Poland in the UN

As early as the Middle Ages, Polish rulers organized international congresses of European monarchs. Some of the most important ones were:

• Congress in Gniezno, 1000 - Emperor Otto III and Bolesław the Brave, the prince of the Polans from the Piast dynasty, met in the then capital of Poland. The aim of the congress was to create a universalistic empire of the West that was to be composed of “Rome [Italy], Germania [German–speaking states], Gallia [France] and Słowiańszczyzna [West Slavic lands-Bolesław the Brave’s state-Poland]” and ruled by a lay emperor.
• Congresses in Visegrád, 1335 and 1338 - congresses of the kings of Poland, Bohemia, and Hungary.
• Congress in Kraków, 1364 - convened by King Casimir the Great and attended by the emperor (and, at the same time, the king of Bohemia), the kings of Hungary and Cyprus, and many princes and magnates.
• Congress in Luck, 1429 - one of the largest congresses of rulers in Eastern Europe in the late Middle Ages convened by King Władysław Jagiełło and attended by the Holy Roman Emperor and the king of Hungary Sigismund of Luxembourg, the Grand Duke of Lithuania Vytautas, and the papal nuncio Andrea de Palatio, as well as several other monarchs, princes, and foreign envoys.
• Congress in Głogów, 1462 - a congress between King Casimir the Jagiellon and the King of Bohemia, George of Poděbrady (co-author of the concept of a league of European states), who signed a dynastic agreement.
• Dynastic congress of the Jagiellons and the Habsburgs in Vienna, 1515 - attended by the emperor and the rulers of Poland, Lithuania, Bohemia, and Hungary.

Among the political initiatives of Polish kings, a Polish school of international law was founded in the Academy of Kraków (later renamed the Jagiellonian University). Following wars and public disputes waged with the State of the Teutonic Order, Poland presented to European rulers (the pope, the emperor, the kings of Bohemia and France, and others) arguments in favor of the right to peaceful settlement of conflicts arising between states. Two Polish scholars who came up through the Church—Stanisław from Skarbimierz, in his sermon De bellis iustis (On just wars) in 1400 and 1413 and Paweł Włodkowic, in his writings and addresses at the Council in Constance (1414–1418)—advocated the idea of peace that respects the right of other nations, including pagan ones, to freedom, while rejecting the unjustness of wars. In 1434, Mikołaj Lasocki, a Polish diplomat, as a delegate of the Council of Basel attending a peace congress in Arras, mediated between the warring parties in the Hundred Years’ War: France, England, and Burgundy. In his address, he appealed for “forsaking the spirit of war and for disarming hearts.” 

These ideas were further developed by Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski. In his 1551 treatise De Republica emendanda… (On repairing the republic…), Book III De bello (On war), Modrzewski wrote: “In order not to be forced to wage wars, one must take utmost care to maintain peace with neighboring nations […]. Neighboring peoples and princes usually enter into agreements between themselves to settle such matters.” The doctrines on international humanitarian and moral law drafted by Poles in the 15th and 16th centuries are still relevant today.

In 1569, in the modern era, Poland (the Crown of the Polish Kingdom) and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania formed a union under one monarch. This gave rise to the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, which became one of the most powerful states in Europe, covering a territory of about one million square kilometers, with a population of some eleven million inhabitants. The Union of Lublin, named after the town, where the treaty was signed, was one of the first state organizations of its kind in Europe. 

The Warsaw Confederation Act, passed by the Polish Sejm (legislature) in 1573, made a significant contribution to the theory and practice of civil liberties and religious freedom. The act guaranteed unconditional and lasting peace to people of different faiths and made Catholics and the followers of other religions equal before the law with the guarantee of state protection. The document is regarded as the first act of law to guarantee religious tolerance. In 2003, the text of the Warsaw Confederation was added to UNESCO’s Memory of the World Program. 
In the 18th century, Stanisław Leszczyński, who had abdicated the Polish throne and became the Duke of Lorraine, wrote Mémorial de l’affermissememnt de la paix generale (On the preservation of universal peace). In his innovative memorial, he proposed to create an inter-state union led by France, Europe’s greatest power at the time. According to Leszczyński, England, the Netherlands, Sweden, Poland, Venice, Genoa, and the Swiss cantons were all republics whose citizens enjoyed wide civil liberties play the main role in this organization. The project never saw the light of day because it was generally regarded as utopian.

