page_title: Intermarium
section_title: Failure
hierarchical_section_title: Intermarium / Piłsudski's "Międzymorze" / Failure
caption_attribution_description: English: Map of the revised plan of the Intermarium by Józef Piłsudski. It would stretch from the Atlantic Ocean to the Adriatic Sea to the Black Sea.
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: In the aftermath of the Polish-Soviet War (1919–21), Piłsudski's concept of a federation of Central and Eastern European countries, based on a Polish-Ukrainian axis, lost any chance of realization.
  Piłsudski next contemplated a federation or alliance with the Baltic and Balkan states. This plan envisioned a Central European union including Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Scandinavia, the Baltic states, Italy, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Greece—thus stretching not only west-east from the Baltic to the Black Sea, but north-south from the Arctic Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea.  This project also failed: Poland was distrusted by Czechoslovakia and Lithuania; and while it had relatively good relations with the other countries, they had tensions with their neighbors, making it virtually impossible to create in Central Europe a large block of countries that all had good relations with each other. In the end, in place of a large federation, only a Polish-Romanian alliance was established, beginning in 1921. In comparison, Czechoslovakia had more success with its Little Entente (1920–38) with Romania and Yugoslavia, supported by France.   
  Piłsudski died in 1935. A later, much reduced version of his concept was attempted by interwar Polish Foreign Minister Józef Beck, a Piłsudski protégé. His proposal, during the late 1930s, of a "Third Europe"—an alliance of Poland, Romania and Hungary—gained little ground before World War II supervened.
  Disregarding the 1932 Polish-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, the Soviet Union allied itself with Nazi Germany to divide Central and Eastern Europe between them. According to some historians, it was the failure to create a strong counterweight to Germany and the Soviet Union, as proposed by Piłsudski, that doomed Intermarium's prospective member countries to their fates in World War II.
caption: Piłsudski's revised Intermarium plan
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