Roman Dmowski

Dmowski was born on 9 August 1864 in Kamionek near Warsaw, in the Kingdom of Poland, which three years later became part of the Russian Empire (as Vistula Land).[4] His father was a road construction worker and later an entrepreneur.[4] Dmowski attended schools in Warsaw, studying biology and zoology at Warsaw University, from which he graduated in 1891.[4][5] As a student he became active in the Polish Youth Association "Zet" (Związek Młodzieży Polskiej "Zet"), where he was active in opposing socialist activists.[5] The Zet had links with the Liga Polska (Polish League), which Dmowski joined in 1889.[6] A key concept of the League was Polskość (Polishness), as opposed to trójlojalizm (triple loyalty).[6]

He also organized a student street demonstration on the 100th anniversary of the Polish Constitution of 3 May 1791.[5] For this he was imprisoned by Russian Imperial authorities for five months in the Warsaw Citadel.[5] He was then exiled to Libau and Mitau in Kurland (Latvia).[6] After 1890 he was also developing as a writer and publicist, publishing political and literary criticism in Głos, where he became close friends with Jan Ludwik Popławski, who would be his mentor.[5][7] After his release from exile, Dmowski became quite critical of the Liga Polska, accusing it of being controlled by Free Masons and being generally incompetent.[6]

In April 1893 Dmowski co-founded the National League and became its first leader.[8] The group differed from the Liga Polska as Dmowski insisted that there could be one Polish national identity, leading him to attack regionalism as a form of split loyalty that was weakening the Polish nation.[6] The same concept also excluded minorities such as Jews from his projected Polish nation.[6] In November 1893 he was sentenced to exile from the Vistula Land.[8] Dmowski went to Jelgava, and soon afterward in early 1895 to Lemberg, Austria-Hungary (modern Lviv, Ukraine, Lwów in Polish), where together with Popławski he began to publish a new magazine, Przegląd Wszechpolski (All-Polish Review).[8] In 1897, he co-founded the National-Democratic Party (Stronnictwo Narodowo-Demokratyczne or "Endecja").[7] The Endecja was to serve as a political party, a lobby group and an underground organization that would unite Poles who espoused Dmowski's views into a disciplined and committed political group.[9] In 1899, Dmowski founded the Society for National Education as an ancillary group.[10] From 1898 to 1900, he resided in France and Britain, and travelled to Brazil.[8] In 1901 he took up residence in Kraków, then part of the Austrian partition of Poland.[8] In 1903 he published a book, Myśli nowoczesnego Polaka (Thoughts of a Modern Pole), one of the first if not the first nationalist manifesto in European history.[7][11]

In Myśli nowoczesnego Polaka, Dmowski was harshly critical of the old Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth for exalting the nobility and for its tolerance for minorities, which contradicted his principle of "healthy national egoism".[12] He also rejected liberalism and socialism for putting the individual above the nation-state, which for Dmowski was the only unit that really mattered.[12] Dmowski argued that the privileged status of the aristocracy in the old Commonwealth had hindered national development, and what was needed was a strong sense of nationality that would unite the nation into one.[12] He also attacked the Romantic nationalism of the 19th century for viewing Poland as the "Christ of Nations", instead arguing for a hard-headed national egoism.[12] Dmowski opposed revolutionary means of fighting, preferring political struggle, and aimed for independence through increased autonomy.[7] After the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War, Dmowski met with Colonel Akashi Motojiro, the Japanese military attache in Sweden and spy-master for Japanese intelligence activities, in Kraków in March 1904. Although reluctant to collaborate with the Japanese, Dmowski agreed to Akashi's proposal that Polish soldiers in the Russian Army in Manchuria might be encouraged to defect to the Imperial Japanese Army.[13] He travelled to Tokyo to work out the details, and at the same time made a successful effort to prevent the Japanese from aiding a rival Polish political activist, Józef Piłsudski, who wanted assistance for a planned insurrection in Poland, an aspiration which Dmowski felt would be doomed to failure.[11][14][15]

