Page 105 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

tier actors found themselves unable to control the movement of people, manage the dynamics within

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borderland communities, and figure out who exactly was crossing the border in the first place.

In listening to their voices, we gain a more nuanced picture of what civilization came to mean

at the border. In particular, and as this chapter will also show, the relationship between civilizing the

area and conceptualizing the region’s various nationalities (including Poles) was not always a

straight-forward one. While officials in Warsaw fretted about keeping non-Poles out, state officials

were often less concerned about the abstract concept of the nation and more worried about the

“uncivilized” peasantry’s susceptibility to behavior that they deemed irrational and unbecoming of a

modern citizenry. For them, this was not simply an abstract clash between Western and Eastern

civilizations—concepts that must have seemed rather distant from the border itself—but one between

the everyday mores and behaviors of incoming officials, on the one hand, and those of a “backward”

and unruly peasantry, on the other. Against a backdrop of the epic struggle between the Polish

(Western) world and its Soviet (Eastern) counterpart, this was also about managing civilization—

with a small “c.”

THE THREAT OF THE GREEN BORDER

Right from the outset, Polish politicians in Warsaw saw the eastern border as a problem. Having been

set by the terms of the Treaty of Riga, which had been signed between the Polish and Soviet

governments in March 1921, the border had to wait another two years for ratification by the Council

of Ministers of the Entente powers. The new border split the prewar Russian governorate of Volhynia

into two parts, with the Volhynian administrative province of the new Polish state taking just over

7 Charles S. Maier, “Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternative Narratives for the Modern Era,”
American Historical Review 105, no. 3 (2000): 807-831. For more on borders, see, for instance, Hastings Donnan
and Thomas M. Wilson, Borders: Frontiers of Identity, Nation and State (Oxford, 1999), 87. See also Michiel Baud
and Willem van Schendel, “Toward a Comparative History of Borderlands,” Journal of World History 8, no. 2
(1997): 211-242.

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