page_title: Intermarium
section_title: Czartoryski's plan
hierarchical_section_title: Intermarium / Precedents / Czartoryski's plan
context_page_description: Intermarium was a geopolitical project conceived by politicians in successor states of the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in several iterations, some of which anticipated the inclusion as well of other, neighboring states. The proposed multinational polity would have extended across territories lying between the Baltic, Black and Adriatic Seas, hence the name meaning "Between-Seas".
  Prospectively a federation of Central and Eastern European countries, the post-World War I Intermarium plan pursued by Polish leader and former political prisoner of the Russian Empire, Józef Piłsudski, sought to recruit to the proposed federation the Baltic states, Finland, Belarus, Ukraine, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. The Polish name Międzymorze, meaning "Between-Seas", was rendered into Latin as "Intermarium."
  The proposed federation was meant to emulate the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, that, from the end of the 16th century to the end of the 18th, had united the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.
context_section_description: Between the November and January Uprisings, in 1832–61, the idea of resurrecting an updated Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth was advocated by Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski, residing in exile at the Hôtel Lambert in Paris.
  In his youth Czartoryski had fought against Russia in the Polish-Russian War of 1792 and would have done so again in the Kościuszko Uprising of 1794, had he not been arrested at Brussels on his way back to Poland. Subsequently, in 1795 he and his younger brother had been commanded to enter the Russian army, and Catherine the Great had been so favorably impressed with them that she had restored to them part of their confiscated estates. Adam Czartoryski had subsequently served Emperors Paul and Alexander I as a diplomat and foreign minister, during the Napoleonic Wars establishing an anti-French coalition. Czartoryski had been one of the leaders of the Polish November 1830 Uprising and, after its suppression by Russia, had been sentenced to death but eventually allowed to go into exile in France.
  In Paris the "visionary" statesman and former friend, confidant and de facto foreign minister of Russia's Emperor Alexander I acted as the "uncrowned king and unacknowledged foreign minister" of a nonexistent Poland.
  In his book, Essai sur la diplomatie (Essay on Diplomacy), completed in 1827 but published only in 1830, Czartoryski observed that, "Having extended her sway south and west, and being by the nature of things unreachable from the east and north, Russia becomes a source of constant threat to Europe." He argued that she would have done better, cultivating "friends rather than slaves." He also identified a future threat from Prussia and urged the incorporation of East Prussia into a resurrected Poland.
  His diplomatic efforts anticipated Piłsudski's Prometheist project in linking efforts for Polish independence with similar movements of other subjugated nations in Europe, as far east as the Caucasus Mountains, most notably in Georgia.
  Czartoryski aspired above all to reconstitute—with French, British and Turkish support—a Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth federated with the Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, Romanians and all the South Slavs of the future Yugoslavia. Poland, in his concept, could have mediated the conflicts between Hungary and the Slavs, and between Hungary and Romania. The plan seemed achievable during the period of national revolutions in 1848–49 but foundered on lack of western support, on Hungarian intransigence toward the Czechs, Slovaks and Romanians, and on the rise of German nationalism.
  "Nevertheless," concludes Dziewanowski, "the Prince's endeavor constitutes a [vital] link [between] the 16th-century Jagiellon [federative prototype] and Józef Piłsudski's federative-Prometheist program [that was to follow after World War I]."
caption: Coat-of-arms for a proposed Polish–Lithuanian–Ruthenian Commonwealth during January 1863 Uprising: Polish White Eagle, Lithuanian Pahonia, Ruthenian Archangel Michael