Roman Dmowski
Roman Stanisław Dmowski (Polish: [ˈrɔman staˈɲiswaf ˈdmɔfski], 9 August 1864 – 2 January 1939) was a Polish politician, statesman, and co-founder and chief ideologue of the National Democracy (abbreviated "ND": in Polish, "Endecja") political movement. He saw the Germanization of Polish territories controlled by the German Empire as the major threat to Polish culture and therefore advocated a degree of accommodation with another power that had partitioned Poland, the Russian Empire. He favoured the re-establishment of Polish independence by nonviolent means and supported policies favourable to the Polish middle class. While in Paris during World War I, he was a prominent spokesman for Polish aspirations to the Allies through his Polish National Committee. He was an instrumental figure in the postwar restoration of Poland's independent existence. Throughout most of his life, he was the chief ideological opponent of the Polish military and political leader Józef Piłsudski and of the latter's vision of Poland as a multinational federation against German and Russian imperialism.
Roman Dmowski
Karol Bertoni (Acting)
9 August 1864
Kamionek, Kingdom of Poland
Bródno Cemetery, Warsaw
- National-Democratic Party (1897–1919)
- Popular National Union (1919–1928)[a]
- National Party (from 1928)
Dmowski never wielded significant political power except for a brief period in 1923 as Minister of Foreign Affairs. Nevertheless, he was one of the most influential Polish ideologues and politicians of his time. A controversial personality most of his life, Dmowski desired a homogeneous, Polish-speaking and Roman Catholic-practicing nation as opposed to Piłsudski's vision of Prometheism, which sought a multi-ethnic Poland reminiscent of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. As a result, his thinking marginalized other ethnic groups living in Poland, particularly those in the Kresy (which included Jews, Lithuanians, and Ukrainians), and he was regarded as anti-Semitic. He remains a key figure of Polish nationalism,[1] and has been frequently referred to as "the father of Polish nationalism".[2][3]
Early life[edit]
Dmowski was born on 9 August 1864 in Kamionek near Warsaw, in the Kingdom of Poland, which three years later became part of the Russian Empire (as Vistula Land).[4] His father was a road construction worker and later an entrepreneur.[4] Dmowski attended schools in Warsaw, studying biology and zoology at Warsaw University, from which he graduated in 1891.[4][5] As a student he became active in the Polish Youth Association "Zet" (Związek Młodzieży Polskiej "Zet"), where he was active in opposing socialist activists.[5] The Zet had links with the Liga Polska (Polish League), which Dmowski joined in 1889.[6] A key concept of the League was Polskość (Polishness), as opposed to trójlojalizm (triple loyalty).[6]
He also organized a student street demonstration on the 100th anniversary of the Polish Constitution of 3 May 1791.[5] For this he was imprisoned by Russian Imperial authorities for five months in the Warsaw Citadel.[5] He was then exiled to Libau and Mitau in Kurland (Latvia).[6] After 1890 he was also developing as a writer and publicist, publishing political and literary criticism in Głos, where he became close friends with Jan Ludwik Popławski, who would be his mentor.[5][7] After his release from exile, Dmowski became quite critical of the Liga Polska, accusing it of being controlled by Free Masons and being generally incompetent.[6]
In April 1893, Dmowski co-founded the National League and became its first leader.[8] The group differed from the Liga Polska as Dmowski insisted that there could be one Polish national identity, leading him to attack regionalism as a form of split loyalty that was weakening the Polish nation.[6] The same concept also excluded minorities such as Jews from his projected Polish nation.[6] In November 1893 he was sentenced to exile from the Vistula Land.[8] Dmowski went to Jelgava, and soon afterward in early 1895 to Lemberg, Austria-Hungary (modern Lviv, Ukraine, Lwów in Polish), where together with Popławski he began to publish a new magazine, Przegląd Wszechpolski (All-Polish Review).[8] In 1897, he co-founded the National-Democratic Party (Stronnictwo Narodowo-Demokratyczne or "Endecja").[7] The Endecja was to serve as a political party, a lobby group and an underground organization that would unite Poles who espoused Dmowski's views into a disciplined and committed political group.[9] In 1899, Dmowski founded the Society for National Education as an ancillary group.[10] From 1898 to 1900, he resided in France and Britain, and travelled to Brazil.[8] In 1901 he took up residence in Kraków, then part of the Austrian partition of Poland.[8] In 1903 he published a book, Myśli nowoczesnego Polaka (Thoughts of a Modern Pole), one of the first if not the first nationalist manifesto in European history.[7][11]
In Myśli nowoczesnego Polaka, Dmowski was harshly critical of the old Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth for exalting the nobility and for its tolerance for minorities, which contradicted his principle of "healthy national egoism".[12] He also rejected liberalism and socialism for putting the individual above the nation-state, which for Dmowski was the only unit that really mattered.[12] Dmowski argued that the privileged status of the aristocracy in the old Commonwealth had hindered national development, and what was needed was a strong sense of nationality that would unite the nation into one.[12] He also attacked the Romantic nationalism of the 19th century for viewing Poland as the "Christ of Nations", instead arguing for a hard-headed national egoism.[12] Dmowski opposed revolutionary means of fighting, preferring political struggle, and aimed for independence through increased autonomy.[7] After the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War, Dmowski met with Colonel Akashi Motojiro, the Japanese military attache in Sweden and spy-master for Japanese intelligence activities, in Kraków in March 1904. Although reluctant to collaborate with the Japanese, Dmowski agreed to Akashi's proposal that Polish soldiers in the Russian Army in Manchuria might be encouraged to defect to the Imperial Japanese Army.[13] He travelled to Tokyo to work out the details, and at the same time made a successful effort to prevent the Japanese from aiding a rival Polish political activist, Józef Piłsudski, who wanted assistance for a planned insurrection in Poland, an aspiration which Dmowski felt would be doomed to failure.[11][14][15]
