S&F Hero: Who We Are and Where Our Place Is

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Eastern Europe from space (photo: Wikipedia)

 

Considered by our ancestors as the most important of the geopolitical zones on the continent when it comes to influencing the balance of power in Europe, it is a separate geopolitical construct with state-forming organisational capacity. It resembles a wide “transition strip” between Western Europe and Eastern Europe and it can be seen that it is connected with the plain terrain of the huge continent of Eurasia. Meanwhile, located west and extended towards the World Ocean, the western part of Europe has been under the influence and the breath of the sea throughout its history. From the sea came the influences of the people of the Sea: the Goths of the northern seas, the Angles and the Saxons, the Arabs and the Vikings, the English and the Spaniards, and in the 20th century even the Americans left their mark on Western Europe. Europeans created world empires from the base in the Western Europe by accessing the World Ocean. The sea decisively influenced the economic development of maritime Europe. However, the part of Europe located closer towards Asia, starting from the eastern part of the Baltic-Black Sea Intermarium region already has a continental character. The impact of the sea has already been clearly reduced here. Everything that happens here is heavily weighted, in this huge and overwhelming continental landmass from the east. And only the Black Sea divides this huge block of land hanging from the east as if separating it into two segments. From there, invasions with a clear continental character came from to Europe. It is continental spaces that have determined the directions of political and economic development of the region and, to a large extent, its status and political anchoring. It is continental Europe, although it is still between-the-seas – hence the concept of the Baltic-Black Sea Intermarium, creating a peculiar spatial block with its three frontiers opening to the Asian continent, even if along the way you would have to cross some outlets of the marginal seas around Europe.

 

Both European geopolitical orientations – sea and continental meet on the Baltic-Black Sea Intermarium.

 

The transitional location of this place between Europe proper and the great spaces of Eurasia did mean that both Western European political forces heading east, as well as the political forces of imperial Russia – unfaltering for several centuries – aimed at subordinating or destroying all political organisms throughout the entire Intermarium.

 

Above all, they tried to prevent the creation of a unified political-state organism covering the geographical whole of the Baltic-Black Sea Bridge, covering, after all, a huge area of about 1 million square kilometers.

 

Between the mouth of the Oder, the Vistula and the Daugava River to the Baltic Sea, then along the Dźwina River up to the Smolensk Gate, then from the Smolensk Gate to the mighty Dnieper down its course towards the Black Sea, then its estuary in the Black Sea and the seashore to the mouth of the Dniester and the Danube, ending with the great Carpathian chain, interrupted momentarily by the Moravian Gate and then further along the Sudetes to the Oder valley flowing to the Baltic and closing this area just described.

A different geological location, a different geographical layout, a different outline of shoreline shapes and surface shapes, different road systems and water communication distinguished the political history of Western Europe – this bizarre mosaic of nationalities, cultures, religions, political tendencies, social temperaments from the history of eastern Europe – cut off from the oceans and the great routes of economic and social ideas of the world.

It is very characteristic that the river systems in Western Europe are more or less symmetrical, and the main river has left and right river basins of approximately the same size. Such is the Rhine, the Seine and other rivers of the west of the continent. However, starting to the Oder to the east, this symmetry clearly ceases. There are many more right tributaries and they are much longer than the left ones. Such are the Vistula, the Niemen and the Dźwina basins beyond the Oder. Another thing which is very characteristic, further to the east of the continent, the above feature ceases and the basins of the Russian rivers are again symmetrical, a perfect example being the Volga. In addition, the river basins on the Baltic-Black Sea Bridge are distinguished by the fact that the peak areas of the river basin of larger tributaries approach very close to the main river of the neighboring river basin. The water divisions are usually very low, narrow and easy to cross.

 

This means that the Intermarium rivers are an excellent communication network, they can be easily connected by canals with very short relocations. Hence, hydrographic cohesion is the second feature after convenient connectivity east-west and north-south and this is where the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth existed.

 

Rivers in former times were a great means of communication, and in the Middle Ages in Poland the water level was even several meters higher than today. The valleys they conditioned also naturally gave directions to land routes. People have always moved and marked roads along river and stream valleys. This is also the case today.

So the historical significance of the river network was, especially in the Intermarium, enormous. This can be explained in large part by the natural expansion of the Polish people to the east. In the geopolitical “long duration” lens – tributaries of the Oder, then the Vistula, the Niemen, the Bug and even the Dnieper extended to the east resembled the arms with which the former Polish empire reached east.

The region’s most important communication land gate is the Moravian Gate, located in the western part of Poland and constituting a smooth communication link with the west and south of the continent. Passing through the Carpathian Mountains, however, the Gate also indicated an almost inaccessible road through the rocky wastes of the Kars leading quite laboriously to the Adriatic. Therefore, the Moravian Gate as a link between the southern and northern seas in Roman times could not compete with more convenient roads leading through the Alps in the same direction. The Brenner Pass was an especially strong competitor to the Moravian Gate and the natural communication advantage of the Brenner Pass probably decided that the Adriatic Basin would become an area of German political expansion, and not former Polish dynasty of the Jagiellonians.

