Europe Since 1918

by Herbert Adams Gibbons

Poland began a reign of terror in Eastern Galicia, suspending the Diet and Provincial Executive on January 30, closing Ukrainian schools, suppressing Ukrainian newspapers, and conscripting Ukrainians by force into the Polish army. When the time came for elections to the Polish Diet, the army was used at the polls to prevent the people from returning Ukrainian deputies. The brutality of the Polish army and the methods of the Polish Government in Eastern Galicia are as bad as anything the Germans and Russians have ever done. This is a strong statement, but it is based upon unimpeachable testimony. I have only recently heard accounts of punitive expeditions to the villages in the Przemysl district that might have been written about Europeans in central Africa. At Przemysl the Ukrainian recruits marched handcuffed through the streets singing patriotic songs. This is how Poland is raising her armies!

Notwithstanding the determination of the Eastern Galicians to have nothing to do with their age-old enemies, on March 16, 1923, the Council of Ambassadors at Paris allotted full sovereignty over Eastern Galicia to Poland. Former Secretary Colby was in Paris, retained by the Ukrainians to plead their cause. But he was refused a hearing. The Ukrainians were ignored. The decision was made solely at the suggestion of France, who had received from Poland control of 50 per cent of the oil-wells and 75 per cent of the refining factories in Eastern Galicia as security for a loan of 400,000,000 francs for military purposes. As a last resort, the Ukrainians requested that the status of their country be referred to the League of Nations or the Hague tribunal. As they did not have the backing of a great power, as the Poles had, the request was ignored. This settlement of the Eastern Galician question creates a large and dangerous Alsace-Lorraine in eastern Europe. None who knows local conditions doubts that Ukrainia will eventually intervene on behalf of her “oppressed brethren,” with the backing of Russia.[11]

Poland had allowed her insatiable territorial greed to create for her another danger on the East as great as that of Eastern Galicia. We have read in another chapter how General Zeligowski violated the armistice agreement arranged between Poland and Lithuania by the intermediary of the League of Nations. Zeligowski, following the successful example of d’Annunzio, seized Vilna, capital of Lithuania. When the Lithuanian Government protested to the League of Nations, the Polish Government answered that Zeligowski had acted on his own initiative, and that Poland was not responsible for him. But Warsaw took full advantage of the breach of faith, and, again with French backing, manœuvered diplomatically so as to secure a decision of the Conference of Ambassadors, on March 15, 1923, arbitrarily dividing Lithuania in two. The Vilna district contains a mixed population, with White Russians predominating. But there are more Lithuanians than Poles, and Vilna is the historic capital of Lithuania. The decision of the ambassadors, after the League of Nations had failed to settle the question, consecrates Zeligowski’s coup de force. The Lithuanians have officially declared that they will not acquiesce in the settlement, and they warn the Entente Powers that “such a wrong done to the most powerful instincts of racial self-preservation may precipitate untoward events.” The reply of the Entente Powers was to give the Lithuanians authority to inflict a wrong upon the Germans at Memel such as the Poles inflicted upon them at Vilna! The Moscow Soviet, speaking for once in the name of all Russia irrespective of party, immediately warned London and Paris that the Occidental powers “are responsible for prejudice to Russian interests through decisions adopted by them without the participation of Russia and her Allies.”

The third dubious success gained by Poland since her reconstitution was the decision of the League of Nations to divide Upper Silesia after the province had voted by nearly three hundred thousand majority to remain with Germany. Before and after the plebiscite Polish bands, with the connivance of the French, overran Upper Silesia. The British and Italians on the spot protested in vain. The decision of the League of Nations, dividing Upper Silesia, awarded to Poland most of the mines and factories, which had been created by German industry and run by German engineers. To make this possible, thriving industrial towns that had given substantial majorities in the plebiscite in favor of Germany were put on the Polish side of the line. I was in Kattowitz when the transfer from French military occupation to Poland took place. The Treaty of Versailles did not bind the victors to make the partition in accordance with the verdict of its inhabitants. The vote was to be for “guidance” only. France stood out squarely for giving Kattowitz to Poland. Aside from the consideration of crippling Germany as much as was humanly possible, the French military authorities pointed out that Kattowitz must be taken from Germany because through this city ran the railway from Prague to Warsaw.

