Page 16 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

Some, like border guards and provincial officials, were directly employed by the state, while others,

like military settlers, academics, and charity workers, received state subsidies for their organizations.

And yet, whether fully or partially funded by the state’s coffers, they were not simply the tentacles

through which state power flowed from Warsaw into the borderlands. Embedded within institutions

that had their own, sometimes competing, agendas, they might best be characterized—to borrow

phrases from Jun Uchida’s work on Japanese settlers in Korea—as the “brokers” of the Polish state

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project at the margins and the peripheral “mediators for the processes of modernity.” Neither
Warsaw-based politicians nor the ordinary populations of the province itself, these second-tier actors

were forced to contend with both of these constituencies.

Focusing on these self-appointed agents of civilization does not mean overlooking the

significance of more traditional political actors or discounting developments in the Polish parliament

(sejm) and in government circles in Warsaw. Key milestones, such as the signing of the Polish

Minority Treaty in 1919 (and Poland’s decision to renounce it in 1934), the official militarization of

the eastern border with the Soviet Union in 1924, and both Józef Piłsudski’s coup d’état of May 1926

and death nine years later, all shaped what was permissible at any given moment. But it does mean

rethinking the locus and dynamics of political power during the interwar years. Considering everyday

encounters between the people who were perceived to represent the state, on the one hand, and local

populations, on the other, forces us to broaden our definition of what constituted a political act in the

interwar Second Republic (or, indeed, in any modern state). What was at stake, we might ask, when

border guards went down to the river to stop peasants on the Polish side from looking at their

counterparts in the Soviet Union? Or when the military settler argued that he was creating a model

outpost of civilization for local peasants? Or when middle-class women and girl scouts went to teach

mothers in Volhynia about the correct way to wash and feed their children? In each of these cases,

21 Jun Uchida, Brokers of Empire: Japanese Settler Colonialism in Korea, 1876-1945 (Cambridge, MA, 2011), 394.

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