Adam Jerzy Czartoryski - Proposed Federation

Proposed Federation

Between the November and January Uprisings, in 1832–61, Czartoryski supported the idea of resurrecting an updated Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth on federation principles.

The visionary statesman and former friend, confidant and de facto foreign minister of Russia's Tsar Alexander I acted as the "uncrowned king and unacknowledged foreign minister" of a nonexistent Poland.

He had been disappointed in the hopes that he had reposed, as late as the Congress of Vienna, in Alexander's willingness to undertake reforms, and the distillation of some years' subsequent study and thought was Czartoryski's book, completed in 1827 but published only in 1830, Essai sur la diplomatie (Essay on Diplomacy). This book is, according to the historian Marian Kamil Dziewanowski, indispensable to an understanding of the Prince's many activities conducted in France's capital following the ill-fated Polish November 1830 Uprising. Czartoryski wanted to find a place for Poland in the Europe of the time. He sought to interest western Europeans in the adversities of a stateless nation that was nevertheless an indispensable part of the European structure.

Pursuant to the Polish motto, "For our freedom and yours", Czartoryski connected Polish efforts for independence with similar movements of other subjugated nations in Europe and in the East as far as the Caucasus. Thanks to his private initiative and generosity, the émigrés of a subjugated nation conducted a foreign policy often on a broader scale than had the old independent Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

Of particular interest are Czartoryski's observations, in the Essay on Diplomacy, regarding Russia's role in the world. He wrote that, "Having extended her sway south and west, and being by the nature of things unreachable from the east and north, Russia becomes a source of constant threat to Europe." He argued that it would have been in Russia's interest, instead, to have surrounded herself with "friend slave." Czartoryski also identified a future threat from Prussia and urged the incorporation of East Prussia into a resurrected Poland.

Above all, however, he aspired to reconstitute – with French, British and Turkish support – a Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth federated with the Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, Romanians and all the South Slavs of the future Yugoslavia. Poland, in his concept, could have mediated the conflicts between Hungary and the Slavs, and between Hungary and Romania.

Czartoryski's plan seemed achievable during the period of national revolutions in 1848–49 but foundered on lack of western support, on Hungarian intransigence toward the Czechs, Slovaks and Romanians, and on the rise of German nationalism." "Nevertheless", concludes Dziewanowski, "the Prince's endeavor constitutes a link the 16th century Jagiellon and Józef Piłsudski's federative-Prometheist program ."