In 1905, Dmowski moved to Warsaw, back in the Russian partition of Poland, where he continued to play a growing role in the Endecja faction.[16] During the Russian Revolution of 1905, Dmowski favoured co-operation with the Imperial Russian authorities and welcomed Nicholas II's October Manifesto of 1905 as a stepping stone on the road towards renewed Polish autonomy.[14] During the revolt in Łódź in June 1905, the Endeks, acting under Dmowski's orders, opposed the uprising led by Piłsudski's Polish Socialist Party (PPS).[14] During the course of the "June Days", as the Łódź uprising is known, a miniature civil war raged between Endecja and the PPS.[14] As a result of the elections to the First Duma (legislative assembly in the late Russian Empire), which were boycotted by the PPS, the National Democrats won 34 of the 55 seats allotted to Poland.[17] Dmowski and the Endecja saw the Duma as a way of improving Congress Poland's position within the Russian Empire as he considered guerrilla war to be impractical.[18] Dmowski himself was elected a deputy to the Second and Third Dumas (beginning on 27 February 1907) and was president of the Polish caucus within it.[16][19] He was seen as a conservative, and despite being a Polish caucus leader, he often had more influence on the Russian than the Polish deputies.[20] Between October 1905 and early 1906, over 2000 Poles were killed by Russian police or military and an additional 1000 were sentenced to death.[18] Even though Dmowski was often denounced as a sellout, he maintained that he was undertaking the only realistic course of action for Poland under the circumstances.[18]

Over time, Dmowski became more receptive to Russian overtures, particularly neoslavism, warming up to the idea that Poland and Russia may have a common future, particularly due to Germany being their common enemy.[19][20] In light of what he regarded as Russian cultural inferiority, Dmowski felt that a strong Russia was more acceptable than a strong Germany. In Dmowski's view, the Russian policy of Russification would not succeed in subjugating the Poles, while the Germans would be far more successful with their Germanisation policies.[7][19] He explained those views in his book Niemcy, Rosja i kwestia Polska (Germany, Russia and the Polish Cause), published in 1908.[20][21] This was not a universally popular attitude, and in 1909 Dmowski resigned his deputy mandate to focus on an internal political struggle within Endecja.[20] He lost the election to the Fourth Duma in 1912 to a socialist politician, Eugeniusz Jagiełło from the Polish Socialist Party – Left, who won with the support of the Jewish vote. Dmowski viewed this as a personal insult; in exchange, he organized a successful boycott of Jewish businesses throughout much of Poland.[22][23][24]

In 1914 Dmowski praised the Grand Duke Nicholas's Manifesto to the Polish Nation of 14 August, which vaguely assured the Tsar's Polish subjects that there would be greater autonomy for "Congress Poland" after the war and that the Austrian provinces of East and West Galicia, together with the Pomerania province of Prussia, would be annexed to the Kingdom of Poland when the German Empire and Austria-Hungary were defeated.[21][25] However, subsequent attempts on the part of Dmowski to have the Russians make firmer commitments along the lines of the Grand Duke Nicholas's manifesto were met with elusive answers.[21][25] Nonetheless, Dmowski's pro-Russian and anti-German propaganda succeeded in frustrating Piłsudski's plans of causing an anti-Russian uprising, and bolstered his position as an important Polish political figure on the international scene, especially with the Triple Entente.[19][26] In November he became one of the active members of the Polish National Committee.[22]

Award of Honorary Doctorate to Roman Dmowski - Cambridge University - 11th August 1916

In 1915, Dmowski, increasingly convinced of Russia's impending defeat, decided that to support the cause of Polish independence he should go abroad to campaign on behalf of Poland in the capitals of the western Allies.[27] During his lobbying efforts, his friends included such opinion makers as the British journalist Wickham Steed. In particular, Dmowski was very successful in France, where he made a very favourable impression on public opinion.[28] He gave a series of lectures at Cambridge University, which impressed the local faculty enough that he was given an honorary doctorate.[27] In August 1917, in Paris, he created a new Polish National Committee aimed at rebuilding a Polish state.[21][27] That year he also published, at his own expense, Problems of Central and Eastern Europe, that he soon distributed among numerous English speaking diplomats.[26][27] He was a vocal critic of Austro-Hungary, and campaigned for the creation of a number of Slavic states (including for the Czechs, as well as non-Slavic Hungarians and Romanians) in its place.[29] Within the Polish political community, he opposed those who supported allying themselves with Germany and Austria-Hungary, including supporters of a vague German proposal for a Regency Kingdom of Poland, with undefined borders, that Germany promised to create after World War I (while in secret, actually planning to strip it of up to 30,000 square kilometres for German colonization after the removal of its Polish population).[29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36]

