side, their relations have on the whole been relatively satisfactory and amicable. To a large extent they are so still, whenever the politicians do not intervene, as is shown, for instance, by the high percentage of mixed marriages. In the nineteenth century, however, a nationalist movement grew up among the Ruthenians, which assumed a marked anti-Polish tendency and which has led to the rather bitter racial feud that has raged in Eastern Galicia in the past thirty years. It is likely that this contest would never have assumed so fierce a character had it not been for the insidious activities of the Austrian government, which lost no opportunity to stir up the two races against each other, aiding now one and then the other in accordance with the traditional Austrian maxim, ‘divide and rule’. In the last twenty years the German government has also taken an active hand in the affair, secretly exciting and aiding the Ruthenians against the Poles; for the latter were always the enemy for Berlin, and decades before Brest-Litovsk German statesmen appreciated the possibilities of the ‘Ukrainian idea,’ which might be used with equal effect against both Russia and Poland.
Nevertheless, the Ruthenian movement remained rather ineffective, both because the Galician Ruthenians were the poorest, most ignorant, and most backward of all the races of Austria, and because they were divided among themselves as to their goal. Two distinct national movements have really existed among them, in a population of three and a half millions. Part of them, the majority, apparently, maintained that they were a branch of the Ukrainian nation, and that their goal must be the ultimate formation of an independent Ukrainian state. The minority, on the other hand, asserted that there was no such thing as a Ukrainian nation: that the Galician Ruthenians and the people of the Russian Ukraine alike were simply a branch of the one great Russian nation, which stretched unbroken from the Carpathians to the Pacific. For these people, in theory at least, the goal was the union of Eastern Galicia with Russia.
For a nation so backward in its development, so divided against itself, and so accustomed to look to Berlin and Vienna for aid and direction, the World War arrived at the wrong moment: the World War and then the collapse of Austria and the crisis that was to decide the fate of Eastern Galicia.
At the moment of Austria’s spontaneous dissolution, one Ruthenian party hastened to set up a ‘Republic of the Western Ukraine,’ and, with the aid of certain Ruthenian units in the old Austrian army, attempted to seize possession of all Eastern Galicia. This led to a prolonged and unhappy struggle with the Poles, who were not disposed to submit to such a settlement of the question. For many months the fighting centred around the city of Lemberg, which long defended itself almost single-handed and with great heroism against superior Ukrainian forces. When at last the Polish government was in position to send large reënforcements, the issue was quickly decided: in June, 1919, the Ukrainian resistance collapsed, and the Poles occupied the whole country as far as the Zbrucz.