Poland towards its Southern Neighbours

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The publication was issued in the framework of the project "The Electronic Platform
for the Transfer of Knowledge and Source Materials: Visions of Poland’s Role in
Central and Eastern Europe in Geo-Political, Economic, Civilisation and Cultural
Concepts in the 20th Century", funded under the „DIALOG” programme of the Polish
Minister of Science and Higher Education in the years 2018–2020.

Cover illustration: Courtesy of Benjamin Ben Chaim

ISBN 978-3-631-81591-5 (Print) ∙ E-ISBN 978-3-631-83861-7 (E-PDF)
E-ISBN 978-3-631-83862-4 (EPUB) ∙ E-ISBN 978-3-631-83863-1 (MOBI)
DOI 10.3726/b17724

© Peter Lang GmbH

Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften

Berlin 2020

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About the editors

The Editor
Professor Przemysław Waingertner – a historian, professor, holder of a post-doctoral degree in humanities, the head of the Chair of the History of Modern Poland of the University of Łódz´. The author and co-author of several monographs and more than 100 research papers on the Polish political thought and the Second Polish Republic.

About the book

Przemysław Waingertner (Ed.)

Poland towards its Southern Neighbours

This is another publication from the series devoted to Polish political reflection on the integration of Central and Eastern Europe. The reader will find here texts of historians, political scientists, and experts in the field of international relations. The texts concern relations between Poland and Poles, and the nations of Central and Eastern Europe: Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania encompassing the period from the late nineteenth to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Apart from the facts concerning mutual relations between Warsaw, Budapest, Prague, Bratislava, and Bucharest, the authors discuss also their outset – Polish concepts shaping relations with Magyars, Czechs, Slovaks, and Romanians and their sovereign states that regained independence in the twentieth century.

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PREFACE

Michał Andrzejczak and Konrad Dziurdzia

The National Democracy’s Political Reflection on the Place of the Polish Nation in Central & Eastern Europe before 1918 – the Neo-Slavic Movement and the Czech Cause

Arkadiusz Adamczyk

Poland’s Relations with Southern Neighbours of the Second Republic of Poland (Czechia, Romania, Slovakia, Hungary) in 1918–1945 in Deliberations of Polish Political, Intellectual, and Cultural Circles

Andrzej Dubicki

Poland Towards Its Southern Neighbours in 1945–1989

Paweł Ukielski

Central Europe in the Polish Political Thought after 1989

Tomasz Grzegorz Grosse

Between History and Modern Times – Poles’ Geopolitical Choices

Przemysław Waingertner

The Relations of Poland with Central And Eastern Europe – Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic, Slovakia) Romania and Hungary – In the 20th and the 21st Centuries, and their Internal and International Circumstances. An Attempt at Recapitulation

BIBLIOGRAPHY

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES OF AUTHORS

PREFACE

The monograph that we are submitting to the reader contains a number of analyses concerning relations that existed between Poland and Poles and states and nations of Central and Eastern Europe – Hungary (Hungarians), Czechia (Czechs), Slovakia (Slovaks) and Romania (Romanians) – from the late 19th century till the beginning of the 21st century. The analyses take into account not only facts concerning mutual relations between Warsaw and Budapest, between Warsaw and Prague (Prague and Bratislava) and between Warsaw and Bucharest but also their seed – conceptions elaborated by Polish political, social and intellectual elites devising the form of mutual relations with Magyars, Czechoslovaks (Czechs and Slovaks) and Romanians and sovereign states created (or restored) by them in the 20th century.

The highlighting of the Polish political reflection referring both to nations and states seems justifiable due to the complex history of Central and Eastern Europe during the past 150 years. A brief overview: global and regional military conflicts that dismantled and… demolished the regional order: the control of the aforementioned region by imperial powers – the monarchy of the Habsburgs, the German empire of the Hohenzollerns and the empire of the Romanovs – from the late 19th century; subsequently, the literal hegemony of two totalitarian states: the German Third Reich and the Soviet Union and the actual division of the region between them at the end of the first half of the 20th century; and, last but not least, the subjugation of Eastern European nations by the communist USSR for a number of decades (which involved the loss of their own statehood or the limitation of political sovereignty) resulted in the situation, in which ideas elaborated by Polish politicians, publicists and thinkers often had to be addressed not to official state authorities, but to the elites of underground irredentism or political Magyar, Czechoslovakian (or Czech and Slovakian) and Romanian emigration circles, which did not have their own state institutions.