Polish nationalism

Polish nationalism (Polish: polski nacjonalizm) is a nationalism which asserted that the Polish people were a nation and which affirmed the cultural unity of Poles. British historian of Poland Norman Davies defines nationalism as "a doctrine ... to create a nation by arousing people's awareness of their nationality, and to mobilize their feelings into a vehicle for political action."^[1]

The nationalism of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth – a polity which existed de facto from 1386, and officially from 1569, until the Commonwealth's 1795 Third Partition – incorporating Poles, Lithuanians, East Slavs, and smaller minorities. was multi-ethnic and multi-confessional, though the Commonwealth's dominant social classes became extensively Polonized and Roman Catholicism was regarded as the dominant religion.

The nationalist ideology which arose soon after the Partitions was initially free of any kind of "ethnic nationalism".^[2] It was a Romantic movement which sought the restoration of a Polish sovereign state.^[1] Polish Romantic nationalism was described by Maurycy Mochnacki as "the essence of the nation", no longer defined by borders but by ideas, feelings, and thoughts stemming from the past.^[2]

The advent of modern Polish nationalism under foreign rule coincided with the November 1830 Uprising and the European Revolutions of 1848 ("the Springtime of Nations"). Their ensuing defeats broke the Polish revolutionary spirit.^[2] Many intellectuals turned to Herbert Spencer's social Darwinism and blamed Poland's erstwhile Romantic ("Messianist") philosophy for the insurrectionary disasters.^[2]

After the failure of the subsequent Polish January 1863 Uprising, the Romantic schools of thought were firmly displaced by a specifically Polish version of Auguste Comte's Positivist philosophy which dominated Polish thought to the end of the 19th century.

After the three partitioning empires collapsed in World War I, Poland returned as a territorially reduced and ethnically more homogeneous polity – though still with substantial minorities, especially the Ukrainians of southeastern Poland, which themselves began to harbor their own national aspirations.