Ignacy Paderewski: Poland (Makers of the Modern World) - Hardcover

‘What an intellectual feast Alan Sharp and his collaborators have served us with this comprehensive treatment of the peace conferences that ended the Great War! What makes this series an important contribution to the historical literature are the distinguished roster of contributors, the careful attention devoted to persons and events not only in Europe and America but also in the non-Western world, and the illuminating demonstration of how this critical turning point in modern world history shaped the rest of the twentieth century and beyond.’ William R. Keylor Professor of History and International Relations Director, International History Institute, Boston University ‘As a glance at the table of contents shows, there are always more and interesting things to be said on the perennially fascinating question of the Paris Peace Conference. Sadly, too, there is much that is still relevant for our own troubled world.’ Margaret Macmillan Warden, St. Antony’s College, Oxford University, author of ‘Peacemakers’ (John Murray, 2001)

The thirteenth of President Wilson’s Fourteen Points of 1918 read: ‘An independent Polish state should be erected which should include the territories inhabited by indisputably Polish populations, which should be assured a free and secure access to the sea, and whose political and economic independence and territorial integrity should be guaranteed by international covenant.’ Ever since the Third Partition in 1795 brought Polish independence to an end, nationalists had sought the restoration of their country, and the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 did indeed produce the modern Polish state. The Western Allies saw a revived Poland as both a counter to German power and a barrier to the westward expansion of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia – a role the Polish army fulfilled by defeating a Soviet invasion in 1920. But caught between two powers and composed of territory taken from both of them, Poland was vulnerable, and in 1939 it was divided up between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany following the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The highest profile Polish representative at the Conference was the pianist and politician Ignacy Paderewski (1860–1941), the ‘most famous Pole in the world’, whose image had done much to promote the Polish cause in the West. But he was joined by the altogether less romantic figure of Roman Dmowski (1864-1939), whose anti-Semitic reputation Paderewski took pains to distance himself from when seeking support in the United States.