The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth’s international position declined and its neighbors, Austria, Prussia, and Russia, partitioned its territory among themselves in 1772, 1773, and 1795. Still, Poland did manage to give the international community a meaningful model of state political reform. The May 3rd Constitution (also known as the “Government Act”) passed by the Polish Sejm (also known as the Great or Four Years Sejm) in 1791 was a unique piece of legislation internationally. This exceptionally bold and progressive legislative act was Europe’s first Basic Law and the world’s second after the United States Constitution. The Constitution of May 3rd provided for three branches of government (the legislature exercised the supreme role) and modified the then existing political system giving partial equal rights to the citizens of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth irrespective of their nationality. The May 3rd Constitution was never implemented because Poland’s neighbors interfered and partitioned Poland again in 1793 and then in 1795.

In the 19th century, when Poland was under foreign rule, Poles who went into exile and those of the Polish elite who remained in the country elaborated several unification projects for European states. Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski, the leader of the Polish diaspora in Paris, in his Essai sur le diplomatie (Essay on diplomacy) suggested creating a political system in Europe that would be a federation of nation-states. Czartoryski attached great importance to creating mechanisms based on morality in relations between states. He also advocated founding supranational institutions that would maintain peace and oversee the just settlement of conflicts. This was his way of trying to help Poland win back its independence. Czartoryski’s plan never got off the ground because Europe’s conservative system of power and alliances after the Congress of Vienna (1815) had no room for such initiatives. 

During that time, Wojciech Bogumił Jastrzębowski, a Polish scholar, published Traktat o wiecznym przymierzu między narodami ucywilizowanymi. Konstytucja dla Europy (Treaty on lasting alliance between civilized nations. A constitution for Europe). He advocated founding a pan-European organization that would represent all nations whose delegates would be sent to a permanently sitting congress. The role of this institution would be to enact laws to prevent armed conflict causing human casualties and to guarantee peace.

In his book La decadence de l’Europe (The fall of Europe) published in Paris in 1867, the historian Stefan Buszczyński suggested “an alliance among all European nations” and “opening of all borders, […], freedom to exchange ideas […], free industry and trade.” It would be modeled on the political systems adopted in the United States and in the Swiss Confederation. Buszczyński’s book is still in print today and continues to be translated into different languages. One of the pioneers of the idea of European integration was Teodor Korwin Szymanowski, a writer and columnist. During his study tour of France, he published several writings dedicated to this subject: L'avenir économique, social et politique en Europe (1885), Conférence Internationale Douanière, Conférence Internationale sur les Réformes Parlementaires (1890), and others, in which he posited establishing a European central bank with one currency and uniform parliamentarian reforms. He developed his innovative concepts of the future of the Continent considering political, economic, and social aspects of cooperation. Szymanowski believed that the implementation of this vision would consolidate international cooperation to attain universal peace. In 2015, the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs published a bilingual Polish-French edition of Szymanowski’s treatise L’avenir économiue…, edited by Radosław Paweł Żurawski vel Grajewski.
 

In a dispatch dated November 16, 1918, the future Head of State Józef Piłsudski sent a message to world leaders declaring that Poland was reentering the international stage: “I hereby notify belligerent and neutral governments and nations of the existence of an Independent Polish State within all the territories of a united Poland. The political situation in Poland and the yoke of the occupation have so far made it impossible for the people of Poland to speak freely about their fate. […] [T]he restoration of Poland’s independence and sovereignty has now become a fact.”

On November 11, 1918, after regaining independence at the end of World War I, Poland regarded the partitioning treaties signed at the end of the 18th century as void under international law. For this reason, establishing diplomatic relations with states that had maintained relations with the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth before 1795 was looked upon as restoration of such ties. Among the nations that subscribed to this view were France, the United Kingdom, and the Holy See, with which Poland reactivated relations during the interwar period. This had never happened before or since in the history of international relations. Poland’s history and its elites’ awareness of the contributions by former Polish monarchs and lawyers to the idea of European peace prompted Warsaw to engage in peaceful diplomatic initiatives on the international stage.

In the spring of 1919, at the Paris Peace Conference, Poland was one of fourteen states that participated in proceedings of the Commission on the League of Nations. In April 1919, Oskar Halecki, an outstanding historian and one of the Polish experts attending the Peace Conference, delivered a public lecture in Paris on “The League of Nations and Poland,” in which he argued that this organization provided an opportunity to create a postwar reality in a “new Europe” and in a “new world.” He referred to the peaceful ideas of Paweł Włodkowic from the Academy of Kraków and the turn-of-the-sixteenth-century project of the Jagiellonian union, which he considered to be the forerunner of the League of Nations. This later became a Polish foreign policy vision also known as the Intermarium concept. The former prime minister and foreign minister Ignacy Jan Paderewski became the first permanent representative to the League of Nations. In the League of Nations, Polish delegates promoted the idea of disarmament and European and world peace.

