‘We swear to fight for the inviolability of the borders of our motherland’: disabled veterans and social welfare in interwar Lviv

Abstract

ABSTRACT The newborn Second Polish Republic inherited a complex imperial legacy and a large minority population. The series of borderland conflicts and the Soviet–Polish War that followed the Great War added additional layers to the heterogeneity of the veteran population. Throughout the interwar era, the eastern borderlands became a source of interethnic, religious and political tension, and turned into a battleground of contested Polish and Ukrainian memory discourses. The article focuses on welfare policy as an instrument of state-building in the eastern Polish borderlands. The process of defining war disability took place alongside the process of nation-building. The question of the legal definition of ‘Polish disabled veteran’ turned into a discussion about who was a part of the national body. The article examines how the interconnections between the categories of war disability and ethnic and new social minorities forged new identities in interwar eastern Poland.