The Making of Minorities on Europe's Periphery

Abstract

The Making of Minorities on Europe's Periphery Olena Palko Kathryn Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge: A Polish Borderland in the Interwar World. 368 pp. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. ISBN-13 978-0190067458. $82.00. Krista A. Goff, Nested Nationalism: Making and Unmaking Nations in the Soviet Caucasus. 336 pp. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021. ISBN-13 978-1501753275. $49.95. Lenny A. Ureña Valerio, Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities: Race Science and the Making of Polishness on the Fringes of the German Empire, 1840–1920. 320 pp. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2019. ISBN-13 978-0821423738. $72.00. According to conventional views, minorities became an issue in world politics only after the establishment of nation-states in East-Central Europe in the aftermath of World War I. Nonetheless, most recent scholarship tends to question the extent to which empires can "think" like nation-states—that is, pursue national consolidation via standardization of its diverse populations.1 Those newly formed governments in the region, meanwhile, are more often conceptualized as, using Roger Brubaker's definition, nationalizing states, essentially "ethnically heterogeneous [states] yet conceived as nation-states."2 In this theoretical debate, the Soviet Union [End Page 445] occupies a unique role, seen as neither a unitary state nor an empire but a mixture of both.3 That said, the books under review offer equally invaluable and methodologically innovative accounts of minority-state relations in each of their three settings. Lenny A. Ureña Valerio looks at Germany's colonial treatment of its Polish-speaking minority, as well as Polish colonial fantasies of the late 19th century; Kathryn Ciancia examines how the state produced and exercised minority categories in interwar Poland; and Krista A. Goff tells the story of how the minorities tried to secure their national future against centralizing tendencies in Soviet Azerbaijan. Although framed in different periods and geographies, read together these studies highlight important similarities in the state's objectives in the treatment of minorities, as well as shared minorities' experiences in nationalizing empires. All three authors divert their attention away from the center—be it Berlin, Warsaw, or Moscow—to the borderland territories incorporated at some point in time. These are, respectively, Prussian Poland—the territories of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth acquired by the Kingdom of Prussia during the partitions of Poland in the late 18th century; Volhynia—originally a part of the Russian partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that became part of Poland based on the 1921 Riga Peace Treaty; and Azerbaijan, a former imperial periphery and an independent nation from 1918 to 1920, incorporated into the Soviet Union as one of its union republics. With those territorial acquisitions came the need to organize nontitular populations and to manage national minority identifications and their rights. Although defining policies and their limits were set in the center, a closer look at the peripheries demonstrates how these minority communities came to navigate state policies and develop relations with respective state structures. Each of these books deals with a particular national experiment. For Ureña Valerio, 19th-century Prussian Poland is a place that, while being an object of German colonizing intentions, became a birthplace of Polish colonial fantasies. Poznanian Poles, driven by a romantic image of unclaimed lands or dire need of survival and national preservation, set off for far-distant places to create colonies of their own, either in East Africa or Brazil. Ciancia examines the role of second-tier actors—the army of experts, teachers, settlers, and border guards—during the so-called Volhynia experiment, when [End Page 446] the central authorities, wishing to consolidate this multiethnic region's position within the newly established Polish state, undertook to redraw its ethnic makeup by promoting Polish colonization and creating a Ukrainian identity loyal to the Polish state.4 Last, Goff provides a much-needed account of the Soviet experiment with nontitular minority nationalism. Although the end goal of this policy was to centralize the state and establish the Soviet regime in non-Russian peripheries, the Communist Party—at least on paper—was committed to national equality and went on to propagate national differences and secure cultural development for its diverse populations. These experiments...