East Central Europe between the Two World Wars - Joseph Rothschild A History of East Central Europe (HECE)

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for national integration was seriously compromised ab initio by the circumstance that its election was confined to areas under Polish control at the beginning of 1919 and was later extended, on a staggered schedule, to the ex-Prussian provinces and some northeastern localities. Thus, the large Belorussian and Ukrainian minorities of the east, whose incorporation into Poland was not settled until 1921, were unrepresented in the constitution-drafting process—-just as neighboring Czechoslovakia excluded her numerous German and Magyar minorities from the same process (see below, Chapter 3, section 4). Furthermore, these Polish elections, held so early in what had recently been a major battle area for over three years and in regions politically separated for over a century, were characterized by much passion and confusion, a truly stunning plethora of lists, considerable administrative incompetence (but not pressure), and frequent irregularities in such matters as eligibility, tabulation, and verification. The system was proportional and complicated, and it appears that somewhat over 70 percent of the eligible electorate (men and women over twenty years of age) participated. Table 8 gives approximate coherence to the quite disjointed results. Even here, the tabulation for “Seats” is somewhat arbitrary since the various parliamentary clubs divided and merged several times during the nearly four years that this Constituent Assembly remained in session. (The Christian Democrats and the Communists had not yet differentiated themselves, respectively, from the National Democrats and the Socialists in 1919 and are thus included in the latter parties’ data.)

      ELECTIONS TO THE CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY

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      The Constituent Assembly’s main achievement was to rally the nation to a rare moment of solidarity during the summer crisis of the Polish-Soviet War of 1920, when Piłsudski’s armies, having been repulsed in their attempt to conquer the Soviet Ukraine in the spring, stood embattled before Warsaw and finally triumphed. Its chief failure was the mishandling of its most specific task, the drafting of the constitution. Here the Right feared that Piłsudski, whom it detested as a former Socialist and as the current protagonist of federalistic notions for “coddling” the ethnic minorities, would become president, since he was the spectacular hero of Poland’s resurrection to independent statehood; and so it decided to tailor the constitution to its own apprehensions. It used its powerful position in the assembly to endow the country with an emasculated presidency and an omnipotent legislature. Poland’s basic institutions of government were thus shaped ad personam—a fatal political procedure. Particularly crippling for any presidential ambitions which Piłsudski might have entertained was Article 46, which, while making the president titular head of the armed forces, prohibited his exercising command in wartime. Ironically, just as the Right in 1919-21 violated its own general belief in a strong executive and, for fear of Piłsudski, proceeded to cripple the presidency as an institution, so in May, 1926, the Left, out of resentment against the policies of the legislature’s dominant Right-Center coalition, was to help this same Piłsudski stage a military coup d’état against the parliamentary institutions which the Left, in principle, championed.

      Though the constitution was formally adopted on March 17, 1921, and the Polish-Soviet War was concluded with the signing of the Treaty of Riga just one day later, the Constituent Assembly, still fearful of allowing the newly acquired eastern minorities to share political power, extended its own existence for another year and a half and postponed the first elections for a regular parliament until November, 1922. This time the Belorussians and Ukrainians of the former Russian Empire participated while the Ukrainians of ex-Austrian eastern Galicia abstained. Of those eligible, 67.9 percent voted in the election of November 5 for the Sejm, the lower but more powerful house, and 61.5 percent in that of November 12 for the Senate. The results failed to correct the fragmentation and paralysis of the parliamentary system. To convey, albeit inadequately, an impression of the deputies’ penchant for political permutations and combinations, the allocation of Sejm seats is given in table 9 for the beginning and the close of the legislature’s five-year term. In the Senate, party alignments were firmer and, except for a major defection from the Piast Party, seat allocations did not change much.

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      The next four years witnessed the accelerating degeneration of Polish parliamentary life and of governmental stability. Piłsudski’s response to the constitutional engineering of the Right was to decline nomination to the presidency. The new Sejm and Senate, sitting jointly as the National Assembly, thereupon elected Gabriel Narutowicz on December 9, 1922, in an exceedingly bitter contest requiring five ballots. The winning balance of 289 versus 227 was supplied by a coalition of the Left, the Center, and the National Minorities. A week later, on December 16, 1922, the new president was assassinated by a rightist fanatic because he owed his margin of victory to non-Polish votes. The murder deepened the chasm between the Right and Piłsudski, who never forgave the National Democrats for what he regarded as their moral responsibility for the murder of Poland’s first president.

      PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS, NOVEMBER, 1922

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      On December 20, 1922, the same Left-Center-National Minorities coalition, by a vote of 298 to 221, elected to the presidency the founder of Poland’s cooperative system, Stanisław Wojciechowski. The victorious coalition broke up soon thereafter when Wincenty Witos took his Piast Peasant Party into partnership with the Right in the spring of 1923. In any event, Wojciechowski’s election was already something of a concession by the other parties to the Right, which considered him the least objectionable candidate outside its own ranks.

      Wojciechowski’s office was weak in the manner of the French presidency under the Third Republic. Elected for a seven-year term, the president had neither legislative initiative nor a veto, and he could dissolve the Sejm only with the assent of three-fifths of the total number of 111 Senators in the presence of at least half the 444 Sejm deputies, the Senate thereby dissolving itself simultaneously. In fact, these provisions for dissolution by the president were a dead letter, and their ineffectiveness became an important factor that contributed to the crisis of 1926. Equally inoperative was the power of the Sejm to dissolve itself by a two-thirds vote.

      In effect, executive power rested within the cabinet, which was dependent on a Sejm majority. The large number of parties and their tendency toward splits, excessive maneuvering for office, and frequent change of partnerships rendered such majorities highly unstable. Ministerial upheavals were consequently frequent. The cabinet that Piłsudski ousted by his coup of May, 1926, was Poland’s fourteenth since November, 1918—not counting reshuffling of portfolios within any one cabinet.

      This instability tended to weaken the ministers in relation to both party leaders and individual deputies. The minister, frequently so transient as to be unable to familiarize himself adequately with the work of his department, was often bullied by his party’s leaders into transforming both its policy and its personnel into a party rampart. Individual deputies, acting as messengers for powerful interests and constituents, shamelessly applied pressure on both ministers and civil servants. The government, in turn, would try to secure a deputy’s support through judicious use of state credits, import and export licenses, land leases, forest concessions, and the administration of the alcohol and tobacco monopolies. Ironically, the deputies, who on the one hand habitually exceeded their authority by chronic interference with administration, would simultaneously shirk their basic legislative and budgetary responsibilities through excessive recourse to delegated legislation and to ex post facto legalization of economic and fiscal departures by the cabinet. A raucous and intensely partisan press aggravated the general political debasement and maximized the timidity of the ministers.

      While corruption and venality were probably not as extensive as the public thought them to be, the very belief in their pervasiveness proved fatal to the prevailing political order. By 1926 the Sejm, though elected by universal suffrage, was out of touch with a public that craved stronger

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