 

 

These weaknesses of the Moravian Gate, along with the nature of the Vistula’s water network and other major rivers of the Intermarium (stronger right tributaries) contributed to the fact that the entire history of Poland was branded with expansion to the east. It is this Intermarium – stretched out across the land and not cut through with mountain chains, intertwined with a dense network of natural valley roads, because it is the most important stigma, and also the physical condition for the existence and political development of the Old State. Thus, giving Poland a central and pivotal location in the Intermarium, like a crossroad on a communication node – right on the line on which the Baltic Sea (our ancestors also called it Sarmatian) and the Black Sea (called Southern or Roman) turn together, although independently of each other – towards the north.

 

In the history of the last thousand years, the Baltic-Black Sea Intermarium was a great bastion and at the same time a great military training ground for the powers of the European continent and a huge historical “exercise ground” through which war campaigns’ trails ran from west to east and from east to west.

 

Not a single war for domination on the continent in modern times, shaking the history of Europe, was spared to the Intermarium.

Mongol power and Tatar-Turkish expansion invaded it. Right in the Intermarium fights took place between Western and Eastern Europe, the routes of Napoleon, the Swedes, the Russians, the Germans and the Soviets led through it. The front of World War I stopped on it. Operation Barbarossa in 1941 and Napoleon’s strike against Moscow in 1812 emerged from the narrowest place of the Intermarium between the Carpathians and the Baltic. Russia’s expansion and the political influence of Western Europe stopped there.

The pressure on the Intermarium spontaneity continued from the very beginning of the formation of the geopolitical map of Europe, separated from the debris of the ancient world in the 8th century. Strong eastward pressure, geopolitical expansion, and demographic expansion followed, which led to the creation of several German states in colonized areas. Over time, two of them began to play a key role: Prussia and Austria. In the 13th and 14th centuries, a Mongolian assault came to the Bridge, which had previously engulfed China – on the other side of the Eurasian land masses, and devastated the formerly powerful Kievan Rus, simultaneously devastating the vast area from Lower Silesia to the Adriatic and Bulgaria. The answer was the integration of the Old State with the potential considered sufficient to stop the attacker. King Casimir the Great annexed Red Ruthenia and made attempts at integration with Hungary, which was also threatened by Mongol invasions, though without lasting effect.

It was only the union of Krewa at the end of the 14th century that led to Great Lithuania anchoring with the the Baltic-Black Sea Bridge. This geostrategic development had an impact on stabilizing the situation on the Baltic-Black Sea Bridge for next 400 years. Perhaps the newly created balance also gave the opportunity for a more peaceful development of the European Rimland area closer to the Atlantic, because it cushioned pressure from the steppes and from Asia Minor, and ultimately from rising Moscow. Finally formed in the 16th century, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth integrated Poland, Lithuania, the Principality of Polotsk (Belarus) and Kievan Ruthenia (Ukraine) fulfilling the Intermarium organizational concept.

Both neighboring powers – German and Muscovite – appreciated the danger that could threaten their wedge ambitions in the form of the Baltic-Black Sea Bridge and attempted to reduce the power of the Commonwealth, and absorb as much of the Intermarium potential as possible. With time, the idea of partitioning the Intermarium, which finally happened at the end of the 18th century. The fall of Poland in the eighteenth century led to the complete liquidation of the geopolitical system the nation-states in this part of Europe had created in the early Middle Ages. At the same time, the geopolitical buffer protecting the Rimland of Atlantic Europe from the continental Russian east ceased to exist.

The partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth at the end of the 18th century and the Vienna Congress confirming it, which followed the turmoil of the Napoleonic wars (which in turn gave hope for the reconstruction of the Old State in the Intermarium, especially the Moscow expedition of Napoleon in 1812), created a provisional demarcation line for 100 years by dividing with the broken line of the Baltic-Black Sea Intermarium.

The Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty of 1918 brought temporary control over the Intermarium to Germany including all of Ukraine up to the Don River, which was once considered the border between Europe and Asia. In Brest, the Russians lost the entire Baltic-Black Sea Intermarium. None of the Bridge nations wanted to be organisationally involved in the world war on Russia’s side. As a result of both revolutions, the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty and Versailles arrangements, organisational and political chaos arose, which was to stabilise only as a result of the Riga Peacy Treaty that ended the war between Soviets and Poland.

Thanks to the victory at war Poland for next twenty years was saved, but the eastern part of Intermarium was not as a large part of Belarus and Ukraine remained part of the Soviet Union – testimony to the failure of Piłsudski’s plan to form a federation structure of the Intermarium including its eastern part.

 

That explains why Polish troops marched on the Dnieper and seized Kiev in the spring of 1920 in an attempt to consolidate the Ukrainian state as ally and the buffer against the Russian (Soviet) imperial designs.

