Uprisings also were condemned as folly by conservatives in Galicia, where the Kraków historical school critically reinterpreted Poland’s history. The conservatives were willing to cooperate with Vienna in exchange for concessions, and, as the Habsburg monarchy transformed itself into a dual Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1867, Galicia obtained local autonomy. From the 1860s the province was largely Polonized. Persecuted elsewhere, Polish culture could flourish there; the Universities of Kraków and Lwów (Lemberg) and the Academy of Arts and Sciences became cultural beacons radiating across the partition borders. There was less progress in the socioeconomic field. Ruled by conservative landowners, Galicia remained a poor and backward province. In its eastern part nascent Ukrainian nationalism clashed with that of the Poles.

The situation for Poles in Prussia at times appeared critical. German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s anti-Polish policies culminated in the Kulturkampf, designed to strengthen the cohesion of the newly created German Empire. In addition, policies of cultural and linguistic Germanization and German settlement in the provinces continuously threatened the Polish and Roman Catholic character of Poznania and West Prussia. A colonization commission was set up in 1886. Eight years later a society for the promotion of German interests in the east came into being. The Poles called it Hakata, after the initials of its founders. The Polish response took the form of credit unions, cooperative associations, and self-help institutions. Showing great solidarity and organizational talents, working hard, and raising socioeconomic standards, Prussian Poles developed characteristics that distinguished them from their countrymen under Russian or Austrian rule.

In the post-1863 decades, prevailing political attitudes took the form of Triple Loyalism, the belief that material and cultural progress in each part of divided Poland was predicated on loyalty to the ruling governments. This policy seemed to produce beneficial results only under Austria. The pursuit of riches was being represented as essentially patriotic even if realized under the harsh conditions of early capitalism. For the masses, with their rapid population growth, living conditions were deplorable. This led to their radicalization on the one hand and to a sizable emigration on the other. In the period 1870–1914, about 3.6 million people, mostly peasants, emigrated from Polish lands to the United States.

A reaction to that situation developed in the 1890s that had both a nationalist and a socialist character. The National Democratic movement originated with a Polish League organized in Switzerland; by 1893 the organization had transformed into the clandestine National League, based in Warsaw. It stressed its all-Polish character, rejected loyalism, and promoted national resistance, even uprisings, when opportune. Its nationalist ideology tinged with populism gradually evolved into “integral” nationalism, which placed national interest and national egoism above everything else. Affected by social Darwinist theories of survival of the fittest and natural selection, Polish nationalism advocated a struggle not only against the partitioning powers but also against the Ukrainians and the Jews, whose interests were seen as opposed to those of the Poles. The father of this integral nationalism was Roman Dmowski, whose writings stressed the need to create a modern Polish nation deriving its strength from the ethnically Polish masses.

Polish socialism, which in its early manifestations was purely a class movement with an emphasis on internationalism, began by the 1890s to stress an indissoluble connection between social revolution and Poland’s independence. At a conference held in Paris in 1892, the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) came into existence. Illegal under Russian rule, it had a counterpart in Galicia in the Polish Social Democratic Party led by Ignacy Daszyński. The dominant figure in the PPS was Józef Piłsudski, who saw the historic role of socialism in Poland as that of a destroyer of reactionary tsardom.

Doubly oppressed (nationally and socially), the Polish proletariat was to be the force to carry the struggle for social justice and national liberation. Opposing such views was the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, the forerunner of Polish communism. Its leading theorist, Rosa Luxemburg, argued that national independence would not promote the interests of the proletariat, who were integrated economically into the three partitioning states.

The outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904 created a tense atmosphere and sharpened the basic differences between the major political trends. While Dmowski and his supporters sought to extract concessions from the tsarist regime, Piłsudski promoted revolutionary nationalistic tactics. Both politicians went to Tokyo, where they presented their opposite programs to the Japanese. At the beginning of 1905, just as the revolution began to sweep Russia, Congress Poland responded to events with a school strike and a general workers’ strike, while Piłsudski’s PPS squads battled with Russian troops and police. The government offered limited concessions to the Poles in Congress Poland and the western provinces. Dmowski’s larger hopes, bound with the creation of the Russian Duma—in which the Poles were mainly represented by National Democrats—proved unfounded. The PPS, in turn, suffered internal splits, Piłsudski moving increasingly in an insurrectionary (national), as opposed to a revolutionary (social), direction.

During the first decade of the 20th century, a mass political culture developed in Polish lands. The Russian Revolution of 1905 contributed to the growth of a civil society in Congress Poland (with legal political parties and trade unions), though it was constantly undermined by Russian rule. In Austria the introduction of universal manhood suffrage in 1907 widened the political involvement of the masses. The Polish peasant movement that had risen in Galicia in the 1890s was beset by schisms. In 1913 there emerged from it the Polish Peasant Party led by Wincenty Witos. In the German partition a Polish national revival in Upper Silesia led by Wojciech Korfanty and one on a lesser scale in East Prussia affected for the first time regions that had not been part of the prepartition Commonwealth.