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Międzymorze was the name for Józef Piłsudski's proposed federation of Poland, Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine. The Polish name may be translated as "Between-Seas," and has also been rendered, from the Latin, as "Intermarum" or "Intermarium." It has also been called the "Border Federation."

The proposed federation was meant to emulate the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, that, from the late 14th to the late 18th century, had united Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (the latter also incorporating modern Belarus and Ukraine). Międzymorze complemented Piłsudski's other great geopolitical vision—Prometheism, whose goal was the dismemberment of the Russian-dominated state. Piłsudski wanted to break the Russian Empire Together these two projects were intended to strengthen Poland at the expense of Tsarist Russia, and later of Soviet Russia and the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union eventually did disintegrate, in different circumstances, in 1991. While a Międzymorze Federation was never formed, many of its proposed constituent states have since been absorbed into a still greater, European Union.

Historical precedents

Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth

The Polish-Lithuanian union and military alliance had come about as a mutual response to a common threat from the Teutonic Order. It had been cemented by the personal union in 1385 of Poland's Queen Jadwiga and Lithuanian Grand Duke Jogaila, who became King Władysław II Jagiełło of Poland. It had been further extended by the 1569 Union of Lublin, when the two states merged into a federation, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (in Polish, Rzeczpospolita Obojga Narodów — the "Republic of the Two Nations"), which would remain until the late 17th century the largest state in Europe. Its combined resources enabled it to hold its own against the Teutonic Order, the Mongols, the Russians, the Turks and the Swedes, for four centuries until the late-18th-century partitions of the weakened Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth by its neighbors. Under the Commonwealth, proposals were advanced to form an expanded, Polish-Lithuanian-Muscovite or Polish-Lithuanian-Ruthenian, Commonwealth, but these were never implemented.

Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski's plan

Between the November and January Uprisings, in 1832-1861, 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. A visionary statesman and former friend and confidant of Russia's Tsar Alexander I, Czartoryski acted as the unacknowledged minister of foreign affairs for a nonexistent Poland. He wrote 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 it would have been in Russia's interest, instead, to have surrounded herself with "friend slave." Czartoryski also identified a future threat from Prussia and urged the incorporation of East Prussia into a resurrected Poland. Above all, however, he aspired to reconstitute — with French, British and Turkish support — a 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.

Czartoryski's plan seemed close to realization during the period of national revolutions in 1848-1849 but foundered on lack of western support, on Hungarian intransigence toward the Czechs, Slovaks and Romanians, and on the rise of German nationalism. Nevertheless, his endeavor constituted a vital link between the 16th-century Jagiellon federative prototype and Józef Piłsudski's federative-Prometheist program that was to follow after World War I.

Józef Piłsudski's concept of "Międzymorze"

Józef Piłsudski's strategic goal was to resurrect a modern form of the old 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). The accomplishment of these ends, somewhat approximated, decades later, with the creation of the European Union, and with the abolition of the Soviet Union in 1991, might have transformed much of Central Europe into a "Third Europe" invulnerable to Poland's historic antagonists, Germany and Russia.

Piłsudski's dream faced opposition from virtually all interested parties. The Soviets exerted their influence to thwart it. The western Allies feared that a weakened Germany and Russia might be unable to pay their First World War reparations and obligations, and that the European balance of power might be excessively altered by coordinated action among the newly independent countries. The Lithuanians, Ukrainians and other peoples that were invited to join a federation, dreaded any compromise to their own cherished independence and were discouraged by a series of wars and border conflicts fought in the wake of World War I over disputed territories (the Polish-Lithuanian War, Polish-Ukrainian War, and border conflicts between Poland and Czechoslovakia). Finally, many Polish politicians such as Roman Dmowski opposed the idea of a multi-cultural federation, preferring to work instead toward a nationalistic, ethnically-pure Poland.

In the aftermath of the Polish-Soviet War, Piłsudski's concept of a federation of Central and East European countries lost any chance of realization. Less than two decades after he had broached the idea, and only four years after his death, all the countries that had so jealously been guarding their independence would once more be engulfed by their neighbors, Germany and the Soviet Union.

A late version of the concept was attempted by interwar Polish Foreign Minister Józef Beck, a Piłsudski protegé. It envisioned a Central European union as also including Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Scandinavia, the Baltic states, Italy, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Greece: thus stretching not only west-east from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, but north-south from the Arctic Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea. Such a polity, comprising some 150 million central Europeans, with a common foreign policy, might have been a force to be reckoned with by Nazi Germany in the west and the Soviet Union in the east.

