Post by JustJohn or JJ on Jun 1, 2013 7:28:34 GMT -7
The Polish Partitions (1772, 1793, 1795)
It is not very well possible to understand Polish history, national identity and position within Europe without knowledge about the 18th c. partitions and the 20th c. rebirth and shift from the east to west. Below some information about the partititions.
This may also throw some light on the complications of European unification
Introduction
Poland in the eighteenth century, if Russia is considered non-European, was by far the largest European state. It reached from the Baltic almost to the Black Sea and extended eastward for 800 miles across the north-European plain. But it was the example of an older political structure which failed to develop modern organs of government. It fell into ever deeper anarchy and confusion. Without army, revenues, or administration, internally divided among parties forever at cross-purposes, with many Poles more willing to bargain with foreigners than to work with each other, the country was a perpetual theatre for diplomatic manoeuvring and was finally absorbed by its growing neighbours.
Reform movement and foreign influences
The Polish royal elections in the eighteenth century were as usual the subject of international interference. The election of 1733 precipitated a European war known as the War of the Polish Succession. After these troubles of the 1730s a reforming movement began to gather strength in Poland. Polish patriots hoped to do away with elements in the constitution that made government impossible. Their efforts were repeatedly frustrated by foreign influence, notably that of Catherine II, tsarina of Russia (1762-1796), who preferred a Poland in which she could intervene at will. In 1763 she strengthened her hold over the country by obtaining the election of a Russian puppet, a Polish nobleman named Stanislas Poniatowski, her former lover, as king. She declared herself protector of the Polish liberties. It was to the Russian advantage to maintain the existing state of affairs in Poland, which enabled Russian influence to pervade the whole country, rather than to divide the country with neighbours who might exclude Russian influence from their own spheres. The Prussians, however, long awaiting the day when they might join the old duchy of Prussia with Brandenburg-Pomerania in one continuous territory, were more willing to entertain the prospect of a partition of Poland.
Partitions
Partition I (1772)
The opportunity presented itself in 1772 in connection with a war between Russia and Turkey, which threw the whole situation in eastern Europe into question. The Turkish empire was showing unmistakable signs of weakness. Russian victories were so overwhelming that both Austrians and Prussians feared for the balance of power in that part of Europe. The Prussians therefore came forward with a proposal. It was a proposal to prevent an Austro-Russian war and to preserve a balance in eastern Europe by leaving the Ottoman Empire (Turkey) more or less intact, while having all three European powers annex territory from Poland instead. The proposition was accepted by the three parties.
Poland was sacrificed. By the first partition, in 1772, its outer territories were cut away. Russia took an eastern slice, around the city of Vitebsk. Austria took a southern slice, the region known, as Galicia. Prussia took the Pomerelian borderland in West Prussia. The Prussians thus at last realized their old ambition. Prussia now reached continuously as a solid block from the Elbe to the borders of Lithuania.
The partition sobered the Poles, who renewed their efforts at a national revival, hoping to create an effective sovereignty which could secure the country against outsiders. But the Polish movement lacked deeper strength, for it was confined mainly to the nobles, who had themselves brought the country to ruin. The mass of the serf population, and the numerous Jews, did not care whether they were governed by Poles, Russians, or Germans.
Partition II (1793)
Nevertheless, in what came to be called the Four Years' Diet, beginning in 1788, a reform party gathered strength. One of its members was King Stanislas Poniatowski himself, who had begun his reign as a protégé of the Russian empress. The reformers produced a new constitution in 1791. It made the Polish kingship hereditary, thus strengthening the executive government, and it reduced the powers of the great magnates while giving political rights to many burghers in the towns. By this time, however, the governments of eastern Europe were afraid of the French Revolution, which they saw as an outbreak of Jacobinism. Denouncing the Polish reformers as Jacobins, the Russian tsarina said she would 'fight Jacobinism and beat it in Poland.' In collusion with a few disgruntled Polish noblemen she sent an army into Poland and destroyed the constitution of 1791.< In agreement with Prussia she then carried out the Second Partition.
Partition III (1795)
In 1794 Thaddeus Kosciuszko led a more revolutionary attempt, which included even a proposed abolition of serfdom. Although it received no aid from the revolutionaries then governing France, it was crushed in the general European counterrevolution when Russian and Prussian armies again invaded Poland, defeated Kosciuszko, and in a Third Partition divided what remained of the country among themselves and Austria. Poland as a political entity ceased to exist.
Appreciation
Many advance thinkers of the day praised the partitions of Poland as a triumph of enlightened rulers, putting an end to an old nuisance. The three partitioning powers extenuated their conduct on various grounds, and even took pride in it as a diplomatic achievement by which war was prevented between them. What seemed to be robbery was justified by the argument that the gains were equal; this was the diplomatic doctrine of 'compensation'.
It was argued also that the partitions of Poland put an end to an old cause of international rivalry and war, replacing anarchy with solid government in a large area of eastern Europe. It is a fact that Poland had been scarcely more independent before the partitions than after. It is to be noted also, though nationalist arguments were not used at the time, that on national grounds the Poles themselves had no claim to large parts of the old Poland. The regions taken by Russia, in all three partitions, were inhabited overwhelmingly by Byelorussians (White-Russians) and Ukrainians, among whom the Poles were mainly a landlord class. Russia, even in the third partition, reached only to the true ethnic border of Poland. But later, after the fall of Napoleon, by general international agreement, the Russian sphere was extended deep into the territory inhabited by Poles.
A shock for the balance of power
The partitions of Poland, however extenuated, were nevertheless a great shock to the old system of Europe. The principle of the balance of power had been historically invoked to preserve the independence of European states, to secure weak or small ones against universal monarchy. It was now used to destroy the independence of a weak but ancient Kingdom. Not that Poland was the first to be 'partitioned'; the Spanish and Swedish empires had been partitioned, and during the eighteenth century there were attempts to partition Prussia and the Austrian empire also.
But Poland was the first to be partitioned without war and the first to disappear totally. That Poland was partitioned without war, a source of great satisfaction to the partitioning powers, was still a very unsettling fact. It was alarming for a huge state to vanish simply by cold diplomatic calculation. It seemed that no established rights were safe even in peacetime.
Moreover the partitions of Poland, while maintaining the balance in eastern Europe, profoundly changed the balance of Europe as a whole. The disappearance of Poland was a blow to France, which had long used Poland, as it had used Hungary and Turkey, as an outpost of French influence in the East. The three Eastern powers expanded their territory, while France enjoyed henceforth no permanent growth. Prussia, Russia, and the Austrian empire became contiguous. They had an interest in common, the repression of Polish resistance to their rule. Polish resistance, dating from before the partitions and continuing after them, was the earliest example of modern revolutionary nationalism in Europe.
A division in Europe
The independence of Poland, and of other submerged nationalities, became in time a cause much favoured in western Europe, while the three great monarchies of eastern Europe were drawn together in common opposition to national liberation; and this fact, plus the fact that the eastern monarchies were primarily landlord states, accentuated the characteristic division of Europe, in the nineteenth century, between a West that inclined to be liberal and an East that inclined to be reactionary.
Until the First World War
In summery, during the eighteenth century, the whole of Eastern Europe north of the Balkans, which is to say north of the Ottoman Empire, had been absorbed by the three monarchies of Russia, Prussia, and Austria. These three empires remained contiguous, except for a few years under Napoleon, covering the whole area until they all collapsed in the First World War, when Poland and the Baltic provinces re-emerged. By the late twentieth century the East European peoples were again affirming their national identity against subjection to the Soviet Union.