In 1917 Dmowski laid out a plan for the borders of a re-created Polish state; it would include Greater Poland, Pomerania with Gdańsk, Upper Silesia, south strip of East Prussia and Cieszyn Silesia.[37] In September that year, Dmowski's National Committee was recognized by the French as the legitimate government of Poland.[28] The British and the Americans were less enthusiastic about Dmowski's National Committee, but likewise recognized it as Poland's government a year later.[38] However, the Americans refused to provide backing for what they regarded as Dmowski's excessive territorial claims (Dmowski's Line). The American President Woodrow Wilson reported, "I saw Mr. Dmowski and Mr. Paderewski in Washington, and I asked them to define Poland for me, as they understood it, and they presented me with a map in which they claimed a large part of the earth."[39]

In part, Wilson's objections stemmed from the dislike of Dmowski personally. One British diplomat stated, "He was a clever man, and clever men are distrusted; he was logical in his political theories and we hate logic; and he was persistent with a tenacity which was calculated to drive everybody mad."[40] Another area of objection to Dmowski was with his antisemitic remarks, as in a speech he delivered at a dinner organized by the writer Gilbert Keith Chesterson, that began with the words, "My religion came from Jesus Christ, who was murdered by the Jews."[41] When British Prime Minister David Lloyd George criticized Dmowski and the committee, Dmowski saw this as a result of Lloyd George's representation of Jewish interests.[27] He refused to admit a single Polish Jew to the National Committee, despite support for such a proposal from Paderewski.[29] A number of American and British Jewish organizations campaigned during the war against their governments recognizing the National Committee.[41] Another leading critic of Dmowski was the historian Sir Lewis Namier, a Jew who served as the British Foreign Office's resident expert on Poland during the war, and who claimed to be personally offended by antisemitic remarks made by Dmowski. Namier fought hard against British recognition of Dmowski and "his chauvinist gang".[41] In turn, Dmowski's experiences at that time convinced him of the existence of an international "Judeo-Masonic conspiracy, unfriendly towards Poland and intransigently hostile to his [Endecja] party".[42]

Polish territorial demands at the Paris Peace Conference 1919 (Dmowski's Line) on ethnographical background and borders of Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth 1772

At the end of the World War, two governments claimed to be the legitimate governments of Poland: Dmowski's in Paris and Piłsudski's in Warsaw. To put an end to the rival claims of Piłsudski and Dmowski, the composer Ignacy Jan Paderewski met with both men and persuaded them to reluctantly join forces.[43] Both men had something that the other needed. Piłsudski was in possession of Poland after the war, but as the Pole who had fought with the Austrians for the Central Powers against the Russians, he was distrusted by the Allies. Piłsudski's newly reborn Polish Army, formed from his Polish Legions, needed arms from the Allies, something that Dmowski was much better suited to persuade the Allies to deliver upon.[44] Beyond that, the French were planning to send the Blue Army of General Józef Haller – loyal to Dmowski – back to Poland. The fear was that if Piłsudski and Dmowski did not put aside their differences, a civil war might break out between their partisans.[45] Paderewski was successful in working out a compromise in which Dmowski and himself were to represent Poland at the Paris Peace Conference while Piłsudski was to serve as provisional president of Poland.[44] Not all of Dmowski's supporters accepted this compromise, and on 5 January 1919, Dmowski's partisans (led by Marian Januszajtis-Żegota and Eustachy Sapieha) attempted a failed coup against Piłsudski.[46]

As a Polish delegate at the Paris Peace Conference and a signatory of the Versailles Treaty, Dmowski exerted a substantial influence on the Treaty's favorable decisions regarding Poland.[26] On 29 January 1919, Dmowski met with the Allies' Supreme War Council for the first time; his five-hour presentation there, delivered in English and French, was described as brilliant.[47] At the meeting, Dmowski stated that he had little interest in laying claim to areas of Ukraine and Lithuania that were formerly part of Poland, but no longer had a Polish majority. At the same time Dmowski strongly pressed for the return of Polish territories with Polish-speaking majorities taken by Prussia from Poland in the 1790s, as well as for some territories beyond Poland's pre-1772 borders, such as southern East Prussia and Upper Silesia. Dmowski himself admitted that from a purely historical point of view, ethnic-linguistic considerations aside, the Polish claims to Silesia were not entirely strong, but he claimed it for Poland on economic grounds, especially the coal fields.[44] Moreover, Dmowski claimed that German statistics had lied about the number of ethnic Poles living in eastern Germany and that "these Poles were some of the most educated and highly cultured in the nation, with a strong sense of nationality and men of progressive ideas".[44] In addition, Dmowski, with the strong backing of the French, wanted to send the "Blue Army" to Poland via Danzig, Germany (modern Gdańsk, Poland); it was the intention of both Dmowski and the French that the Blue Army create a territorial fait accompli.[29][44] This proposal created much opposition from the Germans, the British and the Americans, and finally the Blue Army was sent to Poland in April 1919 via land.[44] Piłsudski was opposed to needlessly annoying the Allies, and it has been suggested that he did not care much about the Danzig issue.[48]