World War II and since

The concept of a "Central European Union" — as a triangular geopolitical entity anchored in the Baltic, Black, and Adriatic or Aegean Seas — was revived in Władysław Sikorski's Polish government in exile during World War II. A first step toward its implementation — discussions between the Polish and Czechoslovak exile governments regarding a prospective Polish-Czechoslovak union — ultimately foundered in Czech hesitation and Allied indifference or hostility.

The concept has more recently, since the demise of Soviet hegemony in east-central Europe, been advocated under various names including "Intermarum" or "Intermarium" (Latin for "Międzymorze," "Between-Seas"). One version of the idea envisions such a federation as a constituent of the European Union; "Intermarum" could, it is argued, give protection to its member states against domination by the European Union's wealthier, more powerful western members.

See also

• Edmund Charaszkiewicz
• Józef Piłsudski
• Prometheism
• Vilnius Conference 2006

References

1. Józef Pilsudski, Polish revolutionary and statesman, the first chief of state (1918–22) of the newly independent Poland established in November 1918. (Józef Pilsudski in Encyclopedia Britannica)
   Released in Nov., 1918, returned to Warsaw, assumed command of the Polish armies, and proclaimed an independent Polish republic, which he headed. (Piłsudski, Joseph in Columbia Encyclopedia)
2. Timothy Snyder, Covert Polish missions across the Soviet Ukrainian border, 1928-1933 (p.55, p.56, p.57, p.58, p.59, in Cofini, Silvia Salvatici (a cura di), Rubbettino, 2005).
   Timothy Snyder, Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist's Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine, Yale University Press, 2005, ISBN 030010670X, (p.41, p.42, p.43)
3. "Although the Polish premier and many of his associates sincerely wanted peace, other important Polish leaders did not. Josef Pilsudski, chief of state and creator of Polish army, was foremost among the latter. 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, 1918-192, [Google Print, p. 59, McGill-Queen's Press, 1992, ISBN 0-7735-0828-7.
4. "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. But his slow consolidation of dictatorial power betrayed the democratic substance of those earlier visions of national revolution as the path to human liberation"
   James H. Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men, p. 432, Transaction Publishers, ISBN 0-7658-0471-9
5. Marshal Jozef Pilsudski. Messiah and Central European Federalist. Polonica.net article by Patryk Dole

• Marian Kamil Dziewanowski, "Polski pionier zjednoczonej Europy" ("A Polish Pioneer of a United Europe"), Gwiazda Polarna (Pole Star), vol. 96, no 19 (September 17, 2005), pp. 10-11.
• M.K. Dziewanowski, Czartoryski and His Essai sur la diplomatie, 1971, ASIN: B0072XRK6.
• M.K. Dziewanowski, Joseph Pilsudski: a European Federalist, 1918-1922, Stanford, Hoover Institution, 1979.
• Peter Jordan, Central Union of Europe, introduction by Ernest Minor Patterson, Ph.D., President, The American Academy of Political and Social Science, New York, Robert M. McBride & Company, 1944.
• Antoni Plutynski, We Are 115 Millions, with a foreword by Douglas Reed, London, Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1944.

External link

• Marshal Jozef Pilsudski. Messiah and Central European Federalist by Patryk Dole

Further reading

• Alfonsas Eidintas, Vytautas Zalys, Lithuania in European Politics: The Years of the First Republic, 1918-1940, Palgrave, 1999, ISBN 0312224583. Google Print, p.78 - on Lithuanian attitudes to Międzymorze.
• David J. Smith, Artis Pabriks, Aldis Purs, Thomas Lane, The Baltic States: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, Routledge (UK), 2002, ISBN 0415285801 Google Print, p.30 (also available here).
• Janusz Cisek, Kilka uwag o myśli federacyjnej Józefa Piłsudskiego, Międzymorze – Polska i kraje Europy środkowo-wschodniej XIX-XX wiek (Some Remarks on Józef Piłsudski's Federationist Thought, Międzymorze — Poland and the East-Central European Countries in the 19th-20th Centuries), Warsaw, 1995.
• Piotr Okulewicz, Koncepcja "miedzymorza" w myśli i praktyce politycznej obozu Józefa Piłsudskiego w latach 1918-1926 (The Concept of Międzymorze in the Political Thought and Practice of Józef Piłsudski's Camp in the Years 1918-1926), Poznań, 2001, ISBN 83-7177-060-X.
• Jonathan Levy Madison, Wilson, and East Central European Federalism, University of Cincinnati, 2006

• History of Europe
• History of Poland (1918–1939)
• History of Lithuania
• Proposed countries