The present study examines the negotiations between the Polish government in exile and the provisional Czechoslovakian government on the creation of a federation in eastern and central Europe. It is based on source materials from the archives of the British Foreign Office and the Polish exile government's archives at the Polish Institute and the Sikorski Museum in London. 

In the first months of World War II the newly appointed Polish prime minister, General Sikorski, worked out an ambitious plan for a political system of checks and balances in eastern and central Europe. The purpose of the security plan was to show the western powers that the new Polish government in exile represented new political thinking and desired to cooperate with other eastern and central European states for the future peace of Europe. Sikorski hoped that this would permit the Poles to take part in the Allies' planning of the war and the postwar period, thus allowing them to influence the Allies' war objectives. 

The British reaction to the plan concealed a disagreement between the Foreign Office and the Government. The main contact of the Polish government in exile was with the Foreign Office, which favoured a cordon sanitaire between Germany and the USSR. The Poles took the favourable attitude of the Foreign Office to be Britain's official policy and believed, therefore, that they had full British backing for their federation plan. But after the German attack on the USSR in June 1941, and more and more as the war wore on and the Polish scheme became an obstacle to Great Britain's Soviet policy, the Foreign Office quietly accepted the Government's opposition to a cordon sanitaire. 

The Soviet Union played a central role in the Polish-Czechoslovakian negotiation process, which began in earnest in the autumn of 1940. Sikorski's efforts to establish contact with the Kremlin during the previous summer created discord within his exile government. His attempt to approach the USSR was not based on a view of Poland's national interests and even less so its security as oriented towards the east. It was simply a matter of bitter necessity. Sikorski calculated that, as long as Poland could guarantee the Soviets' western border against Germany's Drang nach Osten, the USSR would be favourably inclined towards a Polish-Czechoslovakian federation. 

The Poles generally envisaged an economically and politically weakened USSR after the war. Sikorski's view was that the Poles should merely establish diplomatic ties with the Kremlin and then wait for the war to take its course. This was one of the main reasons why he acquiesced in letting the question of Poland's eastern border remain open in the Polish-Soviet treaty of July 1941. He hoped, as a result, that the Poles at a postwar conference would be able to secure an eastern border approximately identical with prewar boundaries. 

Sikorski was of the opinion that a new balance of power should be established in postwar Europe and that the Polish-Czechoslovakian federation would constitute an important element in this constellation. Behind the desire to strengthen eastern and central Europe lay a conception of Poland as a decisive power factor. The strategy of territorial expansion towards the west was part of this effort. Moving Poland westward had security as well as economic objectives. Firstly, it would place Poland geographically and politically more in the centre of Europe and simultaneously shorten the German-Polish border. Secondly, the rich industrial region of Upper Silesia would fall to Poland and thus provide it with an important area for the development of Polish industry. The desired contact with Western Europe would be secured through western investment and free access via the Baltic to world trade. 

In contrast to the Poles, the Czechoslovakians wanted a looser and less binding confederation. Against the background of the Munich Agreement, Benes was not inclined to base the independence and security of Czechoslovakia exclusively on western promises. On the contrary, he saw a confederation with ties to the Soviet Union as a means, on the one hand, of involving the Soviets in maintaining a balance between Poland and Czechoslovakia in the event of disagreement, and on the other hand, of giving Czechoslovakia a position of optimal security through an understanding with both the western powers and the USSR. 

The reestablishment of diplomatic ties between the Czechoslovakian government in exile and the USSR on 21 June 1941 resulted in a sharper Czechoslovakian tone with the Poles. Benes resumed his foreign policy from the interwar years and argued that the Soviet Union should be drawn into the federation negotiations. Both Sikorski and Benes were aware that the Polish-Czechoslovakian conflict was fundamentally a matter of leadership in central Europe. 

The difference of view regarding the USSR was and remained the crucial point of disagreement between the two exile governments. This came into blatant view in the course of 1942, when the Soviets, concomitantly with the progress of the war, became more and more critical of the Poles and their efforts to establish a federation. The Poles' steadfast insistence on Lithuania's independence after the war was a crucial factor in this context. Their persistence made them an easy target for Kremlin accusations of attempting to establish a cordon sanitaire directed against the USSR. Soviet dissatisfaction reinforces the disagreements between the Poles and the Czechoslovakians, making fruitful negotiations impossible. 

With the turn of the tide at the beginning of 1943, Soviet opposition to an eastern and central European federation was straightforward and outright. 

Negotiations on a federation were broken off. But the Soviet "veto" was the occasion rather than the cause. 

Translated by Michael Wolfe