Sanation
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Sanation (Polish: Sanacja, pronounced [saˈnat͡sja]) was a Polish political movement that was created in the interwar period, prior to Józef Piłsudski's May 1926 Coup d'État, and came to power in the wake of that coup. In 1928 its political activists would go on to form the Nonpartisan Bloc for Cooperation with the Government (BBWR).
The Sanation movement took its name from Piłsudski's aspirations for a moral "sanation" (healing) of the Polish body politic.[1] The movement functioned integrally until his death in 1935. Following Piłsudski's death, Sanation split into several competing factions, including "the Castle" (President Ignacy Mościcki and his partisans).[2]
Sanation, which advocated
Background
Named after the Latin word for "healing" ("sanatio"),[3] the Sanation movement mainly comprised former military officers who were disgusted with the perceived corruption in Polish politics. Sanation was a coalition of rightists, leftists and centrists whose main focus was the elimination of corruption and the reduction of inflation.
Sanation appeared prior to the May 1926 Coup d'État and lasted until World War II but was never formalized. Piłsudski, though he had been the former leader of the Polish Socialist Party, had grown to disapprove of political parties, which he saw as promoting their own interests rather than supporting the state and the people. For this reason, the Sanation movement never led to the creation of a political party. Instead, in 1928 Sanation members created a Bezpartyjny Blok Współpracy z Rządem ("Nonpartisan Bloc for Cooperation with the Government"), a pro-government grouping that denied being a political party.
History
Although Piłsudski never claimed personal power, he exercised extensive influence over Polish politics after Sanation took power in 1926. For the next decade, he dominated Polish affairs as
In the course of pursuing "sanation", Piłsudski mixed democratic and authoritarian elements. Poland's internal stability was enhanced, while
A distinguishing feature of the regime was that, unlike the situation in most of non-democratic Europe, it never transformed itself into a full-scale dictatorship. Freedom of speech and press and political parties were never legally abolished, and opponents were usually dealt with via "unidentified perpetrators" rather than court sentences. Sanation allowed the
Józef Piłsudski's personal cult stemmed from his general popularity among the nation rather than from top-down propaganda; this is notable, considering Piłsudski's disdain for democracy. Sanation's ideology never went beyond populist calls to clean up the country's politics and economy; it did not occupy itself with society, as was the case with contemporary fascist regimes. From 1929, the semi-official newspaper of Sanation, and thus of the Polish government, was Gazeta Polska (the Polish Gazette)[citation needed].
Legislative agenda
The Sanation government invalidated the May 1930 election results by disbanding the parliament in August
In April 1935, shortly before Piłsudski's death, a new constitution (the "
- "the "Colonels" (Pułkownicy, formed around Walery Sławek), which sought a modus vivendi with the opposition;[citation needed]
- "the Castle" (Zamek, formed around President Warsaw Castle— hence the movement's name), which became the center; and
- GISZ (Generalny Inspektor Sił Zbrojnych, formed around General Inspector Edward Rydz-Śmigły), which soon became virtually indistinguishable from the Camp of National Unity.[citation needed]
The first of these Sanation movements soon lost much of its importance, but the other two continued the ideological struggle within the country until the outbreak of war.
World War II
During the 1939
Though France insisted on excluding Sanationists from the
After
Notable members
- Józef Beck
- Tadeusz Hołówko
- Janusz Jędrzejewicz
- Wacław Jędrzejewicz
- Adam Koc
- Leon Kozłowski
- Ignacy Matuszewski
- Bogusław Miedziński
- Ignacy Mościcki
- Bronisław Pieracki
- Józef Piłsudski
- Aleksander Prystor
- Edward Rydz-Śmigły
- Adam Skwarczyński
- Walery Sławek
- Kazimierz Świtalski
See also
- Bereza Kartuska prison
- Law and Justice, founded in 2001, one of Poland's major political parties today often considered a modern successor to the Sanation movement [citation needed]
- European interwar dictatorships
- Intermarium
- Piłsudski's colonels
- Polish Underground State
- Prometheism
Notes
- Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1971, p. 665, defines the expression as follows: "sanacja <łac. sanatio = uzdrowienie> (sanation, from Lat[in] sanatio = healing) 1. w Polsce międzywojennej — obóz Józefa Piłsudskiego, który pod hasłem uzdrowienia stosunków politycznych i życia publicznego dokonał przewrotu wojskowego w maju 1926 r.... (1. in interwar Poland, the camp of Józef Piłsudski, who worked a military coup in May 1926 under the banner of healing politics and public life...) 2. rzad[ko używany]: uzdrowienie, np. stosunków w jakiejś instytucji, w jakimś kraju. (2. rare[ly used]: healing, e.g., of an institution, of a country.)"
- ^ Encyklopedia Polski, p. 601.
- ^ Neither the English "sanation" nor the cognate Polish "sanacja"—both derived from the same Latin root, "sanatio"—has much currency in its respective language. The terms' unfamiliarity doubtless accounts for misconceptions about the meaning of the Polish political term. Adam Zamoyski, for example (The Polish Way: A Thousand-Year History of the Poles and Their Culture, p. 343), mistranslates it as "sanitation". Other English-language authors, baffled by the Polish term and unfamiliar with its Latin etymology and English cognate, have left it untranslated.
- ^ a b c Spring Will Be Ours: Poland and the Poles from Occupation to Freedom By Andrzej Paczkowski, page 28.
- ^ Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist's Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine By Timothy Snyder, page 73.
- ^ a b Atlas of Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century By Richard & Benjamin Crampton, pp. 102–103.
- ^ Domestic problems and foreign policies of interwar east European states By Anna M. Cienciala.
References
- S2CID 153991392.
- Seidner, Stanley S. (1975). "The Camp of National Unity: An Experiment in Domestic Consolidation". The Polish Review. 20 (2–3): 231–236.
- ISBN 0-7818-0200-8.
- ISBN 8386328606.