Ghost Provinces, Mislaid Minorities: The Experience of Southern Ireland and Prussian Poland...

Ghost Provinces, Mislaid Minorities: The Experience of Southern Ireland and Prussian PolandCompared, 1918-23Author(s): Tim WilsonSource: Irish Studies in International Affairs, Vol. 13 (2002), pp. 61-86Published by: Royal Irish AcademyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30001983 .

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Ghost Provinces, Mislaid Minorities: the Experience of Southern Ireland and Prussian Poland Compared,

1918-23

Tim Wilson

St. Peter's College, Oxford

ABSTRACT

In the years 1918-23 the Protestant minority in Southern Ireland and the German one in Prussian Poland both underwent a traumatic loss of status. Their conflicts with the majority Irish/Polish nationalisms that engulfed them may be fruitfully compared as belonging to the same species of conflict involving the mass mobilisation of ethnic groups. Nonetheless, the Polish-German conflict was clearly the more extreme. I argue here, firstly, that because of the closer geographical relationship of Prussian Poland to the German state than of Ireland to Great Britain, disturbances there were likely to invoke a stronger response. Ireland's being an island also served to mitigate the conflict there in important ways. Secondly, the collapse of order in Germany itself essentially left German minorities on the frontier to fend for themselves. This volatile situation was at times further exacerbated by Allied involvement. In contrast, Britain was able to isolate Ireland from outside interference. Lastly, for all these similarities, the minorities' subsequent experiences have been radically different. Protestants in Southern Ireland were, in the end, successfully assimilated. German communities in Poland were totally destroyed in the 1940s. This contrast alone highlights the importance of the international context in studying ethnic conflicts.

A NOTE ON NOMENCLATURE

Since the case studies under scrutiny involve changing sovereignties, the question of what to call places that changed their names overnight becomes potentially problematic. This is most marked in the German-Polish borderlands. Here, in the interests of consistency, I have broken with the convention of closely following contemporary official usage and used the German names throughout, as this seems the simplest way of keeping the non-specialist reader on board. Thus, the city known today as 'Bydgoszcz' is 'Bromberg', and 'Poznan' is 'Posen'. Similarly, the region

Author's e-mail: timothy.wilson@ st-peters.oxford.ac.uk

Irish Studies in International Affairs, Vol. 13 (2002), 61-86.



62 Irish Studies in International Affairs

of 'Poznania' is still 'Posen'-the German name could refer to either the province or the capital, as context should make clear-and the Polish region of 'Pomorze', which constituted 66% of the old province of West Prussia, is referred to as 'ex- German West Prussia'. My apologies to any purists who are offended. Needless to say, these are stylistic preferences and not political ones.

As a useful shorthand, I refer frequently to 'Prussian Poland'. Strictly speaking, this could mean only the provinces of Posen and West Prussia, but I use it as an umbrella term to include Upper Silesia as well. Hence it refers to all provinces of the German Reich that underwent major territorial losses to the new Polish state after 1919 (see Fig. 1). Similarly, 'Southern Ireland' refers to all 26 counties that became the Free State, including the three Ulster counties of Monaghan, Cavan and Donegal.

Finally, all translations from the German are my own unless otherwise acknowledged.

INTRODUCTION

Looking back on his service on the German side during the Polish Uprising of December 1918-February 1919, former Lieutenant Vogt reflected that it had been a 'very strange kind of war'. For a veteran of the Flanders trench warfare it was impossible to adjust to the absence of any noticeable front line. Enemy-that is, Polish-villages were all mixed up with German ones. Even more bizarrely, when his men took Polish prisoners they sometimes found that they knew them personally. This was clearly a very different kind of war from the one he had become accustomed to over the previous four years. Somehow, a newly asserted sense of Polish nationality had turned these former neighbours into enemies. And even 50 years after the events he describes, Vogt apparently still could not make much sense of it all.'

Later in the same year-1919-but on quite the other side of Europe, the editor of the Irish Protestant community's major newspaper, the Irish Times, found himself similarly taken aback at the nature of the growing conflict around him. It was, he wrote, war 'without any of the amenities of decent warfare'. He particularly resented nationalist criticism of the behaviour of the new auxiliary police recruits-many, like Vogt, themselves hardened veterans of the Western Front.2 Another loyalist sympathiser agreed in March 1920 that 'it is to be regretted that some members of the auxiliary police are desperate men, but they were appointed to do desperate work, and if it were not for their activity in the south and west of Ireland no Protestant could live in security'.3 In reality, exactly the opposite was true-many Protestants increasingly found themselves in the unenviable position of being used as de facto hostages against Crown atrocities. And local inter-community relations that had seemed amicable enough on the surface often proved wanting when put to the test. Just as in Posen, a deep divide had opened up between Irish Protestants and the majority community.4

The point of these-admittedly anecdotal-comparisons is to suggest that processes of division were taking place in Ireland that resembled those in Prussian

'Dietrich Vogt, Der Grof3polnische Aufstand (Marburg, 1980), 105-7. 2lrish Times, 29 October 1919, 2 March 1921, cited in R.B. McDowell Crisis and decline (Dublin,

1997), 80. 3J.H. Bernard, quoted in R.B. McDowell, Crisis and decline, 80-1. 4See, for instance, Lionel Fleming, Head or harp (London, 1965), 52.



WILSON-Southern Ireland and Prussian Poland Compared, 1918-23 63

StPetersburg A. Before 1919 ,Rigs Mc~

KIrwgsbeg_ Osmif

,Berlin RUSSIA

Warsaw

,Prague

AUSTRIA-HUNGARY

Odessa

Black Sea

B. After 1919

'konigsberg( bauA

Stettoi

Berlin

Fig. 1. Maps A and B: 'East Germany and its hinterland-before and after 1919', in Ian ED. Morrow, The peace settlement in the German Polish borderlands: a study of conditions today in the pre-war Prussian provinces of East and West Prussia (London, 1936), 397. The maps have been slightly altered to display province names. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press.




Poland, and that this similarity repays closer attention. As the unspeakable carnage of the First World War finally spluttered to a halt, a bewildering number of nationalist movements throughout Europe seized their opportunity to secede from the exhausted major states. Usually, this led them straight into fresh conflicts with other competing nationalisms or the efforts of the old order to resist their bids for freedom. But, as the accounts above indicate, these were very different kinds of conflict from what had gone before. Whilst actual hostilities were much more sporadic and less predictable, these new divisions mobilised whole communities against each other.

Within a wider European context, what was most distinctive about the Irish case was that for once the primary badge of communal division was sectarian, not linguistic.5 As a community, the Protestant minority was divided from the Catholic majority by their religious traditions, their indifference or hostility to the Gaelic revival and their political identity as loyalists-that is, by their support for the retention of Ireland within Great Britain.6 Similarly, the German minority in the provinces of Upper Silesia, West Prussia and Posen were separated from the more numerous Poles by a language barrier, which the Prussian school system had strongly reinforced.7 In the latter two provinces the Lutheran identity of the German minority formed another line of division between them and the majority population.8 And although enthusiastic support for the aggressive 'Germanisation' programmes being driven forward in the areas of land ownership and education was probably limited to a hard core of nationalist agitators, there was very little German appreciation of the bitterness these policies had caused on the Polish side.9 But the specific axes of division in each case are less important than their aggregate effect- that is, the baleful persistence in both Ireland and Prussian Poland of deep-seated communal polarisation.10

5We should also note in passing the many and pronounced denominational divisions between Protestants. Presbyterian culture, to give just one example, looked more to Scotland and Ulster, whilst Irish Anglicans were more affected historically by the links with England. Nonetheless, since all these groups were defined by being non-Catholic and pro-Unionist it is justified to treat them here together. See Kurt Bowen, Protestants in a Catholic state (Dublin, 1983), 3; and Jack White, Minority report (Dublin 1975), chap. 2.

6The national identity of Southern Irish Protestants is a thorny subject. I am primarily interested in them as a loyalist community-that is not to deny the existence, or indeed the very high profile, of Protestants in the nationalist movement, but it is to assert that they were highly unrepresentative of their own communities. Generally, I have persisted in identifying this ethnic group by the religious designation 'Protestant', as it seems preferable to the alternatives. To call them, simply, 'loyalist' or 'Unionist' throughout risks blurring the distinction between them and the numerous Catholics who also shared those political preferences. Nor should the labels 'British' and 'Irish' be seen as necessarily inimical to each other. Probably the majority of Protestants did not perceive themselves as 'not-Irish'; rather they did not see their Irish identity and their loyalty to Britain as being mutually exclusive. This, of course, did not stop some of their enemies from calling them by names such as 'West Britons', 'English dogs' etc. See Peter Hart, The IRA and its enemies (Oxford, 1998), 288.

7R.W. Tims, Germanizing Prussian Poland (New York, 1941), 65. 8For a discussion of the conflation of Polish and Catholic identities, see Gotthold Rhode, Geschichte

der Stadt Posen (Neuendettelsau, 1953), 223. 9Tims, Germanizing Prussian Poland, 28 1-7. loOf course, these are generalisations only. As mentioned, not all Protestants were loyalists. Not all

Catholics were nationalists-the majority of the RIC, which bore the brunt of the IRA's campaign, were, indeed, Catholic. Likewise, not all Polish-speakers, when given the choice in plebiscites, chose to vote for incorporation into Poland. Nor were all Germans Protestant-in Upper Silesia, indeed, the majority were Catholic. In Masuria, there were even a few Polish Protestants. In short, not all the identities outlined above were exactly overlapping. But enough were for enough people to ensure that such generalisations still remain useful, if used with discretion. See Richard Blanke, Orphans of Versailles (Lexington, Ky., 1993), 56; White, Minority report, 5.