In September 1927, Poland’s representative, Franciszek Sokal, submitted a new initiative, a draft “declaration to condemn and ban war as a means of settling international disputes and the obligation to arbitrate,” which was formally accepted by the 8th Assembly of the League of Nations on September 24. Public acceptance of its contents invoking moral values was no doubt a Polish diplomatic success. Still, the declaration was not an act of international law. When dozens of countries recognized war as an international crime, work on the issue of global security intensified at the League of Nations. This also paved the way for the acceptance of the US-French Briand-Kellogg Pact of 1928, which renounced war and whose many provisions reflected the Polish proposal. The document became an international treaty with Poland being among its first signatories. Poland’s last meaningful peace initiative at the League of Nations was a draft convention on moral disarmament submitted in September 1931 in connection with the Council of the League of Nation’s decision to convene a global Disarmament Conference. The Polish initiative was promoted at home and abroad by Oskar Halecki. The Polish Foreign Minister August Zaleski sent a memorandum to Eric Drummond, the Secretary General of the League of Nations, in which he outlined the Polish proposals, namely:

• “to codify criminal law in individual countries so that it condemned war as an instrument of international policy”;
• “to deprive journalists who conduct activities dangerous to peaceful international relations of the right to exercise their profession“;
• “to create a system of teaching young people in the spirit of respect for, and trust in foreigners;
• “to organize an international debate on how to implement moral disarmament in radio programs, in the theatre and cinema” A.M. Brzeziński, Oskar Halecki a Liga Narodów (Łódź: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego, 2016), 236–237.

At the League of Nations plenary session in February 1932, Minister August Zaleski advocated the need to take practical steps towards moral disarmament. In March of that year, the Polish delegation submitted a five-point draft of an international convention on “moral disarmament.” The much-changed draft of the convention was adopted in 1933, but was never implemented because of Europe’s political situation, and the fact that Germany had left the League of Nations.

Many Polish experts representing different fields held senior positions in the League of Nations’ various bodies, including:

• Oskar Halecki - a historian, secretary of the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (Commission Internationale de la Coopération Intellectuelle, CICI);
• Szymon Rundstein - a lawyer, engaged in unification and legislation work at the League of Nations, judge at the Permanent Arbitration Court in The Hague;
• Bohdan Winiarski - a lawyer, vice-president of the Organization for Communication and Transit and chairman of the Committee for the Unification of River Law of the League of Nations. He defended Poland’s position on the legal status of the Oder River before the Permanent Court of International Justice in The Hague.

It is worth adding that Maria Skłodowska-Curie, a two-time Nobel Prize winner, had represented Polish science on the International Commission on Intellectual Cooperation since 1922. In 1926, she proposed a draft resolution on “educating children and young people for peace.” She actively lobbied in support of the Polish “moral disarmament” draft convention.

The epilogue of Poland’s interwar activity in the League of Nations was a Polish government delegate’s address after Germany and the Soviet Union annexed Poland’s territory. On December 14, 1939, Deputy Foreign Minister Zygmunt Graliński, who resided in France at the time, in condemning the Soviet Union for invading Finland, clearly referred to the tragedy of the Polish state and nation: “Every state, belonging to the League of Nations, should respond by taking action to the question whether the development of humanity should be based on law or on violence, on justice or on rape, on the freedom of peoples and individuals, or on their subjugation, on moral nihilism, or rather on Christian morality, on civilization or on barbarity? Poland has already made that choice.” (Polskie dokumenty dyplomatyczne. 1939, wrzesień-grudzień, ed. W. Rojek et al. (Warsaw: Polish Institute of International Affairs, 2007), doc. no. 426, 527). The Soviet Union was excluded from the League of Nations at a session attended by Ignacy Jan Paderewski, a symbol of Poland’s rebirth after World War I, who was eighty at the time. 

