Problems of the National Minorities as a Political Issue: The National Concept of "Endecja" before World War I
Abstract
The aim of this paper is to define the attitudes of National Democracy to the question of the national minorities at the turn of the 19th and 20th century. In according to the refusal of previous tradition it is possible to describe the National Democracy's approach to the nation by two dilemmas: as the effort to combine the individualistic and collectivist morality; as the tension between the ethnic and the political determination of the national principle.
The second mentioned issue accounts for the key question for the attitude to the national minorities, because their position was dependent on their task in the National Democracy's vision of the future Central-European development. So if Dmowski and Balicki promoted primarily the strict principle of ethnic determination, the pragmatic reasons as the indistinct territorial delimitation of the future independent Poland forced them to soften their conclusion, which made the certain vision of the progress for the non-Polish nationalities possible.