On Civilization's Edge: A Polish Borderland in the Interwar World

Abstract

Józef Piłsudski once quipped that Poland was like a bagel: everything of substance on the outside, empty inside. That was his way of valorizing the so-called Kresy, the eastern borderlands of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Dating from the Romantic period of the nineteenth century, the myth of the Kresy celebrated a Polish-ruled multiethnic space where diversity and difference had been respected. It has been argued that Piłsudski and his followers sought to foster a similar multiculturalism in their nascent state.The reality on the ground in the Second Polish Republic, the short-lived interwar state, looks somewhat different in Kathryn Ciancia's telling. Ciancia goes beyond the hoary and not always helpful dichotomy between notions of civic and ethnic nationhood, personified in the Polish case by the persons and camps of Piłsudski and Roman Dmowski, by examining more closely what transpired in the provinces, far removed from Warsaw. Her history of a discrete Polish borderland region is notably refracted through a global lens, with the Second Polish Republic located somewhere in the middle: not up to the West European standards of the day but rather perched precariously on the edge of the West, aspiring to “civilize” its own “East” within.The borderland region under investigation is the multiethnic borderland province of Volhynia, today a part of Ukraine. Like Poland in global perspective, this middling province—not interwar Poland's poorest, but close—occupied a similar place within the state: it was “an area of civilizational in-betweenness that both retained certain desirable premodern characteristics and was in desperate need of the right kind of modernization” (p. 9). The book's cast of characters—the nationally conscious, avowedly Polish border guards, local bureaucrats, urban planners, teachers, health care workers, military settlers, and so on—also seem to have been in the middle position: they were neither the central authorities (quite absent from the book) nor the locals who they came to “civilize.” These “second-tier players” (p. 11 and passim) were the people on the ground engaged in state- and nation-building—engaged in a more broadly defined politics, as Ciancia would have it.Elegantly written and impressively nuanced, On Civilization's Edge: A Polish Borderland in the Interwar World presents attempts at civilizing an all-too-challenging multiethnic European borderland. They seemed sentenced to fail, the bar set by the historically-conditioned Kresy myth being too high: how to modernize a fragile multiethnic borderland while respecting difference and allowing for (or even encouraging) regional distinctiveness? Ciancia's finely grained analysis, based on a close reading of a wide range of sources in at least five languages, demonstrates the limits of inclusion, even on the part of the Piłsudskiites. Instead, inclusion and exclusion are shown to vary situationally. Witness the contrast between the treatment of Jews and Ruthenes/Ukrainians. As Russified urban dwellers, Jews were considered too prevalent in the region's towns. Even a bona fide Piłsudskiite like Volhynian governor Henryk Józewski sought to dilute the Jewish element by expanding the urban borders to encompass the surrounding Slavic settlements—in this instance treating the Ruthenes/Ukrainians inclusively. By the end of the 1930s (and with Józewski out of power) Jews were reckoned unassimilable—thus excluded from the national body; by contrast, Ruthenes ultimately were labeled nationally uncertain, thus making them prime objects of (“re”)Polonization. In the end, Piłsudski's bagel proved not to be the bulwark of Polishness he postulated; nor was his multiethnic borderland ever fully integrated into the larger Polish whole (if one can speak thus of the interwar state, which resembled more a mini-empire than nation-state).Bookended by an impressive introduction and conclusion, seven substantive chapters deal more specifically with the region's towns and villages and the work of individual groups of second-tier actors over time. Each of Ciancia's chapters is a model of clarity, containing singular insights into attempts at modernizing a borderland region that doggedly persisted as a multiethnic backwater. A short review like this simply cannot do justice to this fine and pathbreaking book. On Civilization's Edge should be required reading for aspiring scholars in the field of Polish and East-Central European history and anyone interested in interwar Poland. Given the global framing of the book, even those interested in broader issues of European colonialism and imperialism could profit from reading it.