In 1905, Dmowski moved to Warsaw, back in the Russian partition of Poland, where he continued to play a growing role in the Endecja faction.[16] During the Russian Revolution of 1905, Dmowski favoured co-operation with the Imperial Russian authorities and welcomed Nicholas II's October Manifesto of 1905 as a stepping stone on the road towards renewed Polish autonomy.[14] During the revolt in Łódź in June 1905, the Endeks, acting under Dmowski's orders, opposed the uprising led by Piłsudski's Polish Socialist Party (PPS).[14] During the course of the "June Days", as the Łódź uprising is known, a miniature civil war raged between Endecja and the PPS.[14] As a result of the elections to the First Duma (legislative assembly in the late Russian Empire), which were boycotted by the PPS, the National Democrats won 34 of the 55 seats allotted to Poland.[17] Dmowski and the Endecja saw the Duma as a way of improving Congress Poland's position within the Russian Empire as he considered guerrilla war to be impractical.[18] Dmowski himself was elected a deputy to the Second and Third Dumas (beginning on 27 February 1907) and was president of the Polish caucus within it.[16][19] He was seen as a conservative, and despite being a Polish caucus leader, he often had more influence on the Russian than the Polish deputies.[20] Between October 1905 and early 1906, over 2000 Poles were killed by Russian police or military and an additional 1000 were sentenced to death.[18] Even though Dmowski was often denounced as a sellout, he maintained that he was undertaking the only realistic course of action for Poland under the circumstances.[18]
Over time, Dmowski became more receptive to Russian overtures, particularly neoslavism, warming up to the idea that Poland and Russia may have a common future, particularly due to Germany being their common enemy.[19][20] In light of what he regarded as Russian cultural inferiority, Dmowski felt that a strong Russia was more acceptable than a strong Germany. In Dmowski's view, the Russian policy of Russification would not succeed in subjugating the Poles, while the Germans would be far more successful with their Germanisation policies.[7][19] He explained those views in his book Niemcy, Rosja i kwestia Polska (Germany, Russia and the Polish Cause), published in 1908.[20][21] This was not a universally popular attitude, and in 1909 Dmowski resigned his deputy mandate to focus on an internal political struggle within Endecja.[20] He lost the election to the Fourth Duma in 1912 to a socialist politician, Eugeniusz Jagiełło from the Polish Socialist Party – Left, who won with the support of the Jewish vote. Dmowski viewed this as a personal insult; in exchange, he organized a successful boycott of Jewish businesses throughout much of Poland.[22][23][24]
Death[edit]
Weakening in health, Dmowski moved to the village of Drozdowo near Łomża, where he died on 2 January 1939 at the age of 74.[67]
Dmowski was buried at the Bródno Cemetery in Warsaw in the family grave.[67] His funeral was widely attended,[67] with at least 100,000 attendees; the Piłsudski's legacy sanacja government snubbed him without any official representative attending.[68]
Political outlook[edit]
Theorist of nationalism[edit]
From his early student years, Dmowski was opposed to socialism and suspicious of federalism; he desired Polish independence and a strong Polish state, and saw socialism and conciliatory federalist policies as prioritizing an international idea over the national one.[5][69] Over the years he became an influential European nationalist thinker.[47][70] Dmowski had a scientist's background and thus preferred logic and reason over emotion and passion.[71] He once told famous pianist Ignacy Jan Paderewski that music was "mere noise".[71] Dmowski felt very strongly that Poles should abandon what he considered to be foolish romantic nationalism and useless gestures of defiance and should instead work hard at becoming businessmen and scientists.[71][72] Dmowski was very much influenced by Social Darwinist theories, then popular in the Western world, and saw life as a merciless struggle between "strong" nations who dominated and "weak" nations who were dominated.[71]
In his 1902 book Myśli nowoczesnego Polaka (Thoughts of a Modern Pole), Dmowski denounced all forms of Polish Romantic nationalism and traditional Polish values.[9] He sharply criticized the idea of Poland as a spiritual concept and as a cultural idea.[9] Instead Dmowski argued that Poland was merely a physical entity that needed to be brought into existence through pragmatic bargaining and negotiating, not via what Dmowski considered to be pointless revolts – doomed to failure before they even began – against the partitioning powers.[9] For Dmowski, what the Poles needed was a "healthy national egoism" that would not be guided by what Dmowski regarded as the unrealistic political principles of Christianity.[9] In the same book, Dmowski blamed the fall of the old Commonwealth on its tradition of tolerance.[9] While at first critical of Christianity, Dmowski viewed some sects of Christianity as beneficial to certain nations, through not necessarily Poland. Later in 1927 he revised this earlier view and renounced his criticism of Catholicism, seeing it as an essential part of the Polish identity.[73] Dmowski saw all minorities as weakening agents within the nation that needed to be purged.[9][74] In his 1927 book Kościół, Naród I Państwo (Church, Nation and State), Dmowski wrote:
