Page 15 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

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square kilometer in northern Volhynia. Being “on the edge,” it seemed, had become less a
Romantic status to be celebrated and more a problem to be solved by the tools of the modern state.

PEOPLE: SECOND-TIER AGENTS OF CIVILIZATION

If there was no denying that, for historical and geographical reasons, observable differences existed

between Volhynia and areas further west within the new state’s borders, a range of Polish elites

continued to do what their counterparts had been doing before the war: they created comparisons,

conceptualized difference, and mobilized narratives of backwardness in ways that were never

divorced from their own claims to political power. As they compiled statistics, interwar Poles

therefore not only tried to get to know the vast territories that they were charged with governing, but

simultaneously created civilizational maps that informed internal debates about who was qualified to

govern whom. If we view the Second Republic through their eyes, we can see how the constitutional

equality between citizens in a nominal democracy was less important than the creation of hierarchies

between different groups of people, a process that always accompanies civilizing missions.

Their professional identities varied. On the pages that follow, we will meet a colorful and

diverse cast of characters, which included (but was not limited to) border guards, state policemen,

boy and girl scouts, provincial officials, town planners, public health workers, regional activists,

members of the local intelligentsia, teachers, charity workers, military settlers, army men, and

academics. In spite of this diversity, however, these men—and, more rarely, women—shared goals,

strategies, assumptions, and techniques. Most fundamentally, each argued that they were qualified to

both make comparisons and act as the state’s civilizational conduits in the backwaters of Volhynia.

As we shall see, their relationship with the new state was never straightforward. On the one

hand, they saw the state (and state officials in Warsaw saw them) as an indispensable resource.

20 Mieczysław Orłowicz, Ilustrowany przewodnik po Wołyniu (Łuck, 1929), 8.

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