The Failed Eastern European Union

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:00]What if there was a European Union but just in the east? I guess uh Eastern European Union would be the way to call it in EU. That acronym is actually already taken out by the Eurasian Economic Union. But lucky enough, we have another name for it, Intermar. also known by its Polish name of Madzimors.

[00:00:22]This union was a plan presented after World War I by a man who is seen by many as the founding father of the Second Polish Republic, Ysef Peele Sudski, a man with a fantastic eyebrow mustache combo to initially just unite former lands of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth under a single modern polity. But since that wasn't ambitious enough, they then expanded the concept to instead be a federation and include many more of the new countries, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, and Yugoslavia, connecting the Baltic, Black, and Adriatic seas, and giving it its name, Intermarium, Latin for between the seas, its Polish name, Madzimors, which to a nonpole kind of sounds like a Harry Potter spell means exactly the same. Mi is between and Morz is C. As we know, and unfortunately for some, this plan didn't happen, but it could have.

[00:01:26]And if it had, it would have changed the future of Europe forever. So why did it fail? And what if it had succeeded?

[00:01:45]Long before Ysef Pilsutki made intermarium his life's objective, among other things, other Polish leaders were trying to figure out how to stop Russian and German expansion. Poland itself had just been wiped off the map, being partitioned three times between its three neighboring powers of Prussia, Austria, and Russia until completely disappearing in 1795.

[00:02:12]A few years later in the mid 1800s, Prince Adam Yerzi Kazatiski, a leader of the Polish government in exile, who actually previously served as the foreign minister to Zar Alexander I of Russia, was pushing for a similar idea from his exile in Paris. His story is quite interesting. He fought against Russia in the Polish army in 1792. He was captured along with his brother and forced to join the Imperial Russian army. But Katherine the Great was so impressed with them that she restored their estates, leading him to serve Katherine's son Paul the first and then Alexander the first as a diplomat and foreign minister. But he never let go of his grudge towards Russia. He saw it as a permanent threat to Europe. Maybe working with him directly made him realize it. And he argued that the only way for Poland to survive was for it to lead a federation of checks, Slovaks, Hungarians, Romanians, and other South Slavs. He moved to Paris and published a book titled Essay on Diplomacy in 1830 where he wrote, "Having extended her sway and west and being by the nature of things unreachable from the east and north, Russia becomes a source of constant threat to Europe. To counter this, Katariski's plan, which sort of laid the foundation for Intermarium, was basically a panslavic version of the old Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth. A union that had already united Poland, most of the Baltics, Belarus, and Ukraine under one political union. He spent his life trying to convince Britain, France, the Ottoman Empire to support this new block, but the timing was never really right. The revolutions of 1848 seemed like a good moment, but internal bickering between different ethnic groups like the Hungarians and the Romanians along with rising German nationalism killed the project before it could start. This springtime of nations made everyone want to be independent, but they wanted to be independent on their own, and their lack of willingness to cooperate allowed their imperial occupiers to keep ruling them for a few more decades. and in some cases centuries. Their individual goals would be partly achieved after World War I.

[00:04:36]Though when the conflict ended, the losing Russian, German, and Austrohungarian empires, collapsed, and many new nations, most of them Slavic, emerged from the rubble. It was at this time that Ysef Pilzutski, the leader of the newly independent Poland, stepped in with a two-sided strategy. On one hand, he wanted to break the Russian Empire into smaller ethnic states. It's a plan called promtheism. Some people have picked it up in modern times, too. On the other hand, he wanted to gather those states into the intermarium Federation. The strategy was good on principle. There was a major and constant threat to Poland's existence, which was the Russian Empire. If you weaken that empire by breaking off strategic pieces of its land and at the same time strengthen yourself, sometimes by annexing those lands directly, then you assure your nation survival. The idea was essentially to have Poland take on a leading role, but it would still be at a specific point a federation of equal rights made up of Eastern and some central European countries. At its peak, the plan would include Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Belarus, Ukraine, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, and Yugoslavia. Some even wanted to include Finland to reach the Arctic. It did mimic a bit of the reach of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth, especially in its first iteration, but it also extended it tremendously.

[00:06:04]Although, to be fair, the Commonwealth itself in the 17th century had planned to potentially expand its reach, too.

[00:06:10]There was even a proposed Polish Lithuanian Muscovite expansion which would bring in the Russian Empire under a personal union or the Polish Lithuanian Runian idea which would include much of Slovakia and Ukraine.

[00:06:23]These weren't achieved either though.

[00:06:25]It's also interesting to note how Poland Lithuania came about to some extent as a response to common threats to both Poland and Lithuania. the Tutonic Order, which in the 20th century we could replace as the Germans, the Grand Duchy of Moscow, now Russia/the Soviet Union, and also the Golden Horde of the Mongols, which I find a bit more difficult to find an equivalent to. The Commonwealth lasted until 1795 when the third partition of Poland temporarily wiped it off the map. Curiously too, after Intermarium failed, the Second World War began and Poland was once again partitioned between Russia and the Germans, not returning until the end of the war. But I'm diverting too much to the history of Poland specifically. So, let's go back to Intermarium itself.

[00:07:10]Pilotski's idea was ambitious and even he recognized it. The first draft was more realistic. It just included Poland's inter war territories, Lithuania, a small part of Belarus and Western Ukraine, those core Commonwealth territories. He first presented it in 1918. And even abandoning potential greater expansions for the Federation and reverting to basics, he agreed that it just wasn't feasible just 2 years later in 1920. He didn't stop believing in it. He just understood the opposition was too strong and came essentially from all sides. The Soviets were against it because it affected their sphere of influence. The Allies thought bulsheism was only a temporary threat and thought that their Russian Empire ally would return, wanting it to be strong. So, they didn't want to help Poland take land away from them. They also resented the fact that Pilotski refused to aid the White Russians in the Civil War and thought Poland was better off keeping to its ethnic borders. This last argument came especially from the US. President Wilson was adamant on having the war be a way to break up European powers and allow for ethnic self-determination.

