Poland in a Colonial World Order: Adjustments and Aspirations, 1918–1939 (Routledge Histories of Central and Eastern Europe)

429 Pages·2021·5.938 MB·English

by  Piotr Puchalski

Poland in a Colonial World Order is a study of the interwar Polish state
and empire building project in a changing world of empires, nation-
states, dominions, protectorates, mandates, and colonies.
Drawing from a wide range of sources spanning two continents and five
countries, Piotr Puchalski examines how Polish elites looked to
expansion in South America and Africa as a solution to both real
problems, such as industrial backwardness, and perceived issues, such
as the supposed overrepresentation of Jews in “liberal professions.” He
charts how, in partnership with other European powers and international
institutions such as the League of Nations, Polish leaders made
attempts to channel emigration to South America, to establish direct
trade with Africa, to expedite national minorities to far-away places, and
to tap into colonial resources around the globe. Puchalski demonstrates
the intersection between such national policies and larger processes
taking place at the time, including the internationalist turn of colonialism
and the global fascination with technocratic solutions.
Carefully researched, the volume is key reading for scholars and
advanced students of twentieth-century European history.
Piotr Puchalski is Assistant Professor at the Institute of History and
Archival Studies of the Pedagogical University of Kraków, Poland. His
academic interests include Polish, French, British, and American
diplomacy, as well as Western colonialism, totalitarian regimes, and
modern ideologies.
Warsaw interwar songs:
Negus, our Negus,
Only you can save us
Our lines in the south
Have been caught in a rout
And to the north of Makale
All our tactics are folly.
Negus, our Negus,
Give me shot, give me powder.
(“Abyssinia,” trans. William R. Brand and Katarzyna Mroczkowska-Brand
in Ryszard Kapuściński, Emperor (2006
Yay, yay, Madagascar,
What a hot and humid land,
Africa is half-wild!
Bamboo trees, coconuts,
And wild prairies.
I’ll be better off there.
Yay, I like that wild land!
(“Madagascar,” trans. Piotr Puchalski)
Abbreviations, acronyms, and metonyms
Brühl Palace
Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Warsaw
HICEM
Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society
ICR
Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees
JEAS
Jewish Emigration Aid Society
LMiK
Liga Morska i Kolonialna (Maritime and Colonial League)
LMiR
Liga Morska i Rzeczna (Maritime and River League)
MKE
Międzyministerialna Komisja Emigracyjna (Interministerial Emigration
Commission)
MTO
Międzynarodowe Towarzystwo Osadnicze (International Company for
Settlement)
NSDAP
Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist
German Workers’ Party)
OZON
Obóz Zjednoczenia Narodowego (Camp of National Unity)
PTE
Polskie Towarzystwo Emigracyjne (Polish Emigration Society)
PTK
Polskie Towarzystwo Kolonialne (Polish Colonial Society)
Quai d’Orsay
Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Paris)
TISSA
Towarzystwo Importu Surowców Strategicznych (Society for the
Importation of Strategic Raw Materials)
TK
Towarzystwo Kolonizacyjne w Warszawie (Colonization Society in
Warsaw)
Whitehall
Foreign Office (London)
Wilhelmstrasse
Foreign Office (Berlin)
ZPK
Związek Pionierów Kolonialnych (Union of Colonial Pioneers)
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1 of this monograph has appeared in an edited and abridged
form in the Journal of Modern European History 2/2021. I had also
tackled the topic of Polish colonial aspirations in articles that appeared
in The Historical Journal 4/2017 and Res Gestae 7. Moreover, the
basis of this monograph was a PhD dissertation defended at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison in August 2019. Once again, I would
like to thank my committee for their support and feedback. In particular,
Kathryn Ciancia and Larry Wolff encouraged me to situate Polish
colonial ideas in a broader international context of the interwar period,
whereas Alfred W. McCoy persuaded me to stress Poland’s place
against the backdrop of a changing world order. In addition, I express
gratitude to my new friends and colleagues at the Pedagogical
University in Kraków, in particular Mateusz Drozdowski and Mariusz
Wołos, for their cordiality and sharing their nuanced understanding of
Poland’s domestic and foreign policies. Furthermore, my parents,
Magdalena and Artur, offered their inexhaustible love, and my
grandmothers, Joanna and Marianna, offered their historical
reminiscences and much needed home cooking. Finally, Vanessa Linke
has manifested endless patience and support while sharing a domestic
life of research and writing, especially during a global pandemic.
This research was financed with funds from the project “PROM
International scholarship exchange of PhD candidates and academic
staff” within the Operational Programme Knowledge Education
Development, co-financed from the European Social Fund; project no.
POWR.03.03.0000PN13/18. In addition, support was provided by the
Graduate School at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, part of the
Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education,
with funding from the Mellon Foundation. I also thank other entities at
the University of Wisconsin-Madison, especially the Department of
History, for teaching opportunities; the Center for Russian, Eastern
European, and Central Asian Studies, for a research grant; the Institute
for Regional and International Studies, for a summer grant; and the
Lapinski and Gasiorowski families for their generous scholarship
endowments to the Department of German, Nordic, and Slavic.
Moreover, I express my gratitude to Polanki, the Polish Women’s Cultural
Club of Milwaukee, and especially to the Godlewski and Borowiecki