In regard to Lithuania, Dmowski did not view Lithuanians as having a strong national identity, and viewed their social organization as tribal. Those areas of Lithuania that had either Polish majorities or minorities were claimed by Dmowski on the grounds of self-determination. In the areas with Polish minorities, the Poles would act as a civilizing influence; only the northern part of Lithuania, which had a solid Lithuanian majority, was Dmowski willing to concede to the Lithuanians.[48] His initial plans for Lithuania involved giving it an autonomy within a Polish state.[27][29] This caused Dmowski to have very acrimonious disputes with the Lithuanian delegation at Paris.[49] With regard to the former Austrian province of East Galicia, Dmowski claimed that the local Ukrainians were quite incapable of ruling themselves and also required the civilizing influence of Polish leadership.[50] In addition, Dmowski wished to acquire the oil fields of Galicia.[50] His support for that was however more lackluster than that for other regions, and he opposed Piłsudski's proposal of an alliance or federation with Ukrainians.[29] From the Allied powers only the French supported Polish claims to Galica wholeheartedly. In the end, it was the actual fighting on the ground in Galicia, and not the decisions of the diplomats in Paris, that decided that the region would be part of Poland.[51] The French did not back Dmowski's aspirations in the Cieszyn Silesia region, and instead supported the claims of Czechoslovakia.[52] Dmowski for a long time had praised the Czechs as model for national restoration in face of Germanization, and despite his dispute with Czech political leaders, his opinion of the Czech people as a whole remained positive.[53]

Forever a political opponent of Piłsudski, Dmowski favored what he called a "national state", a state in which the citizens would speak Polish and be of the Roman Catholic faith.[54] If Piłsudski's vision of Poland was based on the historical multiethnic state that had existed under the Jagiellonian dynasty, which he hoped to recreate with a multinational federation (Międzymorze federation),[55] Dmowski's vision was the earlier Polish kingdom ruled by the Piast dynasty, ethnically and religiously homogeneous.[54] Piłsudski believed in a wide definition of Polish citizenship in which peoples of different languages, cultures and faiths were to be united by a common loyalty to the reborn Polish state.[56][57] Dmowski regarded Piłsudski's views as dangerous nonsense, and felt that the presence of large number of ethnic minorities would undermine the security of Polish state. At the Paris Peace Conference, he argued strenuously against the Minority Rights Treaty forced on Poland by the Allies.

Dmowski himself was disappointed with the Treaty of Versailles, partly because he was strongly opposed to the Minority Rights Treaty imposed on Poland and partly because he wanted the German-Polish border to be somewhat farther to the west than Versailles allowed. Both of these disappointments Dmowski blamed on what he claimed was the "international Jewish conspiracy". Throughout his life, Dmowski maintained that the British Prime Minister David Lloyd George had been bribed by a syndicate of German-Jewish financiers to give Poland what Dmowski considered to be an unfavorable frontier with Germany. His relations with Lloyd George were very poor. Dmowski found Lloyd George to be arrogant, unscrupulous and a consistent advocate of ruling against Polish claims to the West and the East.[58] Dmowski was very offended by Lloyd George's ignorance of Polish affairs and in particular was enraged by his lack of knowledge about river traffic on the Vistula.[58] Dmowski called Lloyd George "the agent of the Jews".[58] Lloyd George in turn claimed in 1939 that "Poland had deserved its fate".[59]

Dmowski, 1936

Dmowski was a deputy to the 1919 Legislative Sejm, but he attended only a single session, seeing the Sejm as too chaotic for him to exert much influence; he also spent much of that year either in Paris or recuperating from a lung infection, in Algeria.[60] He reorganized endecja into a new party, Popular National Union (Związek Ludowo-Narodowy).[21] During the Polish-Soviet War he was a member of the Council of National Defense and a vocal critic of Piłsudski's policies.[21][60] In the aftermath of the war, Polish eastern borders were similar, if somewhat smaller, from what became known as Dmowski's Line.[60]

