Międzymorze
Międzymorze ( German intermediate sea ) was the major political project conceived by the Polish Marshal Józef Piłsudski after the First World War for a confederation of states in the area between the two seas, the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea .
In German and Anglo-Saxon, especially in political and scientific language usage, the Latin name Intermarium (with the same content) , more rarely Intermarum, is used, whereas in Eastern European countries it is mostly the Slavic variant corresponding to Polish. For the use of the term Intermarum see e.g. B. the conference of the European Humanities University , Vilnius , Lithuania in March 2012.
Interwar period
The Intermarium was de facto a project to restore the Polish-Lithuanian Union or Rzeczpospolita , which existed until the end of the 18th century. It should (initially) include the Second Polish Republic , Ukraine , Belarus and Lithuania . Later Romania , Hungary , Yugoslavia , Czechoslovakia and the other two Baltic States ( Latvia and Estonia ) as well as Finland , which at that time also belonged to the Baltic States , were invited to take part in the project. An essential idea behind this was also the intention to create a confederation of states in East Central Europe that could withstand both the Soviet Union and the German Reich .
However, Piłsudski's plan found no support. Ukrainian, Belarusian and Lithuanian politicians feared that non-Poles and especially non-Catholics would find themselves as second-class citizens in this confederation . In Poland, too, there were many proponents of an ethnically homogeneous Polish nation-state. Many states in Eastern Central Europe were also enemies with one another, and there were a number of border disputes between them. Hungary and Bulgaria in particular sought a revision of their perceived as unjust border drawing at the expense of their neighboring countries.
Nevertheless, Piłsudski was able to use military means in the Polish-Soviet War to conquer parts of the areas in what is now western Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania ( Kresy ), which were incorporated by Lithuania into the Union of Krewo in 1385 and fell to the Russian Empire in 1795 as part of the partitions of Poland were. The expectations of Ukrainian politicians who hoped for the establishment of a Ukrainian state in what is now western Ukraine were disappointed . Poland viewed these ethnically mixed territories, in particular the area around Lviv , as part of a Polish nation-state and did not hesitate to use military force to combat Ukrainian independence movements. The stubborn Polish claim to the territories conquered in the east and the similarly motivated Lithuanian-Polish dispute over the claim to Vilnius revealed the failure of the Międzymorze Confederation, which was to be constructed around a Polish-Lithuanian-Ukrainian axis.
After the realization of a Polish-Lithuanian-Ukrainian federation had become a long way off, Poland began to represent the idea of a Central European alliance (Third Europe) that would extend from Scandinavia to Bulgaria , from Italy to the Soviet border. After Piłsudski's death in 1935, the project was further propagated by Józef Beck , but it was also not well received by the potential federates, although Poland enjoyed good relations with many Scandinavian and Balkan states in the 1930s. Lithuania and Czechoslovakia in particular continued to view such plans with great suspicion. For Poland, the only result of the foreign policy efforts was the Polish-Romanian alliance , which turned out to be largely useless during the attack on Poland (however, this enabled the Polish government to flee to Romania).
During the Second World War , the Soviet Union annexed these territories again in 1939 and 1944 as a result of the division of Poland in accordance with the German-Soviet non-aggression pact and after the suppression of the German Eastern Front in the German-Soviet War and divided them into the Ukrainian SSR , the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic and the Lithuanian SSR a. The plans for an intermarium were thereby pushed out of the realm of realizable politics into the realm of nostalgic-intellectual reflection.
post war period
The idea of the Intermarium remained present among Polish dissidents and intellectuals in exile, especially in the context of the Paris magazine Kultura ( Jerzy Giedroyc , Jerzy Stempowski , Juliusz Mieroszewski ).