 

After almost twenty interwar years, there were various attempts to promote the Intermarium federation concept or the ABC concept (connecting even further to the Adriatic alas today”s Three Seas’ Initiative) and the activities of the Promethean movement (aimed at dividing the Russian continental empire in the east by separating nations and organisms that did not want to be under the power of Moscow, incusing in the Caucasus). They all had a common denominator – the desire to rebuild the geopolitical weight of the Baltic-Black Sea Intermarium in order to build up the proper balancing against the Soviet continental empire and to counter Germany’s economic hegemony in Central and Eastern Europe. Eventually in 1939 this interwar attempt ended in disaster when the Soviets and the Germans came to the agreement on division of spoils in the Intermarium. The Soviets and Germany concluded in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact aimed at the abolition of Polish statehood, and thus any Intermarium ambitions, completely changing the balance of power on the continent, actually for many decades literally up to 1991.

Although the Germans lost, the Soviets in turn won the Second World War and, by shifting Poland’s borders to the west, captured the entire Baltic-Black Sea Intermarium by imposing its will on Poland in the years 1944–1989 (1991) and only allowing a relative degree of internal autonomy of the Polish satellite state. Soviet Union of the time was the huge continental empire stretching from the far Pacific to the Elbe and the Danube Valley in Europe and from the Arctic to the border of Afghanistan, the Pamir Mountains, the Iranian Highlands and the Lesser Caucasus and the Armenian Highlands, from which the great historical Euphrates and Tiger rivers flow into Mesopotamia.

 

At the end of the 1950s, two Poles – Juliusz Mieroszewski and Jerzy Giedroyć formulated a geopolitical doctrine that contained a simple maxim: “There can be no independent Poland without a free Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine.”

 

The editor-in-chief of the Paris-based emigre magazine ‘Kultura’ called for the recognition of the independence of the Belarusians, Ukrainians and Lithuanians, to help them regain independence regardless of whether they would be loyal to Poland in the future or not. He argued that the very fact of the existence of independent neighbours pushes away the danger of a clash with Russia again. The concept was based – in a huge simplification – on the assumption that Russia would not be able to pose a threat to Poland if the two long time rivals would be divided by the independent countries of the eastern part of the Intermarium at that time – Soviet republics.

Therefore, since the 1990s, the goal of Poland after the collapse of the Soviet Union was both to support the emergence of these countries and to care for good neighbourly relations so that they would not fall back into Russia’s orbit. The basic condition for these good neighbourly relations was, of course, the renunciation of all revisionist moods and domination on the part of Poland on the Baltic-Black Intermarium.

In addition, after 1991, the history of the Polish part of the Intermarium has been associated with the geopolitical world of the Atlantic, represented by the American advanced military presence in Europe within NATO and in the economic sphere with the whole of the West as an entity organizing the global system of economic exchange with the entire institutional architecture of Bretton Woods, including in particular with more developed Western European countries in cooperation within the European community.

We are currently dealing with a shift of the world order caused by China’s and Russia’s questioning of US primacy. The more urgent it seems then to understand who we are and where our place is. This, in turn, will result in an understanding of our interests, and from a proper understanding of this might come our own grand strategy.

Meanwhile, unlike the Turkish, German or Russian empires, the construct of the Polish Land Empire was forgotten in the West, whilst it for many centuries held the balance on the continent, creating a separate core area in a pivotal place of Europe and Eurasia, shaping a separate civilisation and the strategic culture serving it. Therefore, western strategists do not think too much about our strategic dilemmas, treating our area as part of a “camp” of its own (after 1991) or hostile (before 1991), and not an independent entity entering the 21st century with a growing potential and superbly located in a key strategic place of Eurasia. In Russia after 1991, they treat us as an area under the strategic guardianship of the United States, although with their own hidden domination ambitions throughout the Baltic-Black Sea Intermarium – at the expense of Russia. China, in turn, understanding the consequences of the importance of the location on the Chinese road of the New Silk Road is just getting to know us and is acquiring its own judgment in recent years as to how matters in our area are being resolved.

Map of Poland and Lithuania, 1771 (photo: Wikipedia)

 

The Baltic-Black Sea Intermarium can be rotated like a coin in the palm of your hand to different sides and in different perspectives, it shimmers with different shades depending on the incidence of light: from the Atlantic, from the Pacific; from Western Europe and Germany, from Russia; from the Baltic, the Black Sea, Constantinople and the Greater Middle East. Above all, however, the entire region is suspended between the World Ocean and the Eurasian landmass, which is a very demanding location but also yielding powerful leverages against others if Poland wished to use such giving us a “say” in the international affairs of the region. Western powers simply cannot influence the situation in the Intermarium – east of Poland without Poland –(thanks to geography we control strategic flows and power projection in the region) even if we do not grasp the leverage we have or do not use it, yet. We will mature to do so, it seems. This is a primary geopolitical feature of the entire Baltic-Black Sea Intermarium, causing overwhelming pressure from external forces on the Republic. Especially when the world order is in flux.

 

Autor

Jacek Bartosiak

CEO and Founder of Strategy&Future, author of bestselling books.

 

Jacek Bartosiak

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