Între alianță și revendicări: minoritatea poloneză din România în rapoarte diplomatice ale Ministerului Afacerilor Străine de la București, 1922-1938

English title: Between alliance and claims: the Polish minority in Romania in diplomatic reports of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Bucharest, 1922-1938

Issue: 1/2023

Pages: 215-228

Language: Romanian

Author: Bogdan SCHIPOR

Abstract:

“I have not once expressed the conviction that the close alliance and cordial Polish-Romanian cooperation, being the most important guarantee of peace in Eastern Europe, must not suffer from various shortcomings, which are of little importance in our overall relations and yet very delicate”. The above lines are an excerpt from an article entitled Let’s speak frankly with Romania about Polish schools, which appeared in the October 28, 1929 issue of the Kraków newspaper Ilustrovany Kurier Codzienny and, in a few words, expresses what can easily be identified as a milestone in the way the Polish minority in Romania, present mainly in Bukovina, but not only there, reported and expressed itself to the authorities and the state throughout the interwar period. It was precisely this attitude, which gravitated between the coordination of the bilateral alliance and the claims of a rather “noisy” ethnic group, that inspired and suggested the present approach.

The target of our present contribution is, however, the analysis of how the activity and demands of the Polish minority in Greater Romania, first and foremost, and as we shall see, of its leaders, came to represent a concern for Romanian diplomacy, whether we are talking about the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Bucharest, the Legation in Warsaw or the Consulate in Lvov. And it must be said that, in this context, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Bucharest did not only set in motion its own resources and mechanisms, but also often turned to the Ministry of Public Instruction or the Ministry of the Interior, to the State Security in order to solve, on a case-by-case basis, problems raised or generated by the Polish minority in Romania.

Keywords: Poland, Romania, Polish minority, interwar, Bukovina

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