Resurgence after 1989
The idea of cooperation between the countries in between Europe came up again after the revolutions in 1989 and during the political change in the form of closer political and economic cooperation between the Visegrád group . The EU followed up on this concept through the Eastern Neighborhood Policy . The Ukraine conflict and the perception of Russian politics as a threat to the eastern member states of the EU and NATO by the governments of various Central and Eastern European countries triggered considerations for political and military cooperation in the affected region in 2014/2015.
Three Seas Initiative
The Three Seas Initiative was launched in 2016 at the request of Poland and Croatia . The focus is on the cooperation between Central and Eastern European countries in the areas of the energy industry and infrastructure based on the model of the Intermarium. At their first conference in Dubrovnik, 12 states in the region agreed to intensify cooperation. Core projects include the construction of liquid gas terminals in Croatia and Poland, including a pipeline, and the Via Carpathia , a road that will connect Lithuania with the Aegean. The second congress of the initiative took place on June 6-7. July 2017 in Warsaw with the participation of US President Donald Trump .
See also
literature
- Stefan Troebst : "Intermarium" and "Marriage with the Sea": Cognitive Maps and History Politics in East Central Europe. In: History and Society . Vol. 28, H. 3: Mental Maps , 2002, pp. 435-469. Published in English translation in: European Review of History. Vol. 10, No. 2, 2003, pp. 293-321 (abstract) .
- Józef Łaptos: Visions of a common Europe. In: José M. Faraldo, Paulina Gulińska-Jurgiel, Christian Domnitz (eds.): Europe in the Eastern Bloc. Ideas and Discourses (1945–1991). Böhlau, Cologne, Weimar, Vienna 2008, ISBN 978-3-412-20029-9 , pp. 317–339.
- Leszek Żyliński: Central Europe and Intermarium. Mythical empire and nightmare of history - under the control of "great politics". In: Hans Henning Hahn (Ed.): German-Polish places of memory. Vol. 3: Parallels. Schöningh, Paderborn et al. 2012, ISBN 978-3-506-77341-8 , pp. 94-106.
- Marek Jan Chodakiewicz : Intermarium: The Land between the Black and Baltic Seas. Transaction, New Brunswick NJ 2012, ISBN 978-1-4128-4774-2 (preview) .
Web links
- Intermarium online magazine . Columbia University New York, East Central European Center.
Individual evidence
- ^ A b Marek Kornat: The rebirth of Poland as a multinational state in the conceptions of Józef Piłsudski. Forum for Eastern European History of Ideas and Contemporary History, 1/2011.
- ↑ European Humanities University, Vilnius, International Research Conference ( Memento of the original from May 26, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Baltic-Black Sea Intermarum: Paradigms of regional development and transformations of law , 29. – 30. March 2012 in Vilnius.
- ↑ Renata Makarska: The room and its texts. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main a. a. 2010, ISBN 978-3-631-59302-8 , p. 21 . But see on Stempowski's skepticism towards the term Timothy Snyder : Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist's Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine. Yale University Press, New Haven CT 2007, ISBN 0-300-10670-X , p. 191 .
- ↑ George Friedman : Geopolitical Journey, Part 2: Borderlands, Intermarium. In: Stratfor , June 3, 2014; Jonathan Levy: Op-Ed: The Ukraine Crisis - It's the Intermarium Plan Again. The garbled slogans and ravings of the Ukrainian nationalists are straight from the Intermarium playbook. In: IsraelNationalNews.com , February 28, 2014.
- ^ Matthias Krupa : Three Seas Initiative: Trump ensnares the Poles . In: The time . July 2, 2017, ISSN 0044-2070 ( zeit.de [accessed July 4, 2017]).
- ^ Dubrovnik Forum adopts declaration called "The Three Seas Initiative" . In: EBL News . August 25, 2016 ( eblnews.com [accessed July 4, 2017]).
- ^ Poland hopes to tap Trump's business acumen at regional summit . In: Business Insider . ( businessinsider.com [accessed July 4, 2017]).
- ↑ Trump plays with Europe . ( tagesspiegel.de [accessed on July 4, 2017]).
