Sprawy Narodowościowe. Seria nowa (Feb 2022)
Fantastyka polityczna czy konieczność? Portugalska Afryka, Nikaragua, Boliwia i Ekwador w polskich planach kolonialnych
Abstract
Political Fantasy or Necessity? Polish Colonial Plans in Portuguese Africa, Nicaragua, Bolivia and Ecuador In interwar Poland some institutions intended to solve part of the country’s economic and ethnic problems by acquiring colonies abroad. Accordingly, the Polish Foreign Ministry as well as special institutions such as the Union of Colonial Pioneers and the Maritime and Colonial League undertook some projects. Poland, a member of the victorious Entente, was supposedly entitled to ca. 10% of the area of the former German colonies (e.g. in Cameroon or Togo), which could be administered independently or as a condominium with one of the colonial powers. These plans were made more specific in the mid-1930s. Argentina and Brazil, as well as Madagascar, were considered to be natural goals of Polish emigration policies. Then Poland became interested in settlements in the colonial dominions of Portugal in Africa, i.e. Angola and Mozambique, and some time later, also in some countries of Latin America and the Caribbean. As for Bolivia, the aim was to send as many Ukrainians as possible to the mountainous area of Todos dos Santos (Province of Cochabamba). Places in the vicinity of the town of Ibera in Ecuador were also considered by the Polish authorities as suitable for settlers, predominantly from Poland’s eastern borderlands. In the region of Encarnacion in Paraguay, a colony called Fram was established in the 1930s. Nicaragua, too, was considered a convenient place for Polish colonisation, following an effort undertaken by the Polish businessman Stanisław Czarnocki, who was a personal acquaintance of the local dictator, the famous Anastasio Somoza senior. According to some unreliable rumours, Dominica was supposedly ready to accept some hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews. All in all, these Polish colonial ambitions were unsuccessful, mainly due to the lack of sufficient Polish state power to make them into reality.
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