[00:08:18]This new Eastern European Commonwealth would be a replacement for those empires in the eyes of many, which wasn't what he wanted. Veyar Germany was also against it, seeing Intermarium as a barrier to German influence and a threat to its efforts to regain lost eastern territories. You have to remember that preWorld War I Germany stretched further east and their initial separate peace with Imperial Russia granted them many more territories including a sort of protectorate in the Baltics. German colonization of the Baltics is fascinating to me, maybe worth a video of its own. Let me know if you'd be interested in that. But while the allies, the former central powers and the Russians were against it, the idea of Intermarium was precisely to form a nation that would keep members safe against these foreign empires. It's normal that they would be against them.

[00:09:07]The issue for Pilotski was that the potential members were mostly against the idea, too. Lithuania had just regained its independence and wasn't willing to join. The Ukrainians wanted independence from Russia, not to switch to being ruled by Poland instead. The Bellarusians didn't really want independence, but also preferred Russian rule to Polish one. The biggest proof of this were a series of events that didn't help at all the integration process. All the border conflicts that Poland had with its neighbors at the time, the war with the Soviets, with the Lithuanians, the Ukrainians, even some border skirmishes with Czechoslovakia.

[00:09:44]Not only that, but within Poland itself, there was also opposition. Many Polish political leaders opposed the idea of a multithnic federation, wanting to work for a unitary Polish nation state where other minorities would be polized. Many other critics also thought that the federation would take away the newly found democracies of many of these countries. And it didn't help that within Poland there was a coup d'eta in 1926 when Pilotski assumed nearly dictatorial powers. To be fair, this was at least 6 years after he himself abandoned the plan. So, one could argue that he would have tried to implement democracy if the federation had moved forward. I guess it depends how skeptic you want to be. But Pilotski was also publicly supportive of keeping the independence of these other countries.

[00:10:31]He famously said that there can be no independent Poland without an independent Ukraine. However, he didn't hesitate to use military force to expand Poland's borders to Galysia and Vulinia, crushing a Ukrainian attempt at self-determination in disputed territories east of the Bug River, which contained a substantial Polish presence.

[00:10:51]And so, with everyone against it, the foreign powers, the potential members, and Poland itself, the idea died out.

[00:10:58]Other nations achieved something a bit similar, but without Poland. In 1920, Czechoslovakia formed the so-called little ant with Romania and Yugoslavia supported by France. These were three of the members of that potential intermarium. It was ultimately useless and ended in 1938 with the German annexation of Czechoslovakia. Pilstuski died in 1935, but the idea didn't die with him. One of his political protes, Ysef Beck, a foreign minister, proposed in the late 1930s, just before the Second World War started the creation of what he called a third Europe, an alliance of Poland, Romania, and Hungary. But it failed also as both Romania and Hungary preferred to be closer to Germany instead. On October 1st, 1938, Germany annexed Czechoslovakia. And in 1939, it split up Poland with the Soviet Union, wiping out two of the potential members from the map. In 1940, the USSR marched into the Baltics and the next Estonia, Latafia, and Lithuania, having before maintained its grip over Belarus and Ukraine.

[00:12:03]Yugoslavia fell later in the war despite continuing an incredibly impressive resistance and reaching to some extent a self-liberation of Axis occupation.

[00:12:12]Hungary and Romania sided with the enemy and suffered much after the war because of it. Despite the many flaws of Pulsutk's plan, the truth is that he was partly right. None of these countries survived German or Russian invasions.

[00:12:27]And while there's no guarantee they would have if Intermarium had happened, they definitely would have had a better chance. Interestingly, during World War II itself, the concept was revised by the Polish government in exile and backed by the British Foreign Office.

[00:12:42]The idea was a bit different. The British supported two different post-war unions, one between Poland and Czechoslovakia, and another between Greece and Yugoslavia, which could then expand to other members of the Balkans.

[00:12:54]They even met in 1942 with all four nations to discuss this. But after the war, most of these countries in Eastern Europe came under the grip, influence, sometimes even direct rule of the Soviet Union, joining the Varsel pact as an opposition to NATO. With the fall of the Iron Curtain, they slowly joined the other side. They joined the EU, then NATO itself. And so the need for intermarium kind of faded away. Despite that and recognizing their common heritage and interests, Poland, Czecha, Slovakia, and Hungary formed a new organization in 1991 called the Vizigrad group. It was before any of them joined the EU or NATO. So it could be seen as a path towards another type of integration which was then not needed. The name is an intended illusion to the medieval Congress of Visigat between the rulers of Bohemia, Hungary, and Poland in 1335, which united these nations at the time against the Habsburg Empire. The organization still exists today. In 2011, they announced the formation of a battle group with joint military exercises for a joint response in case of attack. Even more interestingly, in 2015, an additional organization was created called the three C's initiative.

[00:14:13]A direct successor of the Intermarium, at least a name, the Poles now called it Troy. It includes all of their desired members of Intermarium plus a few more.

[00:14:23]Its only point is to create more dialogue and cooperation, no political integration. But still it proves the validity of Tilsutsk's idea even today.

[00:14:36]So wherever he is now, maybe he can rest a little easier knowing that Poland's independence is guaranteed through that regional cooperation he defended so much. Although he might find it strange that one of their biggest allies is Germany.