When the time came to write a Polish constitution in the early 1920s, the National Democrats insisted upon a weak presidency and strong legislative branch. Dmowski was convinced that Piłsudski would become president and saw a weak executive mandate as the best way of crippling his rival. The constitution of 1921 did indeed outline a government with a weak executive branch.[61] When Gabriel Narutowicz, a friend of Piłsudski, was elected president by the Sejm in 1922, he was seen by many among endecja as having been elected with the support of the parties representing the national minorities, with the notable backing of the Polish Jewish politician Yitzhak Gruenbaum.[62][63] After Narutowicz's election, the National Democrats started a major campaign of vilification of the "Jewish president" elected by "foreigners".[63] Subsequently, a fanatical National Democratic supporter, painter Eligiusz Niewiadomski assassinated Narutowicz.[62]

He was a Minister of Foreign Affairs from October to December 1923 in the government of Wincenty Witos.[60] That year he received the Order of Polonia Restituta from the government of Władysław Sikorski.[60]

In 1926, in the aftermath of Piłsudski's May coup d'état, Dmowski founded the Camp of Great Poland (Obóz Wielkiej Polski), though he would find himself more of an ideologue than a leader, as he was displaced by new, younger politicians.[64][65] In 1928 he founded the National Party (Stronnictwo Narodowe).[64] He kept publishing newspaper articles, brochures and books.[64] With declining health, he mostly retired from politics by 1930.[21] In 1934, a section of the youth wing of the Endecja found Dmowski insufficiently hardline for their taste and broke away to found the more radical National Radical Camp (known by its Polish acronym as the ONR).[64] His last major campaign was a series of political attacks on the alleged "Judeo-Masonic" associates of President Ignacy Mościcki.[66]

Weakening in health, Dmowski moved to the village of Drozdowo near Łomża, where he died on 2 January 1939 at the age of 74.[67]

Dmowski was buried at the Bródno Cemetery in Warsaw in the family grave.[67] His funeral was widely attended,[67] with at least 100,000 attendees; the Piłsudski's legacy sanacja government snubbed him without any official representative attending.[68]

Statue of Dmowski in Warsaw

The Roman Dmowski Roundabout in Warsaw in 2022

Dmowski is considered one of the most influential conservative politicians in the history of modern Poland, although his legacy is controversial and he continues to be a highly polarizing figure. He has been called "the father of Polish nationalism" and the "icon of the contemporary Polish political right" who, as a signatory of the Treaty of Versailles, played a critical role in the restoration of Polish independence after World War I.[97][26][98] Conversely, he has been described as the founder of contemporary Polish antisemitism and criticized for his disdain for women's rights.[99] Dmowski's life and work has been subject to numerous academic articles and books. Andrzej Walicki in 1999 noted that main sources on Dmowski are Andrzej Micewski's Roman Dmowski (1971), Roman Wapiński's Roman Dmowski (1988) and Krzysztof Kawalec's Roman Dmowski (1996).[26]

Suppressed in communist Poland, Dmowski's legacy has been more widely recognised since the fall of communism in 1989. A bridge in Wrocław was named after him in 1992.[100] In November 2006 a statue of Roman Dmowski was unveiled in Warsaw; it led to a series of protests from organizations which see Dmowski as a fascist and an enemy of progressive politics; due to similar protests plans to raise statues or memorials elsewhere have been delayed.[101][102][103] The political commentator, Janusz Majcherek, wrote in 2005: "Instead of a modern Conservative Party, such as was able to modernize Britain or Spain, we find in Poland a cheap copy of the Endecja, in which an old-fashioned pre-war nationalism mingles with a pre-Vatican II Catholicism, united in its rejection of modernization and mistrust of the West".[104] Both Jarosław Kaczyński and Lech Kaczyński have cited Dmowski as an inspiration. Lech, then the mayor of Warsaw, supported the erection of the Dmowski statue in 2006.[98]

On 8 January 1999 he was honoured by the Polish Sejm with special legislation "for his achievement for the independence of Poland and expansion of Polish national consciousness". The document honours him also for founding Polish school of political realism and responsibility, shaping Polish (especially the Western) borders and "emphasizing the firm connection between Catholicism and Polishness for the survival of the Nation and the rebuilding of the State".[70][105]

Dmowski was awarded several state awards: the Grand Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta (1923), Order of the Star of Romania and Order of Oranje-Nassau. He received honorary degrees from Cambridge University (1916) and the University of Poznań (1923). He refused other awards.[106] On 11 November 2018 (100th anniversary of Polish Independence), he was posthumously awarded the Order of the White Eagle.