After the invasion of Poland by Germany (September 1, 1939) and the Soviet Union (September 17, 1939), state authorities left the country and were interned in Romania. By operation of the Constitution of the Republic of Poland, a new president took office in France and, on September 30, appointed a new cabinet in exile headed by General Władysław Sikorski. It was a legal continuation of the former government. In June 1940, after moving to the United Kingdom, the cabinet presented a political initiative relating to the concept of a “federalized Central European Intermarium” representing a block of states situated between the Baltic Sea, the Black Sea, and the Adriatic Sea. A Polish-Czechoslovakian confederation, outlined in the joint Declaration signed on November 11, 1940, was to be the first step on the path toward a “new order in Central Europe” after the end of the war. These plans became obsolete in 1943 because of differences that arose between the two governments over their relations with the Soviet Union.

A similar European project was concurrently elaborated in the United States among the Polish émigré community centered around the New Europe periodical. At the turn of 1941, Anatol Mühlstein, a prewar Polish diplomat, suggested creating the United States of Central Europe. Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, Austria, and possibly other states were to be its members. Despite initial interest shown in the idea, neither of the two English-speaking powers lent their support to these initiatives, the main reason being the Soviet Union’s growing position.

The government of the Republic of Poland in London expressed a negative opinion about the activities of the League of Nations during the interwar period. Prime Minister Sikorski declared “at the time, it was believed that peace can be won by sacrificing at the same time the interest of small nations and states.” As early as in February 1940, Foreign Minister August Zaleski stressed the need to reconstruct the League of Nations. In planning future peaceful establishment of the rules of global security on the grounds of international cooperation, Polish diplomacy was actively engaged from the beginning in the process of building an alliance of the Allied states. Poland and eight other governments-in-exile (Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Yugoslavia, and the Free French National Committee) signed the London Declaration (the Declaration of St. James’s Palace) with the United Kingdom and members of the Commonwealth/British dominions on June 12, 1941. In the document, all the Allied states resolved to continue the struggle against German and Italian oppression. It laid the groundwork for other initiatives aimed at founding a global organization of free states. The idea, accepted by Winston Churchill, of a meeting of the Allied powers was suggested by Poland’s ambassador to the Court of St. James, Edward Raczyński. 

On December 4, 1941, in reference to the provisions of the Atlantic Charter of August 1941, after the restoration of diplomatic relations between Poland and the Soviet Union (July 1941), Prime Minister Władysław Sikorski and Soviet leader Józef Stalin signed a declaration in Moscow that provided for “securing lasting and just peace” by “a new organization of international relations, based on democratic countries united in a lasting alliance […] and respecting international law.” This bilateral agreement became obsolete after the discovery in 1943 of mass graves of thousands of Polish officers and soldiers murdered in Katyn in the spring of 1940 by the Soviets and the severance of diplomatic relations with Poland by the USSR. Among the victims were more than 200 Jews, citizens of the Second Polish Republic who were Polish Army officers. 

Also, regarding the Holocaust in German-occupied Poland, Władysław Sikorski’s cabinet officially informed both British and American leaders about the extermination of millions of Jews whom the German Nazis condemned to death as a nation. As early as on December 10, 1942, the Polish Foreign Minister Edward Raczyński sent a note to the signatories of the Declaration by United Nations describing the tragic situation of Jews based on reports by leaders of the Polish underground authorities in Warsaw. Earlier, Minister Raczyński suggested convening an international conference dedicated to this burning issue to Britain’s foreign secretary, Anthony Eden. Jan Karski, a special emissary from Poland and an eyewitness to this crime [the genocide], met with President Franklin D. Roosevelt and presented him with a report by Polish authorities, The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland.

These two all-important issues can be regarded, under international law, as evidence of Poland’s legitimate authorities’ consistent line of action defending peace and the right of nations to live in freedom. As to Shoah, a great tragedy of the Jewish people, it was a manifestation of opposition to systemic evil and of solidarity with the followers of the Mosaic religion, who had been living in Poland for many centuries. As to the mass murder of Polish officers and soldiers, besides demanding an explanation of the case of Katyń and of other places where the Soviets brutally killed members of the Polish elite, it was a call for justice for the victims and their families. In both cases, leaders of the Western great powers took no action.

Regardless of its bilateral relations with the Soviet Union, the Polish government continued to be actively involved in the creation of international structures at different stages of the process. On January 1, 1942, the then-ambassador to the United States, Jan Ciechanowski, signed the Declaration by United Nations in Washington, DC. This fact settled the matter of Poland becoming one of the founding members of the United Nations after the war. Prime Minister Władysław Sikorski, in a declaration dated February 24, 1942, said that “lasting and just peace […] based on cooperation among free peoples and on their right to free existence has to be secured in the postwar world.”