Ethnic conflicts These shared features encourage comparison of the Irish and Polish cases, since both arguably belong to broadly the same type of conflict-what we now call 'ethnic' or 'ethno-nationalist' conflicts." The term 'ethnic group' is broadly conceived here, in keeping with Richard Schermerhorn's definition:

a collectivity within a larger society having real or putative common ancestry, memories of a shared historical past, and a cultural focus on one or more symbolic elements defined as the epitome of their peoplehood. Examples of such symbolic elements are: kinship patterns, physical contiguity (as in localism or sectionalism), religious affiliation, language or dialect forms, tribal affiliation, nationality, phenotypical features, or any combination of these. A necessary accompaniment is some consciousness of kind among members of the group.12

This may well seem an unnecessary and not very illuminating excursion into sociological verbiage. Why insist on thinking in terms of 'ethnic groups' at all? Why insist on viewing conflicts between them-so-called ethnic or ethno-nationalist conflicts-as a distinct species of conflict?

Such an approach encourages a heightened sensitivity to a type of conflict that operates on a number of different levels simultaneously. Conventional military or diplomatic accounts will go only so far in capturing the essence of these conflicts, and will often ignore the dimension of communal polarisation altogether. Indeed, it is striking how few accounts of the post-war turbulence attempt any sustained linkage between the 'inner world' of group psychology and behaviour and the 'outer world' of international diplomacy and power struggles. Unwieldy as definitions of ethnic conflict must inevitably appear, the concept does at least facilitate such holistic approaches to the study of multi-dimensional confrontations between whole communities.

The case for comparison It has already been asserted that both of the conflicts under discussion here belong to roughly the same genre of conflict. We may also note in passing that both took place on the periphery of their respective states--on what Frank Wright calls the 'ethnic frontier' (i.e. Prussian Poland/Ireland) to distinguish it from the

"There is, it should be stressed, a long historiographical tradition of comparisons between Ireland and Prussian Poland, most usually at the levels of allusion rather than sustained analysis. See, for instance, John Coakley, 'Religion, ethnic identity and the Protestant minority in the Republic', in William Crotty and David Schmitt (eds), Ireland and the politics of change (New York, 1998), 86-106: 101, on ideologies; Peter Hart, 'The Protestant experience of revolution in Southern Ireland', in Richard English and Graham Walker (eds), Unionism in modern Ireland (Dublin, 1996), 81-98: 94, on ethnic cleansing; M.W. Heslinga, The Irish border as a cultural divide (Assen, 1971), 46, on survival of 'native' cultures; J.J. Lee, Ireland 1912-1985: politics and society (Cambridge, 1989), 4-6, for a comparison of Prussian and Ulster Protestant mentalities; Ian Morrow, The peace settlement in the Polish German borderlands (London, 1936), 188, on the psychological importance of borders; Tims, Germanizing Prussian Poland, 7, on strategic importance; Frank Wright, Northern Ireland: a comparative analysis (Dublin, 1987), for by far the most comprehensive treatment. Margaret O'Callaghan also highlights contemporary linkages-the recruitment of staff for the Irish Boundary Commission on the basis of their experience in Upper Silesia; see 'Old parchment and water: the Boundary Commission of 1925 and the copperfastening of the Irish border', Bulldn: An Irish Studies Journal 4 (1) (1999/2000), 27-55: 38.

12Quoted in the introduction to John Hutchinson and Anthony Smith (eds), Ethnicity (Oxford, 1996), 6.




'metropolitan' heartlands (i.e. Berlin/London).13 And since both emerged from the fallout of the World War, they are also both implicitly linked by timing. But the explicit parallels between the two are also very close.

An important attraction for a comparison between these two minorities is the innate psychological drama of their experiences. These communities were, respectively, the local pillars of German and British rule, and provided those regimes with their senior servants. Although we should not lose sight of the profound class differences within the minority communities, it is nonetheless clear that as communities they were disproportionately privileged in terms of wealth and influence. And this--on average superior socio-economic position as compared to the majority community-was inevitably often accompanied by a corresponding superiority of attitude. But by 1923 the props of their self-confidence had been swept away. Chastened and apprehensive, the minorities faced uncertain futures within new states whose creation they deplored.

A comparative framework for analysis The first point to stress in constructing a comparative framework is that relative size matters.The whole island of Ireland was only about a third of the size of the new Polish state (84,252km2 to 240,000km2).14 However, as our primary interest is in areas where a reversal of power relationships took place, we can leave aside Northern Ireland, where one community managed to retain dominance, and most of Poland, where the much smaller German minorities had never enjoyed it. Concentrating therefore on the remaining areas, the entire Free State (70,769km2) still emerges as not much larger than the ex-German territories in Posen, West Prussia and Upper Silesia that now constituted the western provinces of the new Polish Republic (c. 55,000km2).15

However, in terms of population size a much more marked differential is observable. Whereas the Irish Free State inherited 327,000 Protestants-around 10% of the population-the Polish Republic eventually absorbed about 1.4 million Germans in the aforementioned territories.16 Taken together with ethnic Germans from the areas formerly ruled by Austria and Poland, this may have given Poland a combined German population of over two million, or around 7% of the total population in 1921.17 As stated above, though, it is with the former group from the ex-German provinces that we are primarily concerned. Here they constituted on average around 35% of the population.18

13Wright, Northern Ireland, xii. 14J.J. Lee, The European dictatorships (London, 1987), 15, and Hermann Blei et al. (eds), GroJfe

Enzyklopddie (10 vols, Cologne, 1990), vol. 5, s.v. 'Irland', and vol. 7, s.v. 'Polen'. 15These figures are taken from various sources. See GroJe Enzyklopdidie, vol. 5, s.v. 'Irland'. The

dimensions of the pre-war German provinces of Posen and West Prussia are given at www.genealswiss.net/orschaften/posen.html (2 September 2001). Blanke, Orphans of Versailles, 21, states that Germany lost 90% of the province of Posen and 66% of West Prussia, which I calculate to be 26,100km2 and 16,840km2 respectively. William Reddaway et al. in The Cambridge history of Poland (Cambridge, 1941), 514, state that Polish Upper Silesia comprised 10,753km2. Altogether, this gives a total of 53,613km2. In addition, Germany lost a small area of East Prussia to the new Polish state. Rudolf Jaworski and Mieczyslaw Wojciechowski, Deutsche und Polen zwischen den Kriegen (Munich, 1997), 6, give the territory ceded from West Prussia and Posen as 49,909km2 and Polish Upper Silesia as 11,008km2: a total of c. 60,000km2.

16McDowell, Crisis and decline, 3. Blanke, Orphans of Versailles, 31. 17Blanke, Orphans of Versailles, 3. 18Blanke, Orphans of Versailles, 52.



WILsoN-Southern Ireland and Prussian Poland Compared, 1918-23 67

The distribution of this minority population was uneven in the extreme. Overall percentages can do no justice to the complexity of the demographic pattern on the ground, but they are nonetheless worth giving. In the partitioned section of Upper Silesia given over to Poland the German minority probably constituted 29.5% of the population. In the province of Posen the proportion was slightly higher at 34.4%. In the ceded districts of West Prussia the German population rose to 42.5% of the total.19

In the territory that became the Irish Free State the distribution pattern was even more erratic. Much of the south and west of the country had very few Protestants indeed-in Connaught they made up only 4% of the population. Nonetheless, urban centres such as Cork (11.56%) and Limerick (9.48%) boasted larger concentrations. Around the old 'Pale', density of Protestant settlement was higher still-probably around 21% in County Wicklow and Dublin city and county combined. Unsurprisingly, some of the highest percentages were in the three Ulster counties that went to the Free State: in Cavan Protestants made up 18.54% of the population, in Donegal, 21.5%, and in Monaghan, 25%.20 As in Poland, population distribution patterns had profound implications in the event of communal mobilisation.

Both Ireland and Prussian Poland were amongst the least modernised regions of the states they belonged to in 1918. But it is important not to exaggerate here. Both Ireland and these German territories, for instance, enjoyed nearly 100% levels of literacy and were firmly integrated into market economies.21 This was reflected in the occupational profile of the minority communities, who were well represented in the more advanced sectors of these still largely agricultural economies. In the 26 counties, Protestants made up only 7.4% of farmers and only 2.7% of farm labourers.22 Those who were farmers were more likely to have larger holdings.23 The 1911 census reveals dramatic over-representation of Protestants in various professions-they made up over 70% of all those involved in banking, around 50% of doctors and accountants, nearly 33% of commercial clerks and over 20% of merchants. Similarly, in public administration 20.7% of personnel were Protestant.24 Of course, Protestants were in general still more likely to be small farmers than large ones and shop clerks rather than shop owners. But they were certainly less likely than Catholics to find themselves in abject poverty. And although the total political and economic domination of the old Ascendancy was by now a thing of the past, most of what we might loosely call 'the Establishment'-that is, the higher reaches of public and commercial life-was still resolutely Protestant. In 1911, just to give one example, only four out of fifteen High Court judges were Catholics.25

Direct comparison with the occupational profile of the German minority in Prussian Poland is severely hampered both by the different categories used by census

19Blanke, Orphans of Versailles, 244-5. The picture is complicated by the existence of other minorities such as the Cashubs in West Prussia, whose national identity was disputed by the two major communities. Another significant minority was the Jews, who in some towns, such as Posen, probably made up 4% of the total population; being German speakers, they are usually counted as Germans. But they were also to some extent targets of extreme Polish and German nationalists. Incidentally, anti- Semitic currents were not entirely absent amongst some Irish nationalists, although Jews were a numerically insignificant minority in Ireland. See William Hagen, Germans, Poles and Jews: the nationality conflict in the Prussian East 1772-1914 (Chicago, 1980), 208, 305; and Hart, The IRA and its enemies, 315.

