Poland: The End Of Diversity

Poland today is one of the most ethnically homogenous countries in Europe. According to the CIA World Factbook for 2000, 97.6 percent of Poland’s inhabitants are of Polish and 95 percent are Roman Catholic. But it hasn’t always been this way. Historically, Poland has been home to a number of ethnic and religious minorities. The period between the World Wars was the end of an era of great diversity in Poland.

Poland lost its independence in 1795 and didn’t get it back until after WWI. At the time, there was a great deal of controversy as to what the new state should comprise—both in terms of territory and population. For those who had spent their lives striving and hoping for an independent Polish state, the question was now how to define the Polish nation. For some, being Polish involved speaking Polish and belonging truly to the culture—a narrower definition than what others held: For them, anyone could be “Polish” as long as they were loyal to the Polish state and considered themselves to be Poles. The two main proponents of these views, Roman Dmowski and Jozef Pilsudski respectively, will be discussed in depth in the next essay.

Poland between the World Wars embodied, for the most part, the principles of the second philosophy. One third of the population belonged to ethnic groups other than the Poles. Many of them formed local majorities in the regions in which they lived—Lithuanians in the area around Wilno, Germans in the West, Belarussians in the northeast, Ukrainians in the southeast. The latter two groups were adherents of the Orthodox religion, further adding to Poland’s diversity. All these people lived in lands that were taken from the empires that collapsed in the First World War, and were added to the nascent Polish state. The City of Danzig (Gdansk in Polish) and the adjacent strip of land called the Polish Corridor were taken from Germany in the postwar settlement. Poland invaded Lithuania and took the city of Wilno (Vilnius). The Poles also fought the Red Army in 1920, first attacking, then retreating, to miraculously defeat the Soviets on the Vistula River in 1920—gaining land in the East and halting the spread of Communism.

While Poles lived in the newly annexed cities such as Wilno and Lwow (formerly in Ukraine), minorities resided in the countryside. Yet Poland felt a historical claim to these lands, because at the height of its power—the 1500s—all those lands were in fact Polish.

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