Abstract

 
 
 Olgierd Górka was a historian specialized in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe who took actively part in the political debate concerning the place of minorities in Poland. He occupied different roles in the public sphere and appeared to have insistently tried to embody the voice of politically marginalised citizens of Poland. Olgierd Górka argued for a strong link between the Polish state and its citizens as a precondition for their mutual survival. His life exemplifies the discussion around the definition of the people, at the heart of the legitimation of modern nation-states in Central Europe during the 20th century. The debate initiated by Olgierd Górka helps to better understand how the modern Polish state, born from the ashes of three empires, defined Polish citizenship and how it evolved during the upheavals of the interwar and the post-war period.
 
 
Highlights
The essential trait of populism seems to be the claim of being a people’s exclusive incarnation. Whether this claim is interpreted as a pathology of democracy (Rosanvallon 2002) or as intrinsically antidemocratic (Müller 2016), the questions populism raises are vital in the European modern states of the post WWI period
As the people became the sovereign modern state, replacing the monarchy of the Ancient Regime (Hermet 2011: 154), defining the people amounts to excluding certain types of citizens, either because they belong to the elite, opposed here to the people, or for “ethnic” motives
The most salient trait of populism seems to be, its particular discourse, distinctive in its form and content, and best captured by Guy Hermet (Hermet 2011: 25): The method of production of the “popular”[by the populists] [...] is based [...] on the unilateral capture and in their raw state of the individual prejudices of a more or less considerable mass of people or sometimes the majority of them. It is these individual prejudices that the populists turn into collective myths whose factious or fallacious character results from their dissonance with the long-term legitimization work that conforms to the dominant mode of political socialization
Summary
The essential trait of populism seems to be the claim of being a people’s exclusive incarnation. The state-centered conception of “assimilation” or “loyalty” saturated the public debate in the interwar period In this context, some attempted to shape the collective discourse using expert knowledge, as a way to frame the discussion and define some practical policies, based on a “reliable” perception of the situation. One of the problems identified by Górka was that the Ukrainian question arose for the Poles in the context of a rich cultural, literary and historical heritage It was marked by the symbolic function of Eastern Europe and Ukraine, in nineteenth-century literature relating to the history of the First Polish Republic, with its main representative Henryk Sienkiewicz, the author of the trilogy about Polish history, written between 1884 and 1888. He did not deny the importance of literary myths in politics and took the example of William Tell for Switzerland, as an example of a fertile myth
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