20McDowell, Crisis and decline, 4-5. 21Lee, Ireland 1912-1985, 76; Blanke, Orphans of Versailles, 38. 22McDowell, Crisis and decline, 5. 23McDowell, Crisis and decline, 144. 24McDowell, Crisis and decline, 5. 25White, Minority report, 153.




takers and by the paucity of reliable academic research into the subject. Nonetheless, a clear impression of relative German socio-economic privilege emerges. Before the war, writes Blanke, '44% of the German population of Posen and 38% in West Prussia lived in urban communities and pursued typically urban occupations'. Thus, he elaborates, they were disproportionately represented 'chiefly in the professional, civil servant, merchant and artisan categories (as those terms were used by official census takers)'.26 This still leaves the bulk of the German population engaged in agriculture. In the province of Posen over half of all real estate-53.7%-was in the hands of the minority.27 Most German farmers owned medium-sized farms of less than 250 acres.28 But unlike Ireland, there had been no legislative attempt at land distribution to tenants, and the traditional structure of larger Junker holdings was also still intact.29 Unsurprisingly, then, we find Germans overrepresented amongst owners of large estates: 'in 1921 they owned 44% of the large-estate land in Pomorze [ex-German West Prussia] and 36% in Poznania [Posen]'.30 Upper Silesia, with its heavy industry, presents quite a different occupational profile from the other provinces-just as Belfast did from the rest of Ireland. But German privilege was no less pronounced here as well: 55% of the German population of Upper Silesia earned their living in industry or mining, making up 60% of industrial workers and 90% of the white-collar employees. Even as late as the 1930s over half the private industrial capital in Polish Silesia remained in the hands of local Germans or Reich citizens.31

Relative positions of the minorities

It is important to stress that in terms of their relative position vis-a-vis the majority community there was a stark difference between the two minorities in 1918. The Protestant community in most of the 26 counties had long been in political retreat. Their dominance of the major agricultural sector had been largely broken by the various Land Acts. Franchise reforms and increased democratisation in general had exposed their demographic vulnerability and sidelined them in terms of political representation. The successive Home Rule crises had shaken their confidence, as had the apparent willingness of some Ulster Unionists to ditch them as a liability to their cause.32 But as loyal servants to-and beneficiaries of-the old regime they were not yet beaten. By contrast, the German communities in Prussian Poland had been largely insulated by the German state from feeling the full effect of the rise of Polish nationalism. The antiquated franchise system of the Prussian Landtag minimised Polish political representation, while a ruinously expensive central government purchasing programme attempted to increase the amount of land in German ownership.33 Official 'Germanisation' programmes in schools and the renaming of streets and towns underscored the state's determination to shore up German culture

26Blanke, Orphans of Versailles, 49. 27Stephen Horak, Poland and her national minorities (New York, 1961), 135. 28Blanke, Orphans of Versailles, 51. 29Tims, Germanizing Prussian Poland, 281. 30Blanke, Orphans of Versailles, 51. It is important also to bear in mind that by 1921 much of the

German population had already left. 31Blanke, Orphans of Versailles, 52. See also Henryk Zielinski, 'The social and political background

to the Silesian uprisings', Acta Poloniae Historica 26 (1972), 73-108. 32There is a useful summary of these shifts in power in Coakley, 'Religion, ethnic identity and the

Protestant minority in the Republic', 93-6. 33Robert Koehl, 'Colonialism inside Germany', Journal of Modern History 3 (1953), 255-72: 270;

also Tims, Germanizing Prussian Poland, 273.




in the eastern territories.34 In short, when the earthquake hit, the German minority were almost totally unprepared for it. They had a long way to fall.

Communal polarisation overlooked

In Ireland the main conflict took place between the IRA and the forces of the Crown, chiefly the police or their auxiliaries. In military terms, the role of the loyalist Protestant population was a sideshow and a distraction. As a consequence, the 'ethnic component' to this conflict has remained largely overlooked.35 In eastern Germany, by contrast, with the effective collapse of the state at the end of 1918, the minority population were forced at first to try and defend themselves as best as they could. But even here many conventional accounts often manage to ignore the depth of communal polarisation almost entirely. Norman Davies, though admirably succinct, is hardly atypical here:

[in Posen] the crowds took to the streets. The German garrison was expelled. After a brief skirmish, the province was freed. Two months of unpremeditated rebellion were sufficient to redeem 125 years of 'foreign occupation'. Posen became Poznan again, and joined the Polish Republic. Elsewhere, the Polish-German settlement was more protracted. The Treaty of Versailles awarded part of Pomerania, the so-called Corridor, to Poland but left Danzig as a Free City, and subjected Upper Silesia, Allenstein, and Marienwerder to popular plebiscites. Three Silesian Risings failed to resolve the issue.36

Here, remarkably, the German populations at stake remain not so much passive as entirely invisible in the face of the total collapse of the established order.

A brief comparison of conflict intensity It should be clear by now that events in ex-Prussian Poland were played out on a geographic stage of similar size to Ireland, but with a much larger demographic cast. But this of course tells us nothing about the comparative intensity of the conflicts. Lloyd George reputedly exclaimed in a moment of exasperation that the Poles were as bad as the Irish, but he was plain wrong. They were, in fact, much 'worse'--or to put it differently, their conflicts were more sanguinary. In seven weeks the Posen Uprising claimed twice as many victims as the Irish War of Independence did in two years. Nor were the Upper Silesian uprisings any more restrained.37

34Hagen, Germans, Poles and Jews, 193, 272. 35The work of Peter Hart has been invaluable in refocusing attention on this aspect of the Troubles. 36Norman Davies, God's playground: a history of Poland (2 vols, Oxford, 1981), vol. 2, 137-8. 37Casualty figures are problematic for several reasons. The first major difficulty is the paucity of

reliable estimates, especially for Poland. Firstly, only in the case of the Posen revolt of 1918-19 are usable estimates available. Secondly, the figures for both countries reflect a narrow military interpretation of the conflicts, with a bias towards combatant deaths. For instance, no reliable estimates exist for attacks on Protestant civilians in Ireland in the years 1919-23. Thirdly, death rates are, in themselves, a very blunt instrument of analysis indeed. They lack psychological context. In ethnic conflicts, where violence is representational-that is, individuals are often attacked because they represent groups of people-the impact of violence may be out of all proportion to the actual numbers involved or directly affected. That said, it is important to bear in mind that the casualties in these border wars were dwarfed by those of the world war that preceded them. About 25,000 men from the island of Ireland died in the First World War; combined Polish fatalities-split between German/Austrian and Russian armies, in which they served on opposing sides-were probably around the 450,000 mark. The pre-war populations of Ireland and (what became) Poland were probably about 4,390,000 and




However, the shock that the revolution administered to both minorities is most clearly reflected in population decline, primarily due to flight. Like death rates, this is something of a blunt instrument for analysis as the individual reasons why people left are often complex, varied, and opaque. But the overall effect is clear enough. 'Between 1911 and 1926,' writes Peter Hart, 'the 26 counties that became the Irish Free State lost 34% of their Protestant population'.38 This is a dramatic drop. But the flight of the German population from the former provinces of Posen and West Prussia was even more impressive. Possibly over half of the German population- 592,000 according to official German figures-had left these areas by the end of 1921. Perhaps another 100,000 Germans followed from Polish Upper Silesia.39

The implications of these two rough measurements should be clear enough. Quite obviously, the Polish-German conflicts were far more intense in both absolute and relative terms than their Irish counterparts. More importantly for our purposes, in terms of overall effect, they seemed to have hit the German minority harder than the Protestant one in Ireland. Yet I have outlined my belief earlier that both these conflicts belong to the same type of conflict, and may therefore be fruitfully compared to each other. If this is still the case in light of their differentiated impacts on the minorities under scrutiny, then we may fairly ask: why did inter-communal confrontation in the Polish-German borderlands reach levels of intensity not seen in Southern Ireland?

PARAMETERS

'Geopolitical theory' writes Sloan, 'is an attempt to draw attention to the importance of certain geographical patterns in political history'.40 As a theory of spatial relationships and historical causation, this combines the Braudelian view of the environment as 'an architectural outline that time changes little' with a more nuanced awareness that the geographical structure of the field within which power is exercised does in fact change under the influence of far-reaching developments in politics and technology. This section explores the effects that geographical location had upon the minorities' perceptions of their situation, the nationalism of the majority community and the attitude of the metropolitan power.

The location of the minority In happier times it had been possible for the leading members of the minorities to take pride in their peripheral location on the borders of their state and-as they saw it-of civilisation itself, 'each holding his outpost in what he regarded as more or less a jungle of barbarism'.41 'Southern Unionists,' writes McDowell, 'were very

25,000,000 respectively. See Davies, God's playground, vol. 2, 382, and David Fitzpatrick, 'Militarism in Ireland, 1900-1922', in Thomas Bartlett and Keith Jeffery (eds), A military history of Ireland (Cambridge, 1996), 379-406: 401.

38Hart, 'Protestant experience of revolution', 81. 39Blanke, Orphans of Versailles, 32-4. This exodus was very uneven; Blanke claims that up to 85%

of the urban German population left, but 'only' 55% of the rural population. In Ireland, too, urban flight was more pronounced; see White, Minority report, 9. Overall, Catholic population decline in the same period was about 2%.

40Geoffrey Sloan, 'Geopolitics and British strategic policy in Ireland: issues and interests', Irish Studies in International Affairs 8 (1997), 129-35: 130.

