CORRIDOR ISSUE

Evening Post, Volume CXXVII, Issue 88, 15 April 1939, Page 24

CORRIDOR ISSUE

POLES PREDOMINATE

ECONOMICS AND POLITICS

RIVAL ARGUMENTS

When Germany, a nation of 62,000,000, the most populous country in Europe west of Russia, officially took its place among the great Powers, it in so doing has explicitly signified its willingness to accept permanently the Eastern frontiers assigned to it by the. peace conference, for a period of ten years from 1933, writes Harold Callender in the "New York Times." Poland, a renascent nation of 30,000,000, regards the Corridor as vital to its prosperity, if not •to its existence, and is indisposed to surrender a foot of it. This is not a dispute between small States, as in the Balkans; it is one between major Powers. It is a dispute that has been growing in acuteness as Poland has tightened its economic grip on the Corridor, and the adjoining German States have increasingly felt the effects of the loss of this territory.

The Corridor was assigned to Poland in order that it might have a port on the Baltic, and the transfer was held to be justified by the fact that, ' even during German rule, the number of Poles living in the territory was somewhat greater than the number of Germans. Poland's port was to be Danzig, a thoroughly German city. Danzig was not annexed to Poland, but was made into a free city. It was not, however, made quite free, as it was in Hanseatic days. It enjoys only a limited independence, for it is embraced within the Polish Customs area and its harbour is administered by an international board.

Now that Poland has been building at Gdynia a harbour of its own, Danzig, which now must rely entirely upon Polish trade, fears that it may be doomed, and so it longs to return to the Reich. Thus on the eastern side of the narrow Polish seacoast—which is less than fifty miles long—lie the German but "free" city of Danzig and the German Province of East Prussia, which still belongs to the Reich. Between them and Germany, severing them territorially from Germany, is the Polish Corridor. This, in brief, is the political situation. NOT PURELY ECONOMIC. It is, of course, the economic situation which is more important from the point of view of the livelihood of the millions of people involved. But it would be a mistake to regard the Corridor as purely an economic question. For the economic aspects are intermingled—one might say hopelessly entangled—with ideas and feelings concerning language, race, culture, and national traditions. Travelling, as the writer did, through the Corridor and the adjacent German territories and talking with the people, both Germans and Poles, the foreign student of the problem sometimes feels inclined to say, with a certain impatience: "I've heard too much nationalistic propaganda, from both sides; let us leave all that aside for a moment and get down to the concrete economic facts. The point is: Can these populations live under the present arrangej ment or can they not?"

Reasonable as this proposal may seem to the outsider, it is difficult thus to circumscribe the discussions. For* the Corridor, while being a vital! economic issue, is also, so to ,speak, a sentimental one. One 'cannot-'talk long 'with the residents of the region without hearing about Polish schools in Danzig and German schools in Poland, as well as about Polish railway rates and shipping tonnage and tariffs. So the question is, first: Can they live as they are? And, second: Will they? It is not only an old and a new economic system which are in conflict: it is two national cultures— two civilisations, if you like. GERMAN SETTLEMENTS. Ever since the thirteenth century, when the Polish princes summoned the Teutonic knights from the West to help them defend the Vistula, | German settlements have spread along the Baltic shore; so that the German population extends clear to Lithuania, while south of it, and cut off from the sea until 1920, are the Poles. Throughout this whole region

the two peoples have met and mingled for centuries and are racially far more mixed than the nationalists like to admit. In modern times, the western part of Poland, having been part of Prussia from 1795 to 1920, it was the German language and culture which dominated. Now the Poles —or at least the leaders—want to change it and to make the newlyacquired territory as Polish as possible. Hence the stress which both Germans and Poles lay upon the schools. The German argument, as well as the Polish, rests upon these two bases —the economic and the cultural. The Germans have contended that East Prussia, cut off from its former market to'the south and west, cannot prosper; that Germany suffers severely from the loss of the agricultural regions of the Corridor and from traffic delays on the railway lines crossing the Corridor. They likewise profess to fear Polish assimilation and penetration, and say that Danzig and East Prussia, territorially separated from the Reich, are in danger of slowly becoming Polish. In other words, German culture and civilisation on the Baltic, established on that shore through centuries of colonisation, are regarded by some as being imperilled by the new boundaries.

■ POLISH EXPANSION. On the Polish side the economic argument runs thus: Poland had to have access to the sea, and the only secure port is under the Polish flag. Poland is becoming a great nation, with coal and textiles and farm products to export, and cannot be at the mercy of German-controlled communications. Danzig; to be sure, is internationally controlled, but Danzig is not enough. Poland needs two ports—at least two—to meet the demands of her growing trade. As for East Prussia, is it not connected by sea"* with the rest of Germany? Why should it need to be linked by land as well? Moreover the Poles justify their tenure of the Corridor by pointing to its history. Since ancient times, they say, this area has always been Polish in race and language, and the resurrected Poland has every historic right' to it.

The Germans' economic argument is more impressive than their cultural one. Whatever may be the case in the future, when Poland grows up economically, this Baltic region has as yet scarcely begun to adjust itself to the boundaries drawn a decade ago, which cut straight through trade routes upon which East Prussia depended and drove a wedge into the middle of a district which has been an economic unity since the beginning of the modern industrial era. The German cultural argument is less impregnable; for if the Poles are doing their best — as they are—to extend Polish settlement and the Polish language in the Corridor, they are .simply doing what the Germans themselves did in the time of their dominion—not only in the days of the Teutonic knights but down to the war. This doubtless involves a danger for German culture in* this area, just as German expansion eastward was necessarily at the expense of Polish culture. THE HISTORICAL CLAIM. On the historical side the Poles have much to say. They will go back as, far as you like—the further the better. You may pick any century you please; consult the authorities, and you find that the; Corridor was predominantly" Polish in population. AH the maps show it so; and even after centuries of German colonisation the German census of 1910 showed the Poles outnumbering the Germans in what is tnow the Corridor. Nobody denies that this region has always been mostly Polish, or at least Slavic, in population"; and a German, Professor Hans Delbruck, even said that as far west as the Elbe the population was "to a great extent Slavic." Still, even the most extreme 6f Polish nationalists do not lay claim to the Elbe.

Economically, it is another story. Just as Berlin does not challenge the historically Polish character of the Corridor, Warsaw'cannot deny that its acquisition of the Corridor has played havoc with the trade of East Prussia. Both are indisputable facts. The Poles can only contend that the new arrangement, when ameliorated by mutual tariff concessions which the prolonged Customs war between Germany and Poland long prevented, will prove in the long run to be workable if not superior to the old one. But one can merely say that an economic unify which was favourable to Germany was destroyed in the hope that it might eventually be replaced by one favourable to Poland. .