Marek Kornat

The article deals with the opinions of Józef Beck on his foreign partners and the perception of his personality in the eyes of foreign political and diplomatic spheres. The text was created in connection with the biography of the Polish minister of foreign affairs prepared by the author (together with Prof. Mariusz Wołos). As a politician, he was an extremely controversial person. Due to his policy, he aroused dislike especially in Paris, Moscow and Prague. Many assessments devoted to him have been preserved, which is confirmed by sources. There are many reflections about his personality, and many sources testify to a dislike towards him. He was attributed to excessive ambitions, a kind of arrogance and excessive self-confidence and prejudice against France. Beck’s opinions about his foreign partners are not very numerous, and in any case few of them are confirmed by sources. He did not particularly value his Central European (regional) colleagues: Benesz and Titulescu. Beck undeservedly gave high marks to the foreign ministers of the Western powers: Eden and Delbos. He trusted Swedish Minister Sandler and Romanian Victor Antonescu very much. An analysis of foreign opinions about Beck and his own judgements about his partners seriously supplements our knowledge of his seven years of work as a Polish minister of foreign affairs in the turbulent time of the international crisis that took place in Europe in the years 1933–1939.

The aim of the paper is to provide a critical perspective on the concepts of the international security of Poland as defined by the policy makers responsible for the international policy in 1918–1932, that is, before Józef Beck became the Minister of Foreign Affairs, which gave rise to the doctrine of balance between Germany and the Soviet Union. The author’s main conclusion is that the attempts to provide the Polish state with real “material”security in the reality of unstable international order were like squaring the circle. The hopes for alliance with the victorious superpowers of the Entente were not fulfilled because the United States had returned to isolationism and Great Britain did not give any guarantees to any state of continental Europe except France in Locarno. The multilateralism offered by the League of Nations did not yield any fruit because the idea of the collective security turned out to be an illusion. Both the Central-European Bloc and the Intermarium project were merely theoretical concepts. Basically, it is impossible for a historian to provide an ex post outline of a convincing alternative to the activities of Polish diplomacy in relation to those of which we know, no matter how critical their assessment of those actions would be.