41Fleming, Head or harp, 11.



WiLsoN-Southern Ireland and Prussian Poland Compared, 1918-23 71

conscious that they both dwelt in the empire's heartland, the British Isles, and as members of a loyal minority were stationed on the imperial limes'.42 A similarly romantic self-image of warriors defending a threatened frontier lay behind the name choice of the 'German Eastern Marches Society', Deutscher Ostmarkverein (DOV), a nationalist pressure group set up to promote the Germanisation of Prussian Poland. In Ireland, meanwhile, the sense of Protestant isolation was further reinforced by the lie of the land-or, more accurately, of the sea.

The sea

'Studies devoted to frontiers,' comments the French historian Fernand Braudel, 'rarely mention the sea...And yet if a frontier means a break, a discontinuity in space, what traveller leaving Calais, or arriving in Dover, could fail to think he was leaving one frontier and meeting another?'43 If we substitute 'Dun Laoghaire' for 'Calais' and 'Holyhead' for 'Dover', the point still stands. Arguably, the sea-or its absence-has been the single most important influence in determining the territorial form that conflict took in both cases under discussion here.

To take the Irish case first: the traditional obsession of nationalist literature with partition has detracted attention from the uncontested borders-those set by the sea. Indeed, the point is so obvious that it has usually escaped notice: as Guelke says, the 'unalterability [of island status] makes it a factor that tends simply to be taken for granted'.44 Similarly, Bowman stresses the importance of Ireland's 'map- image' to nationalist thinking.45 Thus, the question 'What should the national territory of Ireland look like?' has been traditionally-and from the ideological point of view, decisively-answered by reference to the 'natural boundaries' of the sea.46

What were the likely effects of this map-image on the development of the majority's nationalism? And where, by extension, would the minority be within this imagined new order? Bowman suggests that the very clarity of this mental image of Ireland reinforced nationalist extremism. In an important passage, he draws an explicit contrast between Polish and Irish nationalisms:

42McDowell, Crisis and decline, 21. 43Fernand Braudel, The identity of France, trans. Sian Reynolds (2 vols, London, 1988-90), vol.1,

323. 44Adrian Guelke, 'Northern Ireland and island status', in John McGarry (ed.), Northern Ireland and

the divided world (Oxford, 2001), 228-52: 249. See also the infamous article 2 of the 1937 Irish constitution: 'The national territory consists of the whole island of Ireland, its islands and the territorial seas'.

45John Bowman, De Valera and the Ulster Question 1917-1973 (Oxford, 1982), 11-25. See also Adrian Guelke, 'International legitimacy, self-determination, and Northern Ireland', Review of International Studies 11 (1985), 37-52, for a discussion of the rarity of divided sovereignties on islands.

46Interestingly, if unsurprisingly, Unionists have usually treated the sea rather differently. The duke of Argyll chose effectively to ignore it, reflecting on Ireland's closeness in 1893 thus: 'I have been spending the last few weeks in a part of Scotland whence we can look down on the hills of Antrim. We can see the colour of their fields and in the sunset we can see the glancing of the light upon the windows of their cabins. This is the country, I thought the other day, which the greatest English statesman tells us must be governed as we govern the Antipodes. Was there ever such folly?' (quoted in Hugh Kearney, The British Isles: a history of four nations (Cambridge, 1989), 193). James Molyneaux, in 1990, preferred to stress the importance of the sea over the centuries as a highway uniting cultures rather than dividing them-a concept with much historical validity, if not political resonance (outside the Unionist community). The later Council of the Isles was similarly welcomed by Unionists for its emphasis on the unity of the archipelago. See John McGarry and Brendan O'Leary, Explaining Northern Ireland (Oxford, 1995), 100.




Essentially then, Irish nationalism, concerned with territorial tidiness or completeness, has done little to develop a political culture capable of uniting the population of the entire island. Unlike landlocked nationalist movements elsewhere, Irish nationalism can admit of no compromise on where any new boundary line might be drawn. 'Ireland cannot shift her frontiers. The Almighty traced them beyond the cunning of man to modify' [Arthur Griffith]. The special importance to Irish nationalists of the territorial bond may be due to the fact that, unlike, say, the Poles, they have always thought of the 'homeland' in terms of a discrete geographical entity.47 I argue, however, that exactly the opposite conclusion is more persuasive. The

relatively benign nature of Irish nationalism-at least judged by its own anti- sectarian rhetoric-owed much to its geographical isolation and lack of neighbours.48 The idea of erecting an internal Irish border was so absurd to most Irish nationalists that they simply failed to take it seriously until it was too late. Indeed, both sides in the Irish Civil War seem to have considered the northern statelet unviable from the outset:

The Irish Civil War was fought by Irish nationalists over the terms of the Anglo- Irish Treaty, but not over the terms which referred to Ulster. Both sides assumed that the Ulster question would be satisfied by the Boundary Commission in ways which would make Northern Ireland unworkable. The terms which provoked the civil war were those which affected the scope and extant of Irish 'statehood': its degree of substantive and ritual subordination to the British empire. The geographical scope of the state was not an issue [my emphasis].49 Officially, Irish nationalism accepted Protestants as fellow Irishmen, however

much the latter inconveniently refused to reciprocate the gesture. Arguably, the separation by the sea of the Protestants from the British mainland encouraged Irish nationalists not to take their professions of loyalty to Britain too seriously. Thus, according to Guelke, 'the geographical frame of reference provided by island status makes it easy to refer to the people (singular) of the island, regardless of the existence of any ethnic divisions among them'.50 And if, as a result, Irish nationalists tended to underestimate the strength of Ulster Unionism, they were even less inclined to take the scattered Protestant populations of the south seriously. To some extent, then, the map-image of Irish nationalism acted as a restraining force upon a

47Bowman, De Valera and the Ulster Question, 11-12. 48Bogdan Denitch, in contrast to Bowman, seems to argue that continental nationalisms were, and

are, more prone to a dangerous nostalgic revisionism precisely because land frontiers shift over time: 'Serbs and Croats are not uniquely history-ridden. Slovaks, Bulgarians, and Ukrainians all try to create a medieval history appropriate for their present national goals...Romanian and Albanian national historians, writers and poets try to go even further back, to classical or even pre-Roman times, for their nation's time of greatness. Poles and Lithuanians get nostalgic for the time when their commonwealth stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Hungarians remind all and sundry that they had a powerful medieval state that dominated Croatia, Slovakia, Romania, and sometimes parts of Bosnia, Serbia, and even western Ukraine'-Bogdan Denitch, Ethnic nationalism: the tragic death of Yugoslavia (Minneapolis, 1994), 136-7 (emphasis in original).

49Brendan O'Leary and John McGarry, The politics of antagonism: understanding Northern Ireland (London, 1997), 146. Whether Lloyd George seriously encouraged the Irish delegation at the peace negotiations to believe that Northern Ireland would prove unviable remains, of course, a source of controversy: see A.J.P. Taylor, English history 1914-1945 (Oxford, 1965), 158, for one version of this allegation.

5soGuelke, 'Northern Ireland and island status', 249.




drift to extremism. The isolation from Britain by the sea made the Protestant communities less threatening to the Irish nationalists-and here the absence of any contiguous land link to the motherland was vital. The contrast with Polish nationalism is highly instructive.

The plains One does not have to accept the controversial notion of 'natural frontiers' to recognise that it has held an extraordinary appeal for nationalists of all persuasions.51 On the eastern fringes of the German Reich, however, topography had not been so obliging to nationalists as in Ireland. The plains displayed an unfortunate dearth of clues in the shape of coast, mountains or major rivers to indicate what nature had intended should be the frontier between Poles and Germans. In effect, this allowed extremist imaginations on both sides to run riot about where their national territory should end. As late as 1916 the DOV was still dreaming of aggressive expansion eastwards, swelling 'the flood of war-time pamphlets with directions for straightening out Germany's eastern frontier, clearing it of Poles and substituting a belt of German colonists, and extending German dominion into Russia's Baltic provinces'.52 Unexpected defeat in 1918, and the consequent loss of territory, therefore hit home all the harder. Polish nationalists, for their part, were eventually obliged to settle for less than they had hoped in Posen, Silesia and East Prussia, but it was not for lack of trying. Indeed, after Dmowski's five-hour(!) speech at the Paris Peace Conference, Count Sforza, the Italian Foreign Minister, commented:

We saw the Poles reappear...still the delightful and impractical Poles of old. Their public men flooded the Cabinet of the Entente with memorials, reports, plans, historical reconstructions, juridical theses without end. According to them, half of Europe had been Polish and might become Polish again.53 Unlike Ireland, then, ambiguity over all borders was the order of the day. This

was amply reflected in the messy birth of the Polish state. To borrow Davies' striking phraseology, 'the Polish Republic came into being in November 1918 by a process which theologians might call parthenogenesis. It created itself in the void left by the collapse of the three partitioning powers'.54 The Treaty of Versailles merely confirmed what already existed, and its territorial provisions were concerned purely with defining the border with Germany.

Between 1918 and 1921 this infant republic was embroiled in no fewer than six 'nursery brawls' to establish its frontiers: against Germany in Posen and Silesia, but also against the Ukrainians, the Lithuanians, the Czechs and-nearly disastrously- the Soviets. In effect, the Poles 'drew their own borders, mostly in blood'.55 This hardly supports Bowman's contention that the haziness of an agreed territorial concept of the state amongst Polish nationalists led to greater moderation in their approach. On the contrary:

51See, for instance, Guelke, 'International legitimacy, self-determination, and Northern Ireland', 45. 52Tims, Germanizing Prussian Poland, 274. 53Neal Acherson, The struggle for Poland (London, 1987), 54. Since the Polish leader Dmowski

had been scheduled to speak for only ten minutes, the count's good humour seems all the more remarkable.

