Britain recognises the Polish National Committee

On 15 October 1917 the British government recognised Roman Dmowski’s Polish National Committee as the official Polish organisation and agreed that its seat should remain in Paris. Britain was the second Entente power to do so, less than a month after France. The formula was the same as the French one. Four days earlier the British Embassy had informed the State Department that its government was “very ready” to recognise the Committee “as the official Polish organisation” and to accept its seat in Paris. The date of 15 October is confirmed by a telegram that Secretary of State Robert Lansing sent the same evening to the ambassador in Paris: “The Department understands that the British Government has today recognised the Polish National Committee.”

London had been taking an interest in the Polish question since the summer. On 23 July the British Embassy in Washington presented the Americans with a memorandum. According to British information, Germany and its allies were uneasy about the situation in Poland, and Lloyd George’s government believed that the Poles’ aspirations to freedom and independence should be supported by every means and that they should be discouraged from believing in the “sham independence” promised by the enemy. The British proposed that Poles living in Allied countries, including those from the German and Austrian partitions, should be openly treated as friends and potential allies. Every Polish community in the Entente countries was to have a committee recognised by the government that could vouch for it. When the Committee was founded in Lausanne in August, the British informed Washington that they were inclined to recognise it officially. The Americans were then thinking of a provisional Polish government in the United States. The Parliamentary Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, Robert Cecil, preferred, however, to see first what the Paris committee, which presented itself as the most representative body of Poles from all three partitions, would achieve.

The British wanted to act together with the United States. In a note of 11 October they announced that the Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, would invite Italy to take a similar step and inform Russia as soon as he knew Washington’s view. The Americans hesitated, because they did not want to bypass the Russian Provisional Government, which Poland concerned most of all. London did not wait. The Committee’s representative to the British government was Count Władysław Sobański (PL), a landowner from Ukraine who during the war had been engaged in Russia in relief for the population displaced from the areas occupied by the Central Powers.

According to the Committee, its task was to represent Polish interests in the Entente countries, to conduct the political affairs of the Polish army in France and to look after Poles who were formally subjects of Russia, Germany or Austria-Hungary. The British memorandum of July laid particular stress on the last point: a Pole from the Poznań region or from Galicia living in England could count on the protection of the authorities if a recognised committee vouched for him. Recognition did not make the KNP a government, nor did it settle Poland’s frontiers. It did, however, give Dmowski a second great partner. Italy and the United States followed London’s lead within the following weeks.