The Poles argued that the country-side around these German cities like Kattowitz contained a Polish peasant population, and that the large German population in the cities was due to colonization. But when I had been in Eastern Galicia, where Lemberg had a Polish and Jewish majority and the country was Ukrainian—more Ukrainian than the country districts of Upper Silesia were Polish—I was told that it was the city population that counted! Alarm for the peace of Europe and not sympathy with Germany for the loss of this rich region prompts one to denounce the decision by which people were bartered like cattle and were placed under a Government that will have great difficulty in utilizing the resources thrust into its inexperienced hands. Decisions of this sort in international questions are precisely what keep alive old animosities, and sow the seeds of new wars. The problems are not solved; they remain, and are aggravated.

The new frontier in Upper Silesia will give rise to countless difficulties. The provisions for the “preservation of the economic unity of Upper Silesia” will not succeed. Poles and Germans have closed the frontier to each other. They could not have done otherwise. And they have mounted guard to the detriment of any peace within the near future. An Englishman who knows Upper Silesia thoroughly told me that the country would go to smash—on both sides of the frontier—as it would be impossible to work out on a sound economic basis the coal and iron and railway readjustments made necessary with the new frontier. “It just can’t be done,” said my informant, “and one of these days we shall read despatches in the newspapers telling us that the Germans and Russians have decided to take back what is now given to Poland. And who will prevent them?”[12]

In contrast to the success of her neighbor, Czechoslovakia, Poland has been floundering in the mire of financial difficulties from the day of her birth. Of course, the conditions confronting the two new Governments were entirely different. Because Bohemia had highly organized industries that furnished most of the war materials for Austria-Hungary, the Czechoslovaks prospered throughout the war. And Czechoslovakia was not invaded. Poland, on the other hand, had been a battle-ground, and had suffered as much as northern France and Serbia from the ravages of contending armies. It is impossible to overestimate the economic damage done to Poland not only by the fighting but also by the dislocation of her industrial and agricultural life.

For all that, the natural richness of the country might easily have turned the balance in the years immediately after hostilities had not the new state taken upon itself from the very beginning the burden of military ventures and a large standing army. Ever since the end of 1918 Poland has strained every nerve to keep up a military establishment and to accomplish the various extensions of her frontiers outlined in this chapter. When territories are occupied they must be subjugated; and when they are subjugated they must be defended. Thus it is that the Polish Government has never had a chance to get a breathing-spell to put its financial house in order and attempt to balance its budget. The printing-presses have turned out paper money by the trillion. The Polish mark has gradually sunk until now it stands hardly better than the Austrian crown. From a financial point of view, as indicated by her exchange, Poland, although she has no national debt as an inheritance and no indemnities to pay, stands with the conquered nations. She has recently been voted a loan of 400,000,000 francs by France “for the purpose of improving Poland’s financial and economic situation so that she may resume her proper place in the European concert of nations and play the rôle to which her geographical position and her history entitle her.”

So ran the resolution adopted by the French Chamber of Deputies. But it was soon discovered that the purpose of the loan was to increase still further the Polish army and to develop Polish factories capable of producing war materials. With what result? The Polish mark is still far below the German mark in purchasing-power. That means that it has virtually no purchasing-power! Militarism is the curse of Poland, and there is no hope of economic rehabilitation until the revenues of the nation and the money she can borrow abroad are devoted to purposes of peace.

At the Peace Conference the British advocated the restriction of the frontiers of Poland to regions inhabited in large majority by Poles. They argued that the award to the new republic of provinces with alien majorities, at the expense of Germany and Russia, would create fatal irredentist questions. But such a Poland would have been an agricultural country, without access to the sea, and without a common frontier with Rumania. France wanted a Poland to take the place of Russia as an ally, possessing the iron and coal and oil essential to military power in the twentieth century. The French plan, for the accomplishment of which the doctrine of self-determination would have to be sponsored or ignored as it fitted the plan, called for a cordon sanitaire of allied states separating Germany and Russia.