54Davies, God's playground, vol. 2, 393-4. 55Acherson, Struggle for Poland, 54.




Poland was surrounded by neighbours who were contemptuous of its existence, and anything but trustworthy, and Poland treated them as such. In the fight to regain both its old territories and some viable modem form, the link with the sea was of crucial importance.56 The latter point, indeed, is vital to an understanding of Polish nationalism in the

period. Whilst Polish nationalists may have lacked the clear-cut map-image of Irish nationalists, the sea was no less vital to their thinking.57 Rather than the sea being taken for granted as a natural boundary surrounding them, access to it had to be fought for tenaciously as a strategic and economic prerequisite for survival. The refusal in 1920 of Danzig's dockers to handle supplies and munitions destined for the war effort against the Bolsheviks brought home sharply the fragility of the Polish position. As such, access to the sea acquired a huge symbolic importance in its own right:

In 1920 Poland was awarded a Corridor to the sea through West Prussia to the Baltic coast. On 20 January 1920 a detachment of Polish soldiers in greatcoats and four-cornered caps waded out knee-deep in the icy Baltic. They paraded national and military flags, recited ancient poems, sang hymns and the Polish anthem 'Still Poland is not lost as long as we are living'. Then they raised their hands in the air and gave three cheers. The ceremony was called 'Slub z morzem', the betrothal to the sea.58 At the risk of oversimplifying, we may attempt to summarise the importance of

the sea to both conflicts as a study of contrasts. In Ireland the sea was accepted by nationalists as the unarguable frontier. As such, it helped partially to insulate them from more direct confrontation with British nationalism, and thereby may have helped to mitigate some of the effects of the conflict. On the borders of the Reich, however, the sea was not so much an insulator as a resource to be fought over. It exacerbated the clash of nationalisms:

Seaports are primarily intended to serve pacific trading interests and to promote intercourse between the nations. Two seaports on the eastern shore of the Baltic Sea have nevertheless awakened bitter racial enmity within the past sixteen years. The problems of Danzig and Memel have many common features. Both problems originated in the necessity of furnishing Poland and Lithuania with seaports. In each case the only suitable seaport also happened to be a town predominantly inhabited by a German population and possessing German and Hanseatic traditions.59

Indeed, it would be fair to say that the status of Danzig and the so-called 'Polish Corridor' was the main source of friction in Polish-German relations in the inter-war years-these losses were resented on the German side even more bitterly than those in Posen and Upper Silesia had been.

56Carl Tighe, Gdansk: national identity in the Polish-German borderlands (London, 1990), 101. 57Interestingly, in contrast to what O'Leary terms the 'literal insularism' of Irish nationalism, post-

1945 Poland does not seem-as far as I am aware-unduly bothered by the partition of the island of Usedom between itself and Germany.

58Tighe, Gdansk, 90, 190. A similar ceremony was held in 1945. See also Timothy Garton-Ash, The Polish revolution: Solidarity (London, 1999), 69, on the monuments that the Solidarity movement planned in 1980 to commemorate earlier workers' protests: 'Each cross bears an anchor, which in Poland symbolises not only the sea but also struggle and redemption-it was the badge of the Home Army during the [Second World] war'.

59Morrow, The peace settlement in the German Polish borderlands, 419.




The ethnic frontier and the metropolis It remains to explore briefly the question of how the ethnic frontier was viewed from the metropolis in each of our two cases. Once more there are striking points of comparison, particularly as both frontier areas were zones of strategic concern to their respective capitals:

Why was Ireland so sensitive an issue in English politics? It was, of course, our postern gate through which foreign enemies-first, the Spaniards, then the French sought to attack us. It was to us what Poland was to Prussia once Prussia was strong and Poland weak; and through fear we treated it similarly: colonisation, expropriation, discrimination, partition.60 Nonetheless, there is an important question of degree here. Indeed, it seems

reasonable to assume that the Prussian borderlands were-relatively speaking-less peripheral than their British counterparts. That is to say, shockwaves on the frontier were likely to be felt quicker and harder in Berlin than in London. To some extent this is merely a symptom of actual distance-London lies approximately 460km from Dublin, which is twice the distance from Berlin to Posen.61 After the Treaty of Versailles the border came to within 160km of the German capital.62 Yet physical distance was also compounded by psychological distance, which-particularly in the case of English governments-often seemed to reach quite extravagant proportions.63 Even Gladstone barely visited Ireland. His second visit to Dublin, in 1880, was no more than a stopover from a convalescent cruise on a friend's yacht. 'Thus,' as one historian has dryly observed, 'almost the only visit to Ireland by a Prime Minister in office between the Act of Union and 1914 was to attend an Anglican Church service as a result of ill-health.'6

Nor was it just a question of distance. Some parts of the German East were every bit as remote from Berlin as Ireland was from London. But if the arguments about the relative isolation of Irish nationalism by the sea, outlined above, hold validity, they also work in reverse. That is, British governments and public opinion were also partially insulated from a head-to-head confrontation with Irish nationalism. Thus, in a tradition that has continued to the present day, British governments could appear to concur unconsciously with nationalist arguments that Ireland was an overseas colony and to pose as a referee holding the ring between warring 'Irish factions' by virtue of her detachment-or, to use Lloyd George's phrase, her 'benevolent neutrality'.65

60Hugh Trevor-Roper, quoted in McGarry, and O'Leary, Explaining Northern Ireland, 311. See Tims, Germanizing Prussian Poland, 1, for a similar observation.

61My estimate is from the Times comprehensive atlas of the world (10th edn, London, 1999). I calculate the distance in a straight line from Berlin to other cities in the East as follows: Bromberg, 310km; Danzig, 400km; Kattowitz, 520km. These rough estimates, needless to say, tell nothing about the conditions of travel, or average journey times.

62Michael Laffan (ed.), The burden of German history, 1919-1945 (London, 1988), 86. 63Gladstone, for instance, particularly emphasised the physical break between Ireland and Great

Britain in 1886: 'Quoting Grattan, who had said that the channel forbade union as the ocean forbade separation, Mr Gladstone said, just before the close of his speech, "Do what you will with your steamers and your electrical telegraph, can you make that channel cease to exist, or to be as if it did not exist? These 60 miles of sea may appear but little; but I ask you, what are the 20 miles of sea between England and France?"'--Thomas MacKnight, Ulster as it is (2 vols, London, 1896), vol. 2, 130-1. The remark was greeted with particular horror in Ulster, not least for its inaccuracy: at its closest, Scotland is only twelve miles from the Antrim coast. My thanks to Professor Paul Bew for this reference.

64H.C.G. Matthew, Gladstone 1875-1898 (Oxford, 1995), 283. 65Quoted in O'Leary and McGarry, The politics of antagonism, 183. See McGarry and O'Leary,

Explaining Northern Ireland, 312-13, for more recent examples of British ministers apparently




Even the importance of Ireland to British strategic thinking is prone to exaggeration. The vital point to hold in mind here is that Britain's empire was a sea- borne one: that is, strategic concern tended to focus much more upon the safeguarding of trade routes and the provision of safe anchorages than it did upon holding territory for its own sake. Indeed, the striking feature of German support for the Irish rebels in 1916 was that it caught the British so completely off guard. Undoubtedly, Ireland was a strategic headache to British military planners, but it was not yet the full-blown migraine that it was to become in the next world war after France's Atlantic bases fell into German hands in 1940. Even after the 1916 Rising Lloyd George was still prepared to settle for possession of the Treaty ports as a guarantee of Britain's maritime security, and even these were given up in 1938. In short, there is perhaps more of a tradition of complacency in British thinking about Ireland than has generally been allowed.66

In the German East, by contrast, there was no buffer zone at all. The chain of fortress towns along the borderlands was Germany's first and only line of defence against any threats from the east-be these Russian in 1914 or Polish in 1918-21. A successful army could, in theory, march all the way into Berlin. Indeed, in 1920 many German conservatives were worried that the Bolshevik army sweeping through Poland would do just that-until the Poles unexpectedly routed them in the 'Miracle on the Vistula'. These threats had been, however, uncomfortably close to home. In 1945, indeed, they were to go all the way.67

In this context, a glance at the attitudes of central government to East Prussia and Northern Ireland in the years immediately following the First World War may be illuminating. Both regions had been detached from their traditional hinterlands and left vulnerable to border incursions from hostile neighbours. At the end of May 1922 IRA units took Pettigo and Belleek in County Fermanagh. In the House of Commons Winston Churchill 'sought to play down the incident, saying he did not think "anything in the nature of an invasion" had taken place'. Eventually, however, a very reluctant British government was obliged to send troops and artillery to retake the villages.68 By contrast, the defence of East Prussia was afforded a very high priority in Berlin, despite the political turmoil in the capital. Social Democrats were prepared to give conservative officers and officials on the ground a free hand to organise against the Polish threat.69 Amongst the wider German public, a thriller entitled Last night the Poles invaded East Prussia! enjoyed a certain popularity.70

The elevation of the Polish Corridor by German nationalists in the inter-war period to National Grievance No. 1 is all the more striking, given that the borders of Germany in 1918 were less than 50 years old:

inadvertently referring to Northern Ireland as if it were an overseas colony, or at least basically 'foreign'.

66See Raymond J. Raymond, 'Irish neutrality and Anglo-Irish relations', review article, International History Review 9 (3) (1987), 463-4 (I am indebted to Professor Bew for this reference). As early as 1926-7 the British Admiralty was apparently 'taking the view that maintaining the Treaty Ports was "an awkward commitment"'-Fort Dunree Museum guide The guns of Dunree (Ballyshannon, n.d.), 5-6.