Poland was engaged in creating specialized institutions that later became part of the United Nations:

• On November 9, 1943, the government of the Republic of Poland signed an agreement establishing the office of United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), and Jan Kwapiński, Minister of Industry, Commerce and Shipping, became the chairman of the Social Welfare and Health Commission;
• May 18–June 3, 1943, participation in the Hot Springs Conference (held in the United States and dedicated to the postwar food market) and signing of the Hot Springs Declaration of Principles. As a result, in October 1944, Poland became one of the twenty founding states of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAOUN);
• July 1–22, 1944, participation in the Bretton Woods Conference, where the decision was made to create the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development;
• April 20–May 10, 1944, participation in a conference of the International Labor Organization, which Poland had joined in 1919, held in Philadelphia where the Philadelphia Charter was adopted;
• November 1–December 7, 1944, participation in a civil aviation conference ending in the signing of the Chicago Conference and the creation of the International Civil Aviation Conference (ICAO).

From August 21 to October 7, 1944, a conference was held at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC, and attended by delegations from the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and China. It resulted in creating a general international organization under the title The United Nations. The Polish government suggested some changes to the proposed provisions of the Dumbarton Oaks Proposals, namely: to increase the number of non-permanent seats on the Security Council to ten, and to adopt the principle that all Security Council resolutions are adopted by a majority of the votes. Amendments “to consider the situation of smaller states and to give them a role adequate to their rights, interests, and place in the world” were presented in New York, in March of 1945, in the brochure Polish Amendments to the Dumbarton Oaks Proposals. 

It should be stressed that the permanent presence of the Red Army in the territory of Poland and the unfavorable decisions made at the Yalta Conference of February 1945, which placed Poland under the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence, definitively weakened the position of the Polish authorities in London. Representatives of the government of the Republic of Poland residing in London were not invited to the conference convened in San Francisco on April 25, 1945, that founded the United Nations. This prompted Prime Minister Tomasz Arciszewski to address a protest note to the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, and China, and, on April 21, to declare in a memorandum that the government of the Republic of Poland “will attach the utmost importance to making sure that Poland as a co-founder of a global security organization did not lose the right and possibility to be elected to the Council of a future World Security Organization.” (Historia dyplomacji polskiej, vol. 5, 1939–1945, ed. W. Michowicz (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, 1999), 705.)

Nevertheless, the following representatives of the Republic of Poland in London were accredited in the United States and came to San Francisco: Consul General Władysław Sokołowski and Press Attaché at the Polish Embassy in Washington, DC, Władysław Besterman, as well as Polish journalists whose names were added to the British media list. Since official representatives of the government of the Republic of Poland could not attend the conference, its views on the new world order were presented in San Francisco by Charles Rozmarek, president of the Polish American Congress (PAC). On May 10, he submitted a memorandum addressed to the head of the US delegation to the conference, Edward Stettinius, with the following demands:

1. “that the US government repudiate the Yalta Agreement”;
2. “that the London-based government receives an invitation to send an official delegation to the San Francisco Conference since it is recognized by all UN, with the sole exception of the Soviet Union and one or two of its satellites, and it has never lost the loyal support of the Polish Armed Forces and, practically speaking, of all Poles who have the freedom to express their opinion.” (Historia dyplomacji polskiej, vol. 5, 1939–1945, ed. W. Michowicz (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, 1999), 707.)

Members of the Polish elites, who remained in the West after World War II, continued to publicly express their commitment to freedom and contributed to the development of justice and peace on the international stage. Here are some of noteworthy Poles who attained high positions in international politics:

Rafał Lemkin (1900–1959, New York), a lawyer, expert on international criminal law. He received his PhD degree in law from the Jan Kazimierz University in Lwów. During the interwar period, Lemkin, as a member of the official Polish delegation, encouraged the League of Nations to adopt a convention that would provide for the punishment of crimes against humanity. From 1941, Lemkin resided in the United States as a lecturer at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and at the University of Virginia’s School of Military Government in Charlottesville, Virginia. He wrote his most important book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe… (Washington, DC, 1944), during World War II and coauthored the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted by the UN General Assembly on December 9, 1948.

Józef Retinger (1888–1960, London), close collaborator of the prime minister of the Polish government-in-exile in London and, for a short time (August–September 1941), the first Polish diplomatic representative to the USSR. After the war, he continued to pursue the idea of a federation of European states, which he outlined in a brochure titled The European continent? (London, 1946). He coordinated the Congress of Europe in The Hague, convened on Winston Churchill’s initiative in 1948. One of its tasks was to establish a Western European parliament that was a prelude to the creation of the Council of Europe.

