The Polish Question

Abstract

The term “question” is singularly appropriate when dealing with the subject of Poland at the Paris Peace Conference, for it suggests wider issues than mere territorial demarcations. Indeed, this expression has acquired a special meaning different from the similarly sounding and much discussed Czech question (Ceska otazka). The Polish question goes back to the partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the late eighteenth century and the demise of the old Respublica divided by Austria, Prussia, and Russia. It came to haunt Europe throughout much of the nineteenth century. Poland's partitions were, in Edmund Burke s words, a “very great breach in the modern political system in Europe.” The ensuing territorial changes brought Russia into the center of Europe and created conditions for a series of confrontations between it and the Habsburg monarchy. They paved the way for Prussia's greatness and eventually Germany's hegemony on the continent. The partitions, as a Polish historian put it, “constituted a great upheaval of the 'European system'; the Poles could recover their independence only within the frame of a new European upheaval on a similar or even greater scale.” Throughout the nineteenth century the Poles were to follow again and again the advice given to them by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his Considerations sur le gouvernement de Pologne: If you cannot prevent being devoured, you must make sure that you will not be digested. The Poles rose up in insurrection in 1794, 1806, 1830, 1846, 1848, and 1863. Most of these uprisings had international repercussions. Indeed, the great powers found themselves repeatedly confronted with the Polish question, and although at times they tried to ignore it, at others they were forced to seek at least a partial solution. The legitimist program of the Congress of Vienna is a case in point.