67Berlin had been conquered by the Russians once before, in 1760. Other occupations were at the hands of the Austrians (1757) and the French (1806-8). London, by contrast, has never in modem times been occupied by a foreign power.

68Dennis Kennedy, The widening gulf (Belfast, 1988), 77. 69Francis Carsten, A history of the Prussian Junkers (Aldershot, 1989), 153-5. 70Casimir Smogorzewski, Poland's access to the sea (London, 1934), 428. The translation of the title

appears in the original.




One of the signal developments of...the annexations of 1866, regularly ignored by German historians in the interwar years, was that it ended the centuries when Prussian territory had been non-contiguous...In the following year, 1867, the United States purchased Alaska; since then there has been what could be called a 'Canadian Corridor'. Few in the United States lose much sleep over this problem, whatever the practical difficulties created by the situation. The key issue is not territorial contiguity, long atypical in the German area, but the perception of the onlooker.71 The perception of the German nationalist onlooker was governed by a clear map-

image no less compelling than that of Irish nationalists-that is, of East Prussia as a beleaguered island of German civilisation.72 The crucial difference, of course, was that the borders of this 'island' were manmade, being imposed by the Treaty of Versailles. More ominously for the future, they were also potentially reversible.

Summary

This contrast between the peripheries of the German Reich and Britain should not be overdrawn. In both cases there were various tendencies pulling in differing directions. Irish nationalism's concern with a map-image of Ireland rendered it only relatively more benign for those on the receiving end than its Polish counterpart. Nor could the impact of the successive Irish crises be prevented from striking home to the very heart of British politics. And although successive German regimes devoted considerable attention to their eastern borderlands, the DOV, for their part, still frequently bemoaned the difficulties of keeping policy-makers and public sufficiently exercised about the unremitting struggle for German civilisation on the 'joyless steppe' of Poland.73 To their horror, the German revolutionary government in November 1918 contained notable Polish sympathisers, such as the state secretary to the interior, Helmut von Gerlach.74

Nonetheless, taking a longer-term overview of the geographical parameters of the two conflicts, it seems that the ethnic frontier ran closer to the heart of German politics than British politics. That is, on balance it was always more likely that the German state was going to find it harder to disengage from Poland than Britain was from Ireland. Given the role of Prussia as the nucleus around which the modern German state had been built, it would never have been possible to say-as has been said of Ireland to the English-that Poland was 'an unknown country to...most [of her] politicians'.75 This, in turn, was to have major implications for the severity of the conflict there.

THE WORLD OUTSIDE

In 1886, the same year that Gladstone submitted his first Home Rule Bill to parliament, the Prussian Landtag passed Bismarck's Act to promote German settlement in the eastern provinces. The former was designed to give Ireland a

71Gerhard Weinberg, Germany, Hitler and World War II (Cambridge, 1995), 15. 72We may, perhaps, see a similar phenomenon in the Cold War map-images of West Berlin as forlorn

outpost of the 'Free World'. 73See, for instance, Hagen Germans, Poles and Jews, 270. 74Blanke, Orphans of Versailles, 11. 75Kearney, The British Isles, 181. Note, by contrast, the prominence in Germany of Hindenburg and

Ludendorff (both natives of Posen) in the war and in the years that followed.




substantial measure of autonomy from the British state, the latter to bind Prussian Poland even more tightly into the German one. This simple contrast highlights the comparison, hinted at in the previous section, that placed the British ethnic frontier at a greater distance from the heart of the British state than the German ethnic frontier from the German state. Just as importantly, this distance was not fixed-rather, it was 'growing' in the former case and 'contracting' in the latter. The trends are unmistakeable, despite strong evidence of counter-currents. For instance, in Germany, the Caprivi administration of 1890-4 attempted a conciliatory initiative towards Polish aristocracy. In Britain, the Home Rule bills of 1886, 1893 and 1914 all met with ferocious domestic opposition--on the first two occasions, with fatal results for their translation into legislation. Yet by 1914 it was clear to even the most die-hard Unionists that there would be some form of Home Rule for Ireland. In Prussian Poland, German nationalists had been bitterly disappointed at the limited success of 'Germanisation' policies. But there was no question of the German state disengaging, even partially, from her eastern provinces. The apparent apathy of the majority of Germans that DOV activists continually bemoaned probably reflected the community's sense of security within existing arrangements.76 Moreover, the recent attempts to impose German as the language of religious instruction in primary schools and the token expropriations by the German state of a handful of Polish estates suggested a willingness on Berlin's part to redouble her efforts, even if only on a rhetorical level.

The implications of this for morale in both minority communities were far- reaching. If most Southern Unionists went relatively quietly in the end, it was largely because their political eclipse had been so thorough for having been so gradual. Their morale had suffered a slow, lingering decline: even the shock of British withdrawal could rouse it only briefly from its deathbed. As one 'old-fashioned Unionist' explained in April 1921, the fading prospect of Home Rule seemed positively attractive, now that so much worse was on the horizon:

Everybody's taken a step to the left. Your old Nationalists have joined pacifist Sinn Fein; pacifist Sinn Fein has become active Republican; we Unionists take our stand on the old Nationalism.77 Defeat for German nationalists in the east, by contrast, was brutally sudden. In

West Prussia, for instance, despite the explicit reference in the thirteenth of Wilson's fourteen points to 'Poland's access to the sea', most Germans 'tried to convince themselves at first that the redrawing of frontiers would not affect them, that some nonterritorial way would be found to provide Poland with the promised access to the Baltic'.78 Thus, when the terms of the proposed Treaty of Versailles were publicised in early May 1919, the German reaction was predictably dramatic:

The first reaction of defiance, including even calls for senseless resistance, culminated in discussion of a fantastic Oststaat idea; at a meeting of German national councils in Bromberg, May 28, 1919, Cleinow [a DOV activist] urged the creation of an independent 'eastern state'; before the Versailles Treaty took effect, Prussia's eastern provinces were to secede from Germany in armed defiance of Berlin, Poland, and the western powers as well.79

76See Hagen, Germans, Poles and Jews, 270, for an account of DOV concern at German apathy. 77Wilfrid Ewart, A journey through Ireland, 1921 (London, 1922), 47. 78Blanke, Orphans of Versailles, 18. 79Blanke, Orphans of Versailles, 24; the German national councils had been set up after the

Armistice to safeguard German interests.




In effect, German nationalist thinking in West Prussia had undergone an evolution comparable to that experienced by Southern Unionists in coming to a highly reluctant acceptance of 'Home Rule'-but in the compressed period of three weeks, rather than three decades. Within this timeframe they had, needless to say, little chance of arriving at an emotional acceptance of their fate. Indeed, their belated enthusiasm for 'Home Rule' was shallow and tactical, and very soon overtaken by events. Temporarily stunned into acceptance of the Treaty of Versailles by the total collapse of German power, the depth of their shock nevertheless boded ill for the future of German-Polish relations.

Post-war confusion and state paralysis The suddenness with which German nationalists were confronted by the failure of their programme was, of course, only a microcosm of the shock of a comprehensive defeat for German society as a whole-the devastatingly unexpected failure to win the war. The extent of the German collapse, or of the intermittent paralysis of the state that followed, can scarcely be overstated. Of course, in England the post-war years were also socially and politically turbulent. Over Ireland, in particular, Lloyd George's freedom of action was severely limited by his coalition government's deep internal divisions. Nonetheless, the coalition did actually govern. In Germany, governments barely governed at all.80 Von Gerlach's overriding priority in November 1918, when sent to evaluate the situation in Posen, was to safeguard the province's supply of potatoes for Berlin, which would otherwise starve. Something of the depth of the paralysis of the German state at the time may be gauged from the ease with which the fortress city of Posen fell overnight to lightly armed Polish rebels on 28 December 1918. Just over 26 years later the same city held out against the entire might of the Red Army for a full month.81 Likewise, under the Treaty of Versailles, the area of the 'Polish Corridor' was handed over in January 1920 without resistance. Most interesting for the student of ethnic conflict, the German minority seems to have made a stand only when supported by their government. Usually this support was clandestine and fitful but it was enough to tip the balance in Upper Silesia between sullen acquiescence and armed resistance to the new order, as one German officer explained:

The Reichswehr [the army] had been barred from the disputed area by virtue of the Treaty of Versailles; the government therefore allowed the Volunteers to carry on the struggle. It gave money, arms and equipment. Otherwise the battle would not have been possible. Naturally the government officials denied having anything to do with the matter and represented it as an action undertaken by the local population itself [my emphasis].82

80Regrettably, there is not the space here to begin to do justice to the complex interplay of what might be crudely described as 'ethnic' and 'class' conflicts during this period. Suffice it to say that educated opinion across Europe was deeply preoccupied with the spectre of Bolshevism. Indeed, especially in the early days after the Armistice, Germans were as divided amongst themselves as against the Poles. In Upper Silesia and East Prussia the Free Corps movement subsequently came to act as a militia on Junker estates against the threat of both Poles and domestic revolutionaries. Likewise, even in distant Ireland at least some of the more privileged members of the minority saw social and national revolution as natural allies: in the view of the Irish Times (cited in McDowell, Crisis and decline, 100), Bolshevism was the sinister camp follower of Sinn Fdin. See also Ewart, A journey through Ireland, 87, 115.

81And, indeed, had previously been held by the Poles for two weeks against the Germans in 1939. 82Major Buchrucker, quoted in Robert Waite, Vanguard of Nazism (Massachusetts, 1952), 231. A

similar pattern is observable in the Posen uprising.




