|
Poland Poland's International Situation
By far the gravest menace to Poland's longevity came
from
abroad, not from internal weaknesses. The center of
Poland's
postwar foreign policy was a political and military
alliance with
France, which guaranteed Poland's independence and
territorial
integrity. Although Poland attempted to join the Little
Entente,
the French-sponsored alliance of Czechoslovakia, Romania,
and
Yugoslavia, Czechoslovak suspicions of Polish territorial
ambitions prevented Polish membership. Beginning in 1926,
Pilsudski's main foreign policy aim was balancing Poland's
still
powerful neighbors, the Soviet Union and Germany.
Pilsudski
assumed that both powers wished to regain the Polish
territory
lost in World War I. Therefore, his approach was to avoid
Polish
dependence on either power. Above all, Pilsudski sought to
avoid
taking positions that might cause the two countries to
take
concerted action against Poland. Accordingly, Poland
signed
nonaggression pacts with both countries in the early
1930s. After
Pilsudski's death, his foreign minister Józef Beck
continued this
policy.
The failure to establish planned alliances in Eastern
Europe
meant great reliance on the French, whose enthusiasm for
intervention in the region waned markedly after World War
I. The
Locarno Pact, signed in 1926 by the major West European
powers
with the aim of guaranteeing peace in the region,
contained no
guarantee of Poland's western border. Over the next ten
years,
substantial friction arose between Poland and France over
Polish
refusal to compromise with the Germans and French refusal
to
resist Adolf Hitler's rise to power in the early 1930s.
The
Polish nonaggression treaties with Germany and the Soviet
Union
resulted from this bilateral deterioration of confidence.
The Polish predicament worsened in the 1930s with the
advent
of Hitler's openly expansionist Nazi regime in Germany and
the
obvious waning of France's resolve to defend its East
European
allies. Pilsudski retained the French connection but had
progressively less faith in its usefulness. As the decade
drew to
an end, Poland's policy of equilibrium between potential
enemies
was failing. Complete Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in
early
1939 encircled Poland on three sides (East Prussia to the
northeast had remained German). Hitler's next move was
obvious.
By 1939 Hitler had shattered the continental balance of
power by
a concerted campaign of armed diplomatic extortion that
brought
most of Central Europe into his grasp.
Data as of October 1992
|