Rowmund Piłsudski (1903–1988, London), leader of the Polish Freedom Movement (Niepodległość i Demokracja). He was a proponent of European integration, which should be preceded by the “liberation of Central Europe from Soviet hegemony.”

Undoubtedly Zbigniew Brzeziński’s personal experiences and knowledge of Poland’s history helped him play an important role in the process of peaceful normalization of US political relations with the People’s Republic of China and the USSR and in brokering the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel. Brzeziński was a counselor to successive American Presidents and President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor from 1977 to 1981. When Poland was under threat of a Soviet military intervention during the time of Independent Self-Governing Trade Union “Solidarity” (NSZZ “Solidarność”) (1980–1981), he took a firm stand in deterring a potential crisis. Brzeziński wrote in his memoirs: “I grew up and came of age in North America, first in Canada, and later in the United States. In the political sense of the word, I am an American, but Americans do not share a common past with the other citizens of their country, but a common future based on the same faith in genuine freedom of individuals, in democracy, and in equal life opportunities for all. And this makes it possible to be a good American, who feels a duty to be loyal to his country, and, at the same time, preserve the roots that are in your own historical heritage and cultural past, which Poland is for me personally. (Z.  Brzeziński, Cztery lata w Białym Domu. Wspomnienia Doradcy do Spraw Bezpieczeństwa Państwa 1977-1981, (London: Polonia, 1986), XI). 

Traditions of the Polish school of international law were brought to public attention by Pope John Paul II on October 5, 1995, during his second address to the UN General Assembly during its fiftieth session in New York: “In reality, the problem of the full recognition of the rights of peoples and nations has presented itself repeatedly to the conscience of humanity, and has also given rise to considerable ethical and juridical reflection. I am reminded of the debate which took place at the Council of Constance in the 15th century, when the representatives of the Academy of Kraków, headed by Paweł Włodkowic, courageously defended the right of certain European peoples to existence and independence.” 

On December 31, 1944, a Soviet-imposed Provisional Government was formed in Warsaw that was not recognized by the United States or the United Kingdom. Roosevelt and Churchill, unlike Stalin, still recognized the government of the Republic of Poland residing in London to be the only representative of the Polish nation. In February 1945, at the Yalta Conference, the three powers decided about Poland’s future borders and about forming a “provisional government of national unity,” to be composed of Polish politicians living at home and those that “emigrated.” On April 25, 1945, the United Nations’ founding conference began in San Francisco without a Polish delegation. On March 22, 1945, the legitimate government of the Republic of Poland in London and the pro-Soviet Provisional Government in Warsaw both issued statements on “Poland’s irrefutable right to take part in the conference.” Delegates from fifty countries sat in the hall of the San Francisco Opera. During the inauguration of the session, the Polish pianist of Jewish descent, Arthur Rubinstein, who played a concert, said: “In this hall, where the great nations gather to make a better world, I miss the flag of Poland for which this cruel war was fought. I shall play my national anthem—please stand!” It was a symbolic and poignant reminder of the right of Poland, which was the first victim of aggression by the Third Reich and the Soviet Union in September, 1939, and which suffered proportionately the biggest losses during the war, to attend the United Nations’ founding conference. 

