Page 104 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

conflict, and particularly the Battle of Warsaw in August 1920, which one British politician would

later dub “the eighteenth decisive battle of the world,” allowed interwar Poles of various political

3
stripes to reuse familiar narratives about the nation’s role in defending the European continent. If
much of this language revolved around keeping something out rather than annexing something new,

however, Poles in the 1920s also perpetrated the myth that their nation had traditionally spread

civilized behavior to the “wild fields” of the East as a consequence of an ever-expanding frontier.

The concept of the kresy itself carried connotations of both defending the homeland and encouraging

what one scholar called “a militarized, masculine, aggressive identity of a true Pole, convinced that

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he carries a civilising mission.” The nineteenth-century poems of Wincenty Pol, who had

popularized the term kresy and valorized the heroic role of Poles on the eastern frontier, enjoyed

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renewed fame with the founding of the Second Republic.
As historians have argued, however, borders always have multiple meanings. “If their

physicality is a signifier,” wrote Tamar Herzog in a recent forum on the subject in the American

Historical Review, “their meaning is determined by the actions taken by multiple individuals and

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groups on several levels.” While this chapter begins by tracing the ways in which a range of Poles

resurrected the older civilizational significance of the border in the early-to-mid-1920s and focused

on the idea that non-Poles (particularly Jews) should be kept out, I am just as concerned with the

perspectives of those state officials, policemen, and border guards who made their way into the local

spaces around the border. In a world in which state borders were supposed to be inviolable—a

concept that stood in marked contrast to that of the more fluid early modern frontier—these second-

3 Viscount D’Abernon, The eighteenth decisive battle of the world: Warsaw, 1920 (London, 1931).
4 Snochowska-Gonzalez, “Post-colonial Poland,” 718.
5 Kolbuszewski, Kresy, 5-49.
6 “AHR Conversation: Walls, Borders, and Boundaries in World History,” American Historical Review 122, no. 5
(2017): 1521.

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