families. In addition, I remain grateful to the Hoover Institution for
welcoming me into its Library & Archives as a Silas Palmer Research
Fellow.
Preface
While traveling from Warsaw’s Fryderyk Chopin Airport a couple of
years ago, I caught sight of a collection of reports sent to Polish
newspapers by Kazimierz Nowak, amateur cyclist from Poznań, during
his epic journey around Africa by foot and bike in the 1930s. Nowak’s
references to the Polish settlement being formed at the time in
Portuguese Angola piqued my interest, as I had already heard of what
at first impression seemed to be an amusing historical anecdote: the
interwar Polish plans for colonial expansion. I was also interested in
Poland’s connection to “exotic” lands, as my great-uncle Franciszek
boarded a ship to Manus Island instead of returning to communist
Poland after forced labor in Nazi Germany. This part of New Guinea, in
the process of being transformed from a League of Nations mandate
into a United Nations Trust Territory, was not far from where
anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski had written his Argonauts of the
Western Pacific two decades earlier. I therefore purchased the book
from the airport stand and began to wonder about the reasons that had
inspired Poles to travel to colonies, whether it was emigration for a
better life, as in Franciszek’s case, or a scientific expedition such as
Malinowski’s. Most importantly, however, I began to ask why interwar
Polish statesmen, themselves rulers of a rather poor country patched
together from fallen empires, would dream of colonial expansion and
what such an expansion would mean to them. Upon graduating from
New York University, I decided to pursue the topic of Polish colonial
aspirations, especially their domestic roots such as nationalism and
anti-Semitism, and entered a PhD program at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison.
As the years progressed, I also started noticing parallels between the
transitional interwar period during which Warsaw clamored for colonies
and the present era in which our world order is similarly undergoing
transformation. The annexation of the Crimea by Russia, the European
refugee crisis, and Brexit appear as signs of a shifting global balance,
whose broader symptoms include the increased political and racial
tensions in the United States and Europe, the continuing conflicts in the
Middle East, the popularity of crypto currencies, and China’s economic
expansion worldwide. The global pandemic of Covid-19 only
accelerated the coming of a multipolar world, making the idea of an
“end of history” grotesque. At the same time, I listened to intellectuals
and politicians discussing Poland’s strategy of adaptation to this new
“decline of the West,” for example whether the country should lay all of
its bets on a close alliance with Washington or whether it should remain
in the European Union. These discussions would sometimes feature
post-colonial discourse, with some arguing that post-communist Poland
is exploited economically by Western governments and corporations
through acquisitions, dumping, and immigration policies that encourage
brain drain. Others dismiss such claims as too nationalistic and inward-
looking and point to Poland’s own historic “colonization” of Ukraine. In
brief, acts of referencing “colonialism” to determine Poland’s place in the
world are becoming common across the political spectrum.
During my final months in Madison and upon starting work in Kraków
Cracow), I became more attuned to the ways in which interwar Polish
leaders interpreted colonial policies as ways of adjusting to systemic
changes around the globe that Poland was too frail to oppose, and not
only as methods of increasing its international prestige or sending Jews
abroad. In effect, this book examines the interwar Polish state’s position
in a world that emerged after the Paris Peace Conference and that
consisted of empires, nation-states, mandates, protectorates, and
colonies. After World War I, a new order was established, with the
United States shifting its focus back to its informal empire in the
Western Hemisphere, the British and French empires reaching their
greatest extent through the acquisition of mandates, the League of
Nations encouraging a more internationalist approach to colonial rule,
and the collapse of the Habsburg, Hohenzollern, and Romanov empires
allowing for both a communist coup in Russia and the emergence of
independent nation-states with significant minorities in Eastern Europe.
This multipolar world order remained colonial in nature and at least
partly enshrined in international law, with a handful of powers
controlling their spheres of influence in more or less formal ways. Still,
Poland’s place therein has hardly been discussed outside of the context
of Europe and Wilsonian national self-determination. The present study
looks at the actions of Polish statesmen in South America and Africa,
described as “colonial” policies and pursued to address Poland’s real
and perceived problems. In particular, the Polish state suffered from
agricultural unemployment and stagnated industrialization, which
stemmed from difficulties in accessing raw materials and bore
resemblance to today’s middle-income trap. This book’s protagonists
witnessed the morphing nature of empires in the growing preference for
informal colonial rule, the migration of policies between colonies and
metropole, the increased treatment of colonies as destinations for
migrants and refugees, and the growing significance of international
technocratic solutions. They concluded that these changes offered an
escape for Poland. Thus, this monograph explores both the
intersections between domestic and foreign policies as well as the
factors that encouraged the leaders of a post-imperial state to imagine
that colonial power would transform Poland into a modern nation (Figure
0.1).