The Steering Committee of the San Francisco Conference left a space on the Charter for the signature of a representative of a future, united Polish government, with its seat in Warsaw. The fact that the Polish government-in-exile in London signed the United Nations Declaration as early as on January 1, 1942, provided the formal and legal grounds for including Poland among the founding members of the United Nations. On June 28, 1945, which was after the San Francisco Conference, the Provisional Government of National Unity (Polish: Tymczasowy Rząd Jedności Narodowej or TRJN) was formed in Warsaw as stipulated in the Yalta Agreement. It was a representational government in theory only, with Soviet-backed communists (the prime minister and the heads of power ministries) playing the key role in the cabinet. By July 5, 1945, France, the United States, the United Kingdom, and China recognized de iure the TRJN. By the same token, they withdrew their recognition for the government of the Republic of Poland in London, which protested to the Western Allies against this decision. On October 15, 1945, the TRJN’s foreign minister, Wincenty Rzymowski, signed the United Nations Charter and the Agreement Establishing the Preparatory Commission of the United Nations in Washington, DC, as the last of the fifty-one representatives of the UN founding members to do so. The next day in Warsaw, Bolesław Bierut, the president of the Polish National Council, placed his signature on these documents. Poland’s instrument of ratification was deposited with the US Department of State on October 24, 1945. Thus, Poland’s status as a UN founding member was confirmed and, by the same token, the last formal condition for the entry into force of the United Nations Charter was met. On that occasion, Minister Rzymowski read out the Polish authorities’ declaration: “The Polish government duly assesses the system of collective security established by the UN Charter and is prepared, to the best of its abilities, to cooperate with other members of this Organisation in maintaining world peace and in rebuilding the prosperity and well-being of the nations that have suffered from atrocities committed by the German invaders” (Historia dyplomacji polskiej, vol. 6, 1944/1945–1989, ed. W. Materski, W. Michowicz, (Warsaw:  Polski Instytut Spraw Międzynarodowych, 2010), 249, 250.) Poland’s representative, undersecretary of state at the MFA, Zygmunt Modzelewski, took part in the second session of the Preparatory Commission of the United Nations, which was held in London in November and December 1945, as the President of the Second Committee that drafted recommendations for the future Security Council. Minister Wincenty Rzymowski headed the Polish delegation to the first session of the UN General Assembly, which took place in London in January 1946. Zygmunt Modzelewski was a member of the General Committee, and Józef Winiewicz, a counsellor at the Embassy of the TRJN to the United Kingdom was elected Vice-President of the Commission on Refugees and Displaced Persons. It rapidly transpired that the Warsaw government delegation agreed all its actions (initiatives, amendments, voting) with representatives of the Soviet Union. Poland was elected. One of the six non-permanent members of the UN Security Council for a two-year term in 1946–1947. Professor Bohdan Winiarski was elected to the International Court of Justice of the United Nations.

The creation of a new international organization necessarily led to the dissolution of the League of Nations. The last 21st Assembly of the League of Nations was held in April, 1946. It was attended by Jerzy Putrament, who as a delegate of TRJN and its envoy to Switzerland at the time. Two days earlier, the United Nations had formally taken over the League of Nation’s assets. A protocol to that effect was signed in Bern by the last LN Secretary General Seán Lester and Włodzimierz Moderow, a Polish citizen and former official of the Polish government in London, who was a UN Secretariat employee at the time and later was appointed Director of the European Office of the UN at Geneva.

After World War II, Poland fell under Soviet domination. Its sovereignty and independent foreign policy were definitively limited. From 1945–1955, Warsaw’s diplomacy was fully subordinated to Moscow. Therefore, Poland’s permanent representatives to the United Nations and Polish delegations could not act without the approval of Soviet representatives. Only in matters of lesser importance, they could theoretically take their own initiative, for instance, Fryderyka Kalinowska, a member of the Polish delegation on the Sub-commission on the Status of Women (in the Commission on Human Rights), co-authored a report on the situation of women in the world.

Ludwik Rajchman, who held directorships in the League of Nations’ health agencies in 1920–1939, should be credited for his contribution to the development of the United Nations Organization. He was Secretary-General of the International Conference of Far-Eastern Countries on Rural Hygiene, held in Bandung in 1937. During World War II, Rajchman was one of the founders of UNRRA as a delegate of the Polish government-in-exile in London. In December 1946, as a representative of Polish communist authorities in Warsaw, he proposed creating the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) and was its chairman until 1950.

From 1947–1955, Poland’s representatives, exercising, as they themselves stressed “the moral title to propose peace and security initiatives,” focused their efforts on sustaining international cooperation and the need to strengthen the authority of the United Nations.  Some historians argue that these were timid attempts to contest Moscow’s dictate on the international stage, which nevertheless effectively vetoed proposals for UN Security Council resolutions put forward by Western powers. At the same time, the Polish delegation fully supported Soviet diplomacy in its actions. 

The political changes that occurred in the Soviet Union and in Poland in 1956, after Władysław Gomułka came to power and became the First Secretary of the Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR), reinvigorated Polish diplomacy’s actions on the international stage. One example of its efforts to improve East-West relations was the Rapacki Plan. Adam Rapacki, a foreign minister of the Polish People’s Republic (PRL), spoke with Soviet approval at the 12th Session of the UN General Assembly on October 2, 1957. He said that communist authorities in Warsaw would abandon plans to produce nuclear weapons and to deploy them in its territory if both German states (the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic) would commit themselves to doing the same. Polish delegations went on to present detailed disarmament initiatives in the United Nations:
 

1.    On November 19, 1960, the Polish delegation presented a “draft resolution recommending drawing up a report by UN experts on the effects of the possible use of nuclear weapons and its publication by all states.” One of its outcomes was the publication, in October 1967, of a report by the UN Secretary-General “Effects of the possible use of nuclear weapons and the security and economic implications for states of the acquisition and further development of these weapons.”

