Roman Dmowski (1864–1939) was a Polish statesman. As the co-founder and chief ideologue of the right-wing National Democracy movement, he was one of interwar Poland's most influential politicians, known as the father of Polish nationalism. A prominent spokesman for Polish national aspirations during World War I and Poland's delegate to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, he was instrumental in the restoration of his homeland's independence, but, except a brief stint as foreign minister in 1923, he never wielded official political power. Before independence, Dmowski saw aggressive Germanization of ethnicaly Polish territories in the German Empire as the major threat to Polish culture and advocated a degree of accommodation with another partitioning power – the Russian Empire. He favored re-establishment of Polish independence by nonviolent means and supported policies favorable to the middle class. Convinced that only a Polish-speaking Roman Catholic could make a good Pole, he marginalized renascent Poland's ethnic minorities and he was vocally anti-Semitic. Dmowski was the chief political opponent of Józef Piłsudski, who sided with the Central Powers against Russia, and of his vision of Poland as a multinational federation. (Full article...)