ABSTRACT
Any objective assessment of the state of Polish society and of the economy in 1918 could hardly fail to point out the magnitude and complexity of the tasks confronting both spheres. A common language, culture and religion had sustained ethnic Poles throughout the lengthy partitionist era, but it was immediately doubtful whether this basis would be sufficient to promote a new, integrated society now that Poland was again an independent state. It was not simply that the inevitable differences in the administration, laws, conventions and other practices of the three former partitioned areas would need to be smoothed out, remodelled and eventually made uniformly and widely acceptable. A further complication was that when Poland’s borders were finally established and internationally recognised by 1923, the population included non-Polish ethnic groups who accounted for approximately one-third of the total at any time throughout the interwar period.