2.    On February 17, 1962, the UN Secretary General published a report, drafted on Poland’s initiative and with its participation, “Economic and social consequences of disarmament.”

3.    On July 1, 1969, the UN Secretary General published a report, on Poland’s initiative, “Chemical and bacteriological (biological) weapons and the effects of their possible use.”

4.    On July 22, 1969, the Polish delegation submitted a draft document “banning the use of chemical and biological weapons” to the Disarmament Committee in Geneva.

5.    On November 28, 1975, on Poland’s initiative, the Political Committee of the UN General Assembly adopted a draft resolution “calling on all states to take maximum efforts in order to achieve a speedy agreement on the elimination of chemical weapons from military arsenals.”

(J. Zając, R. Zięba, Polska w stosunkach międzynarodowych 1945–1989 (Toruń: Wydawnictwo Adam Marszałek, 2006), 245–246.)

Poland participated in many UN commissions, missions, and military operations:

1.    1953–1994—Polish military and civilian experts were part of the Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission in Korea (NNSCK).

2.    1954–1975—Soldiers of the Polish People’s Army were active in International Commissions for Supervision and Control (ICSC) in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.

3.    1973–1976—Poland’s representatives, as part of the ICSC oversaw the implementation of peace agreements after the Vietnam War.

4.    1974–1993— Units of the Polish People’s Army participated in the Second United Nations Emergency Force (UNEFII), which oversaw the ceasefire in the Sinai Peninsula. 

5.     1974–1993—In a Warsaw Pact contingent, Polish soldiers were part of peace-keeping forces on the Israeli-Syrian front (UNDOF).

6.     1968–1970 and 1988–1991—Poland’s civilian and military representatives formed part of International Observers’ groups: in Nigeria after Biafra’s secession (OTN); as overseers of the ceasefire in the Iraqi-Iranian war (UNIIMOG); and as negotiators securing the implementation of the agreement granting independence to Namibia (UNTAG).
(J. Zając, R.  Zięba, Polska w stosunkach międzynarodowych 1945–1989, (Toruń: Wydawnictwo Adam Marszałek, 2006), 248–249)
 

In total, more than nineteen thousand army officers and enlisted service members and several hundred civilian experts from Poland took part in peacekeeping missions.

The Polish People’s Republic’s diplomacy in 1945–1989 timidly attempted to draw attention to its initiatives aimed at reconstructing the system of international relations. Once again, it should be emphasized that all important diplomatic steps taken by Warsaw were subordinated to Moscow, specifically in 1945–1955. This condition was true in the activities of the UN General Assembly, the Security Council (as a nonpermanent member in 1946–1947; 1960; 1971–1972, and 1982–1983), the Special Committee on Decolonization, the Human Rights Commission, the International Court of Justice, and the UN Secretariat. Polish representatives traditionally raised the matter of maintaining peace and the need to observe the principles of the UN Charter that obligated states to respect the law in settling international conflicts. Poland was engaged in the work of many UN specialized agencies, in which it participated on account of being subservient to the interests of the USSR (with breaks in 1950–1954/1955), for example: FAO, ILO, IBRD, WHO, UNESCO, IMF, UNCTAD, GATT, UNID, and UNDP.

A Polish diplomatic success, which should be credited to both the communist-controlled Polish People’s Republic and the sovereign Republic of Poland, has been the realization of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which Poland proposed in the UN Human Rights Commission in 1978. Poland’s representative was continually the chairman-rapporteur of the Working Group that drafted the document. The Convention on the Rights of the Child was unanimously adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on November 20, 1989, and entered into force on September 2, 1990. The educational theories associated with the progressive Polish educator and physician Janusz Korczak before World War II served as the basis for the Convention.

On December 31, 1989, the Polish Sejm adopted a law that restored the prewar name of the state—the Republic of Poland. In so doing, the provisional name until then—the Polish People’s Republic (PRL)—was thrown into the trash heap of history.  Once again, Poland became an independent nation on the international stage. In 1918, after 123 years of bondage created by partitions, Poland fought and won its independence; on the turn of 1990, after a period of Soviet domination, it regained sovereignty. In both of these historical cases, the people and its leaders relied on the tradition of the old Republic of Poland, whose statehood began in the 10th century. Each period in its one-thousand-year history had its unique circumstances, which were largely conditioned by the political and diplomatic relations with other countries.