• Myśli nowoczesnego Polaka (Thoughts of a Modern Pole), 1902.
• Niemcy, Rosja a sprawa polska (Germany, Russia and the Polish Cause), 1908. French translation published under the title: La question polonaise (Paris 1909).
• Separatyzm Żydów i jego źródła (Separatism of Jews and its Sources), 1909.
• Upadek myśli konserwatywnej w Polsce (The Decline of Conservative Thought in Poland), 1914.
• Polityka polska i odbudowanie państwa (Polish Politics and the Rebuilding of the State), 1925.
• Zagadnienie rządu (On Government), 1927.
• Kościół, naród i państwo (The Church, Nation and State), 1927.
• Świat powojenny i Polska (The World after War and Poland), 1931.
• Przewrót (The Coup), 1934.

Wikiquote has quotations related to Roman Dmowski.

• History of Poland (1918-1939)
• Poland in World War I
• Dmowski's Line

• Cang, Joel: "The Opposition Parties in Poland and Their Attitude towards the Jews and the Jewish Question" Jewish Social Studies, Volume 1, Issue #2, 1939. pages 241–256
• Dabrowski, Patrice M. "Uses and Abuses of the Polish Past by Józef Piłsudski and Roman Dmowski," The Polish Review (2011) 56#1 pp. 73–109 in JSTOR
• Davies, Norman "Lloyd George and Poland, 1919–20," Journal of Contemporary History, (1971) 6#3 pp 132–54 in JSTOR
• Fountain, Alvin Marcus Roman Dmowski: Party, Tactics, Ideology 1895–1907, Boulder: East European Monographs, 1980 ISBN 0-914710-53-2.
• Groth, Alexander J. "Dmowski, Piłsudski and Ethnic Conflict in Pre-1939 Poland," Canadian-American Slavic Studies (1969) 3#1 pp 69–91.
• Komarnicki, Titus Rebirth of the Polish Republic: A Study in the Diplomatic History of Europe, 1914–1920, London, 1957.
• Kossert, Andreas. "Founding Father of Modern Poland and Nationalistic Antisemite: Roman Dmowski," in In the Shadow of Hitler: Personalities of the Right in Central and Eastern Europe edited by Rebecca Haynes and Martyn Rady, (2011) pp 89–105
• Lundgreen-Nielsen, K. The Polish Problem at the Paris Peace Conference: A Study in the Policies of the Great Powers and the Poles, 1918–1919: Odense, 1979.
• Macmillan, Margaret Paris 1919 : Six Months That Changed The World, New York : Random House, 2003, 2002, 2001 ISBN 0-375-50826-0, pp 207–28
• Mendelsohn, Ezra. The Jews of East Central Europe between the World Wars, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983 ISBN 0-253-33160-9.
• Porter, Brian. When Nationalism Began to Hate. Imagining Modern Politics in Nineteenth-Century Poland, (Oxford University Press, 2000). ISBN 0-19-515187-9
• Seitz, Richard George. "Dmowski, Piłsudski, and the Ideological Clash in the Second Polish Republic." PhD dissertation University of Washington., 1975.
• Valasek, Paul S. Haller's Polish Army in France, Chicago : 2006 ISBN 0-9779757-0-3.
• Walicki, Andrzej. "The Troubling Legacy of Roman Dmowski," East European Politics & Societies (2000) 14#1 pp 12–46. stresses xenophobia, anti-Semitism and role of Church
• Wandycz, Piotr Stefan "Dmowski's Policy and the Paris Peace Conference: Success or Failure?" from The Reconstruction of Poland, 1914–23, edited by P. Latawski: London, 1992.
• Wandycz, Piotr S. "Poland's Place in Europe in the Concepts of Piłsudski and Dmowski," East European Politics & Societies (1990) 4#3 pp 451–468.
• Zamoyski, Adam The Polish Way A Thousand-Year History of the Poles and their Culture, London: John Murray Ltd, 1987 ISBN 0-7195-4674-5.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Roman Dmowski.

• Website dedicated to Roman Dmowski
• Roman Dmowski's funeral (video)
• TVP Opole documentary about Roman Dmowski
• Newspaper clippings about Roman Dmowski in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW
• Works by Roman Dmowski at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)