In Ireland, of course, the British government enjoyed a much greater freedom of action. Yet, strangely enough, the irregular forces they developed to cope with the Irish insurrection-the Black and Tans and the Auxiliaries-bore more than a passing resemblance to the German units that emerged on the Polish border: the quasi-official Grenzschutz (Border Guards) and Free Corps legions.83 The British government was reluctant to treat the situation in her borderlands as an all-out war; the German government, under international pressure, was forbidden to do so. Both came to rely heavily, therefore, upon irregular formations that seemed convenient but in practice were apt to show 'an unfortunate independence of spirit'.84

THE BLACK AND TANS: A BRITISH FREE CORPS?

Both minorities enjoyed a highly ambivalent relationship with the forces sent for their protection. For two frontier communities with proud martial traditions, communities that had always contributed disproportionately to their national armies, the indiscipline of these new recruits often came at first as a rude shock. Something of this ambivalence may be gleaned from the following exchange between Captain Wilfrid Ewart and an elderly Unionist in Cork in 1921:

'...then the Blacks and Tans-'

He stopped, but I pressed him.

'The fact is, "K" Division-not the military-were intolerable... I personally had only one experience of that lot. I was walking home one night before the curfew when a patrol stopped me and although they could see I was an elderly man and in fact knew me for a loyalist, a young cub of 19 searched me, swore at me, and knocked my hat off. It's incidents like this that turn moderate people into extremists as much as, or nearly as much as, material losses do.'85 Material losses for the minority at the hands of their supposed protectors were

also not uncommon. Examples occur in the Irish Grants Committee papers of Protestants who had suffered from both the Crown Forces and Sinn F6in.86 Similarly, Von Gerlach commented sarcastically that the Grenzschutz in Posen were very even- handed-they looted enthusiastically from both Poles and Germans.87 But what probably did more than anything else to prevent an alliance in Ireland between

83There were also, needless to say, vast differences between the two. Firstly, perhaps 200,000-400,000 men served in the Free Corps; the Black and Tans (as distinct from the Auxiliaries) numbered under 20,000. Secondly, the Free Corps was as much directed at domestic enemies- Spartacists, for instance-as external ones. Finally, there were important cultural and organisational differences, both between individual Free Corps units and between the Free Corps and the Grenzschutz, and, of course, between the Auxiliaries and the Black and Tans. However inaccurately, but in accordance with common parlance, I have used 'Black and Tans' as a shorthand for both. See Bartlett and Jeffery, A military history of Ireland, 406; Waite, Vanguard of Nazism, 40.

84Harold Gordon, The Reichswehr and the German Republic (New Jersey, 1957), 23. 85Ewart, A journey through Ireland, 53. 86Public Record Office, London, Irish Grants Committee papers, CO.762/8/50, CO.762/66/1045

and CO.762/34/503. It should also be noted that there is ample evidence of widespread social intercourse between loyalists and the Blacks and Tans. The Irish Times, for its part, took a lenient view of the latter's reprisals against Republicans: the men being apparently 'maddened by the cold-blooded slaughter of their comrades'. See McDowell, Crisis and decline, 80, citing Irish Times, 3 November 1920, 29 October 1919, 24 March 1920, 29 June 1920, 22 February 1921 and 2 March 1921.

87Helmut Von Gerlach, Der Zusammenbruch der deutschen Polenpolitik (Berlin, 1919), 16.




loyalists and Crown forces was the highly scattered distribution of the Protestant populations. This effectively rendered them hostages to the IRA in the event of British atrocities. Protestant resentment of the Black and Tans was primarily on account of their ineffectiveness. If they had offered better protection, presumably more Protestants would have assisted them actively with information. In Upper Silesia and Posen, where larger German populations were more concentrated and less immediately vulnerable, local defence initiatives often made common cause with Free Corps and Grenzschutz units, and the latter in turn often recruited from the local populations.

Poland's 'centrality' 'Poland's nationalism,' writes Wright 'was perpetually bound up with international politics in a very immediate manner. The 1815 partitions of Poland between Prussia, Austria-Hungary and Russia meant that changing relationships between each were reflected in the Polish areas'.88 During the war the fate of Poland became even more internationalised, merited explicit mention in Wilson's fourteen points and quickly became one of the major preoccupations at the Paris Peace Conference. The most important Polish victories on the German frontier arguably took place in the diplomatic, not the military, arena. Of course, this was a two-way process-the campaigns in Posen and Upper Silesia were at least partially motivated by the policy of creating 'facts on the ground' that the Allies would be more inclined to recognise. But even in areas where Poles had no 'facts on the ground' it was largely in vain that Germans launched a 'formal protest before the whole world against the intention to turn over two million members of the German cultural nation to the revenge and hatred of the fanatical Polish nation'.89 In this context the French desire to inflict the maximum territorial punishment possible on Germany was crucial. Indeed, the Polish diplomatic offensive began to falter only when, after the disappointments of the Marienwerder and Masuria plebiscites, their French allies began to face increased British and American opposition over Upper Silesia. Yet it seems undeniable that the central role of Germany's enemies in 'arbitrating' on the extent of German territory to be ceded vastly accelerated the process by which the lost eastern provinces became a central rallying cause for the nationalistic right in the Weimar Republic. And the first small step along that road had already been taken on 27 December 1918 by the demobilised German soldiers who tore down Entente flags in Posen 'with faces contorted with fury' at the sight of their enemies' flags in 'their' German town.90 They left the Polish flags alone, but nonetheless, this gesture was sufficient to spark off the Polish uprising that erupted the next day.

Ireland's isolation

By contrast, 'Ireland's distance from Continental Europe deprived her of the international significance of Poland'.91 The British government was determined to keep it that way. Like Polish America, Irish America formed a potentially powerful lobby in US politics, and this spectre caused the British some concern:

88Wright, Northern Ireland, 37. 89Bromberg National Council, quoted in Blanke, Orphans of Versailles, 23. 'Facts on the ground'

meant areas where Poles had not waited for international approval before seizing control. 90Vogt, Der Grof3polnische Aufstand, 48. 91Wright, Northern Ireland, 43.




the Foreign Office was preoccupied with the problem of preventing Irish appeals to the peace conference. An argument clearly designed for US consumption...was that it 'would be inadvisable to go even the smallest distance in the direction of admitting the claim of American Negroes or the southern Irish...to appeal to an Interstate Conference over the head of their own government'.92 That the British were successful was, of course, overwhelmingly due to their

having emerged on the 'right' side at the end of the war. This allowed them to isolate the Irish problem internationally, but also domestically: 'the dominant political powers in Britain had no incentive to encourage the overspill of the Irish conflict into Britain'.93 Victory in the war allowed the unlikely Lloyd George coalition, which encompassed both 'diehard' (ultra-conservative) and liberal elements, to survive as long as it did-a situation that would have been unthinkable in defeated Germany. Counter-insurgency atrocities and nationalist historiography notwithstanding, the relatively free hand that the British government enjoyed in Ireland was probably a mitigating force in the Irish conflict. Without it, the plight of the Southern Irish Protestants might have been much worse. If they had been turned by the British government into a major rallying point, a symbol of British national kudos, they might, ironically, have attracted much rougher treatment from the majority community.

CONCLUSION

Ethnic conflict is a byword for 'protracted' or 'intractable' conflict. Commentators typically stress the resistance over long-term timescales to attempts at resolution, or even amelioration.94 Yet surveying Europe in the early twenty-first century the conspicuous feature of our two chosen case studies is their absence. There is no 'Protestant Question' today in the Republic of Ireland, nor a German minority problem in Poland. Indeed, one might think that this fact alone would have encouraged ethnic conflict experts to take more interest in the fates of these two communities than they have done. But though both conflicts have been 'resolved', the resolutions themselves constitute a study in opposites. Although severely reduced numerically, there are still communities of Southern Protestants in Ireland that show every sign of successful integration into the state they once viewed so bitterly.95 By contrast, the German communities in Poland were almost all totally destroyed, at vast cost in both humanitarian and cultural terms, in the years 1944-8.96 Both these outcomes, arguably, had their roots in the settlements of the early 1920s. At the risk of gross oversimplification we might summarise thus: until the early 1920s the broad similarities between the positions of these minorities are more compelling than the differences. Thereafter the opposite becomes true.

92Wright, Northern Ireland, 96-7, quoting Nicholas Mansergh, The Irish Question 1840-1921 (London, 1965), 280-1.

93Wright, Northern Ireland, 98. 94John Paul Lederach, Building peace (Washington, 1997), 14. 95See, for instance, Coakley, 'Religion, ethnic identity and the Protestant minority in the Republic',

102. 96By emphasising German civilian suffering in the period c. 1944-8, I do not mean in any way to

detract from the sufferings of Poles, Jews and other groups at the hands of the Nazi regime--a regime that many in those German communities had welcomed as their liberators and loyally served. Nonetheless, post-war retribution was shockingly indiscriminate. It should also be noted in passing that there is still one sizeable German community in modem Poland-the German minority in Upper Silesia. See Thomas Urban, Deutsche in Polen (Munich, 1994), 7.




Differences in degree How do we account for such dramatically contrasting outcomes? Much of this later divergence was admittedly presaged by the earlier events of the revolutionary period. As we have seen, in a variety of ways the stage was always set for a more intense confrontation in Eastern Europe than in Ireland. Firstly, Southern Protestants were to some extent shielded from wholesale sectarian persecution by the insistence of Irish nationalists on treating the island of Ireland as the proper national unit: 'The prominence of Protestants in the nationalists' ranks, from Tone to the United Irishmen to Parnell and the home rulers, and the emphasis given to a geographic image of the community of the nation, accustomed them to the belief that "Irish domicile per se created Irish nationality". Sinn Fein's ideology blinded it to unacceptable realities'.97 This was, from the point of view of vulnerable Protestants in the 26 counties, a rather benign myopia on the part of their enemies. In Prussian Poland, though, inter-communal conflict tended more readily to take the form of outright turf wars, nationalist thinking on both sides being much less obsessed by notions of 'natural frontiers'.

