Page 150 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

This was, however, always a balancing act, one that revealed the exclusions inherent in the

Sanacja’s more inclusive vision of the Polish nation. While Kański explicitly rejected what he

referred to as the “Polonization” of Volhynia’s towns (a term that was associated with the National

Democrats) and adhered instead to a more peaceful vision of Polish cultural assimilation, he still

believed that Volhynia’s towns needed to take on more “Polish,” and therefore less “Jewish,”

characteristics. In deploying such ideas, he was not alone among Józewski’s county heads. At

another meeting later that year, the head of Równe county also stressed that Polish cultural and

educational activities needed to provide a “counterweight” against Russian culture in Równe, which,

he claimed, was maintained by the Jewish population and the small remaining contingent of

44
Russians. However much Józewski and his supporters disagreed with the Endecja’s assumption that
Western-style modernization and anti-Semitic Polonization were two sides of the same coin, they

still believed that state-led modernization could not be separated from an explicitly Polish campaign

to reduce what they saw as “Jewish influence.”

SPATIAL POLITICS: MOVING BEYOND THE CENTER

To explore the ways in which self-conscious civilizers sought to transform Volhynia’s towns from

“Jewish” into “Polish” spaces, it is worth focusing on efforts to regulate and expand urban

boundaries. Like the development of sewer systems, paved roads, and other urban facilities, policies

of boundary regulation were part of a more general set of processes that took place in much of

Europe in the period prior to the First World War, when urban planners and politicians watched and

learned from one another. The creation of Greater Kraków, a largely Polish-speaking city in the

Habsburg empire, took its inspiration from the late nineteenth-century expansion of the imperial

capital of Vienna. By the outbreak of the war, areas on the outskirts of Kraków had been transformed

44 “Protokół zebrania kierowników władz I-instancji, odbytego w dniu 19 listopada 1929 roku, w gmachu Starostwa
Powiatowego w Równem,” AAN MSW (Part 1) 87/100a.

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