problems presented by her ethnic minorities: their number, their size, their recalcitrance, their external support, and, in the eastern regions, their poverty. Poland was doubly handicapped by having simultaneously to cope with the postpartition reintegration of the long-severed parts of the Polish state-nation as she vainly sought for a consistent and feasible approach toward the minority problem. Her search for a solution was fatefully compromised by the apparent incompatibility between her frontiers and her institutions. Piłsudski’s military efforts had incorporated non-Polish populations whom Dmowski’s domestic arrangements could not digest. The Right, which by the 1930s had ideologically saturated Polish society, viewed all expressions of nationalism on the part of minorities as treasonable and to be stifled. Believing that the old quasi-federalistic commonwealth had too long been suicidally indulgent toward the non-Polish and non-Catholic populations, the Right insisted that restored Poland either assimilate or expel her minorities. But they were too numerous, already too conscious, and still too rooted for either of these alternatives to be practicable at that time. They were simply alienated by the whole sterile paraphernalia of discriminatory devices which this program entailed: skewed census tabulation, boycott, numerus clausus, colonization, biased land reform, prejudicial tax assessment, and violence.
7
Already in reborn Poland’s first and most important assertion of sovereignty, the drafting of its constitution, the chasm between Piłsudski and the Right proved crippling. The resurrection of an independent Poland at the close of World War I was made possible by that war’s singular outcome, which Piłsudski had uniquely anticipated: the defeat of all three of her partitioning powers—first of Russia by Germany, then of Germany and her Austrian partner by the Western Powers. Piłsudski and his Legionnaires had fought as associates of the Central Powers until Russia’s defeat had been assured in the spring of 1917. Then, insisting on Polish priorities, they had refused further collaboration and were interned until the war’s end. This audacious, skillful, and successful conduct had won such high moral authority for Piłsudski that he was promptly acknowledged as chief of state and commander in chief of the armed forces upon his return to Warsaw from German confinement on November 10, 1918. Thus, for the moment, he eclipsed his rightist rival Dmowski, who had endorsed the Russian and Western war efforts and whose wartime activities had been diplomatic and political rather than military and political. The Polish Right had traditionally been more interested in the development of a modern society than in independent statehood; hence it liked to see in the Russian Empire—Piłsudski’s bête noire—both a shield against what it feared was the more pressing menace of Germany to Polish society, and a vast market for that society’s nascent industries.
To the disappointment of his friends of the Polish Left, who hoped at one stroke to achieve land reform, nationalization of industry, social security, secularization of culture, and the democratization of society, Piłsudski now refrained from instituting a radical-reform dictatorship and insisted, instead, that fundamental social changes could only be initiated by an elected legislature. Accordingly, he arranged for the early election of a unicameral Constituent Assembly, which on February 20, 1919, proclaimed itself the sovereign authority while unanimously confirming Piłsudski as chief of state, which became an office of reduced authority, and commander in chief, which remained a position of great power. Piłsudski’s apparent self-restraint during this period may be interpreted either as a manifestion of an impressive sense of democratic responsibility, or as an intended (but unsuccessful) maneuver to free himself from all partisan and ideological affiliation and thereby render himself the umpire among the several political phalanxes whom he hoped would emerge deadlocked from the elections to the Constituent Assembly.
The Right, however, emerged from these elections as the strongest phalanx but not sufficiently dominant to give Poland stable governments. Thus, whatever may have been Piłsudski’s hopes and intentions, the elections were politically premature and inaugurated seven-and-a-half years of party anarchy and fragile coalitions until Piłsudski closed this painful era with his reseizure of effective power by a coup d’état in May, 1926.
The effectiveness of the Constituent Assembly as a potential vehicle for national integration was seriously compromised ab initio by the circumstance that its election was confined to areas under Polish control at the beginning of 1919 and was later extended, on a staggered schedule, to the ex-Prussian provinces and some northeastern localities. Thus, the large Belorussian and Ukrainian minorities of the east, whose incorporation into Poland was not settled until 1921, were unrepresented in the constitution-drafting process—-just as neighboring Czechoslovakia excluded her numerous German and Magyar minorities from the same process (see below, Chapter 3, section 4). Furthermore, these Polish elections, held so early in what had recently been a major battle area for over three years and in regions politically separated for over a century, were characterized by much passion and confusion, a truly stunning plethora of lists, considerable administrative incompetence (but not pressure), and frequent irregularities in such matters as eligibility, tabulation, and verification. The system was proportional and complicated, and it appears that somewhat over 70 percent of the eligible electorate (men and women over twenty years of age) participated. Table 8 gives approximate coherence to the quite disjointed results. Even here, the tabulation for “Seats” is somewhat arbitrary since the various parliamentary clubs divided and merged several times during the nearly four years that this Constituent Assembly remained in session. (The Christian Democrats and the Communists had not yet differentiated themselves, respectively, from the National Democrats and the Socialists in 1919 and are thus included in the latter parties’ data.)
TABLE 8
ELECTIONS TO THE CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY
The Constituent Assembly’s main achievement was to rally the nation to a rare moment of solidarity during the summer crisis of the Polish-Soviet War of 1920, when Piłsudski’s armies, having been repulsed in their attempt to conquer the Soviet Ukraine in the spring, stood embattled before Warsaw and finally triumphed. Its chief failure was the mishandling of its most specific task, the drafting of the constitution. Here the Right feared that Piłsudski, whom it detested as a former Socialist and as the current protagonist of federalistic notions for “coddling” the ethnic minorities, would become president, since he was the spectacular hero of Poland’s resurrection to independent statehood; and so it decided to tailor the constitution to its own apprehensions. It used its powerful position in the assembly to endow the country with an emasculated presidency and an omnipotent legislature. Poland’s basic institutions of government were thus shaped ad personam—a fatal political procedure. Particularly crippling for any presidential ambitions which Piłsudski might have entertained was Article 46, which, while making the president titular head of the armed forces, prohibited his exercising command in wartime. Ironically, just as the Right in 1919-21 violated its own general belief in a strong executive and, for fear of Piłsudski, proceeded to cripple the presidency as an institution, so in May, 1926, the Left, out of resentment against the policies of the legislature’s dominant Right-Center coalition, was to help this same Piłsudski stage a military coup d’état against the parliamentary institutions which the Left, in principle, championed.
Though the constitution was formally adopted on March 17, 1921, and the Polish-Soviet War was concluded with the signing of the Treaty of Riga just one day later, the Constituent Assembly, still fearful of allowing the newly acquired eastern minorities to share political power, extended its own existence for another year and a half and postponed the first elections for a regular parliament until November, 1922. This time the Belorussians and Ukrainians of the former Russian Empire participated while the Ukrainians of ex-Austrian eastern Galicia abstained. Of those eligible, 67.9 percent voted in the election of November 5 for the Sejm, the lower but more powerful house, and 61.5 percent in that of November 12 for the Senate. The results failed to correct the fragmentation and paralysis of the parliamentary system. To convey, albeit inadequately,