Secondly, the minorities offered most resistance where they were demographically most concentrated. Outside the Ulster counties, Southern Irish Protestants were too scattered to put up much of a fight-unlike the Germans of Posen and Upper Silesia. Several authorities, for instance, stress that the Posen revolt began to lose momentum as it reached areas where Germans were in the majority locally.98 Only in parts of Monaghan, Cavan and Donegal did Protestants have the demographic strength to try and mobilise-and even here their resistance was largely undermined by the obvious willingness of their fellow Unionists in the North to abandon them in favour of a six-county Ulster. Overall, conflict seems often to have been greatest where the demographic gap between the opposed communities was smallest--or, to put it differently, where the opponents were most evenly matched.

Thirdly, government support-however surreptitiously given-was pivotal in persuading threatened communities to make a stand. And since the ethnic frontier ran-literally and metaphorically-relatively close to Berlin, the German state was obliged to respond particularly energetically on behalf of its threatened nationals, further fuelling the cycle of conflict. Its failure to do so more effectively was more reflective of its own temporary incapacity than of its lack of will. That is, Entente pressure obliged the German governments to limit their aid to surreptitious measures such as support of Free Corps units. But however betrayed many Germans in the threatened regions felt at the fact that more outright support from Berlin was not forthcoming, the effect of such measures was still inflammatory enough. Indeed, inter-communal strife in Upper Silesia, Posen and West Prussia consistently ran at levels of severity rarely seen in Ireland south of the six counties.

Lastly, in psychological terms the German minority had arguably fallen further and faster than the Protestants had done. There was no equivalent in the Prussian East to the land and franchise reforms of the previous 50 years that had eroded the power of the Ascendancy, nor to the Home Rule crises that had shaken their morale. Rather, in the colonisation and schools programmes the energy of the state had been directed to shoring up the German 'civilisation'. Recent success on the Eastern Front had even encouraged some nationalists to dream of a greatly expanded German

97Michael Laffan, The resurrection oflreland (Cambridge, 1999), 230. The quotation is from Oliver MacDonagh.

98See Friedrich Swart, Dieseits undjenseits der Grenze (Leer, 1954), 67.




'mission' in the east. Defeat in 1918-21 was therefore even more bitter for having been so unexpected. It seems reasonable to assume that the task of reconciling minorities to the new regime was likely to be most difficult where not only the confrontation between the communities had been most bitter, but also the reversal in power roles had been most sudden.

Not, it has to be said, that both new regimes tackled the task of reconciliation with equal enthusiasm. Without question the Irish Free State handled its Protestant minority with a benevolence all too often missing in the Polish Republic.99 In response, Protestant acceptance of the Free State may often have been both grudging and partial:

The mass of Protestants, whether in town or country, remained unconverted to the new way of life. They did not regard the Irish nation as having anything to do with them. It had to be accepted, of course, as a system to which one must now pay one's income tax, but never, until the end of their lives, would they speak of its government, as 'our government'.100 But even this much acceptance of the new regime-'as a system to which one

must now pay one's income tax'-seems rather remarkable by comparison with the Polish case. It was certainly encouraged during the Civil War period by the spectre of an even worse outcome for Protestants if the anti-Treaty IRA emerged victorious. To summarise: in the years following the revolutions, the roles of the minorities evolved rapidly in diametrically opposite directions. The fundamental reasons why this was so lie arguably more in the international than in the domestic arenas.

Differences in kind

No one factor does more to explain the sharp divergence between the trajectories of the two conflicts after the First World War than the fact that Britain had deserted her minority voluntarily, while Germany had not. Separated from the bulk of their co- religionists in the north by partition, and abandoned by the British government, Southern Protestants were finished as a political force. Victory in the world war allowed Lloyd George's coalition government to dispose of them quietly whilst ignoring the protests of their diehard allies. Under conditions of defeat, however, diehard voices such as that of Ronald McNeill (who argued in the House of Commons in 1922 that 'sooner or later the reconquest of Ireland would be an unavoidable necessity') might have enjoyed a much greater resonance-just as their equivalents did in Germany over the 'lost provinces'.101 'No one who has witnessed the transformation of the British image of the Falkland Islands in 1982 from insignificant far-flung possessions into a citadel of staunch and loyal British subjects need wonder about how Posen [was] so transformed in 1918-20'.102 But, in the

99In fairness, it should be added that the Germans were only one of a large number of minorities in the new Polish state. For a useful discussion of Ireland's relative homogeneity, see Lee, Ireland 1912-1985, 77: 'However objectively mongrel its genes, the Free State was subjectively virtually 100% homogeneous, and that was all that politically mattered. In contrast, Romanians constituted-and they knew they constituted-only 72% of the population of Romania, Poles only 70% of the population of Poland, Czechs only c. 50% of the population of Czechoslovakia, Serbs only 43% of the population of Yugoslavia'.

'o0Fleming, Head or harp, 93. '01This is, of course, assuming the likely scenario of a peace treaty forcing a defeated Britain to give

Ireland independence: see Wright, Northern Ireland, 53, 109-11. See also Michael Kinnear, The fall of Lloyd George: the political crisis of 1922 (London, 1973), 113.

102Wright, Northern Ireland, 110.




event, what is remarkable is how far and how fast Ireland slipped down the list of British government priorities: from the English point of view, 'the Irish question had been answered for good or ill'.103 There was to be no 'phantom limb' effect from the amputated territory. For their part, Southern loyalists realised that they could expect no further help from over the water. Their defeat was total: 'the treaty was signed; there was no going back on it'. 04

By contrast, the issue of the German minority in Poland remained very much alive and kicking:

No other European minority problem attracted more attention, showed up more often on the League of Nations' agenda, or was more immediately associated with the outbreak of World War II.10os

This was primarily due to the very clear signals given by German governments throughout the inter-war period that they had not accepted the loss of territory and population. Indeed, the remnants of Posen and West Prussia that the Reich had managed to retain after Versailles were not merged with their neighbouring regions (as would have made the most administrative sense), but rather retained as a symbol-a province of three separate fragments with the provocative title of Grenzmark Posen-West Preuf3en, a name that 'rings out like a challenge. A challenge-to whom or to what? It is difficult to resist the impression that the challenge is to the territorial settlement effected by the Peace Conference in restoring German West Prussia and Posen to Poland'. 06 Germany, in short, remained haunted by its 'ghost provinces'. This, in turn, lent German-Polish relations in inter-war Poland an ominous sense of unfinished business:

the ideology in particular of the German minorities was not redundant after independence. Pan-Germanism was not merely a starry ideal; it could be seen, as events showed, as a realistic goal. In Ireland, by contrast, Unionism was acknowledged to be irrelevant after 1922 not only because of the finality of the break with Britain but also because, as dismayed and betrayed Irish Protestants saw it, the Union had been dissolved by the British themselves.107 Adrian Guelke has convincingly shown in the context of contemporary Northern

Ireland that the contested international legitimacy of a settlement may in itself act as a powerful force for continued internal instability.108 This is undoubtedly true, but legitimacy itself is in turn bound up with notions of irreversibility. For German nationalists in the 1920s, the post-Versailles borders were an outrage that could, and must, be rectified. So, too, Polish nationalists used to describe East Prussia in remarkably similar terms to those used by their Irish counterparts about Northern Ireland. The existence of both these entities was seen as artificial and abnormal: in some sense, as being 'contrary to the nature of things'.109 This unnatural state of affairs would be rectified only by its dissolution. Southern Protestants, in contrast to

103Taylor, English history 1914-1945, 236. "04Brian Inglis, West Briton, 13. 105Blanke, Orphans of Versailles, 1. 106Morrow, The peace settlement in the German Polish borderlands, 386. To translate Grenzmark

as 'border province' misses its self-consciously archaic and martial flavour. 'Mark' in this sense is akin to the old English word 'march', as in the 'Welsh marches', 'marcher lords' etc.

107Coakley, 'Religion, ethnic identity and the Protestant minority in the Republic', 101. 108See Guelke, 'International legitimacy, self-determination, and Northern Ireland'. 109The phrase is taken from a tract sympathetic to Polish nationalist aspirations to claim East Prussia.

See Robert Machray, East Prussia: menace to Poland and peace (London, 1943), 94.




all the above groups, had no chance of overthrowing the new state in which they found themselves. Its 'legitimacy' in their eyes, then, was largely a function of its irremovability.

Long-term stability The disturbing implication of all this is that the longer-term stability of both the settlements in question rested ultimately upon their perceived irreversibility. Decisiveness, in the end, may have mattered more than any objective measure of 'fairness'. And final defeat for the German communities, when it came in 1945, proved no less decisive than it had been for Southern Protestants in 1922-but also infinitely more horrific. Compared to the destruction of the German communities in Poland through mass ethnic cleansing in the 1940s, the experience of Southern Irish Protestants in the early 1920s was very mild indeed. That they gave, and were given, so little trouble in the Free State was largely due to the totality of their defeat and the resulting inevitability of their surrender. And in this-whatever the virulence of contemporary resentments at England's treachery-their early abandonment may even have proved something of a blessing in disguise.



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Ghost Provinces, Mislaid Minorities: The Experience of Southern Ireland and Prussian Poland...

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