Authors

Barbara Klassa ¹ University of Gdansk, Poland

Discussion

The policy of interwar Poland towards national minorities is a very complicated issue, perceived and evaluated in different ways by historians from different countries and nationalities. The consequences of the decisions made by the Polish government at that time were, and in many respects still are, visible in relations between the nations of Central and Eastern Europe (especially Polish-Ukrainian and Polish-Lithuanian). The objective of this text will therefore be to analyse how these controversial issues were presented from the perspective of scholars publishing after 1945, which aspects and consequences were highlighted, which were overlooked or underestimated. In order to provide a broad perspective, a selection of synthetic works on the history of individual countries and the region as a whole will be analysed, taking into account authors from Central and Eastern Europe as well as from the United Kingdom or the United States, working under different conditions - in communist bloc countries, in democratic states, or writing under changed conditions after 1989. The image of the minority policy of the Polish government will be confronted with that of other countries in the region, primarily Czechoslovakia and Hungary, in order to identify analogies and differences as well as the way their immediate and long-lasting consequences were shown.