Klaipėdos universitetas

This article offers a comparative analysis of how the First World War affected emerging Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian nationalisms. There has been a clear tendency to treat the three states declared by these national movements in 1918 as a single ‘Baltic’ grouping created as a result of common factors and processes. Yet, such a characterisation downplays differences which arise due to the position of the region at the very frontline of the war in the East, which brought a variety of jurisdictions and political contexts. A further tendency has been to retrospectively portray the nationstate framework ultimately created in all three cases as the realisation of the long-cherished goal of the pre-1918 national movements. Such an understanding of national self-determination, however, only emerged much later, and federalist thinking continued to shape both external and internal conceptions of sovereignty during and immediately after the war. How statehood was conceived, moreover, had a lot to do with which side of the line a region was located during the conflict, with key points of difference being discernible between the Estonian and Lithuanian cases in particular.

In August 1914, France had already defined a pattern of war aims which would be shaped and amended during the next four years. Regarding East-Central Europe, two approaches present themselves to the French policy-makers: the classic system of alliances to maintain the balance of power, and the new internationalist doctrine implying the priority application of the principle of nationality. Both these concepts reacted to the geopolitical evolutions which occurred during the Great War. The article analyses these evolutions of the French concept of a ‘world order’ in East-Central Europe between 1914 and 1918 primarily through an examination of the case of Poland.