Page 19 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

DEFINING TERMS, MAKING INTERVENTIONS

By following in the footsteps of these people, we can both challenge a number of previously accepted

narratives about Polish history and theorize about key terms that are of interest to a much wider

group of scholars. There are, in particular, several terms that have become so deeply embedded in the

scholarship that they require a brief explanation of both what they have come to mean and how we

might challenge and reimagine them.

The first, almost inevitably in a book on modern eastern Europe, is nationalism.

Traditionally, studies of Polish history have tended to rely on what has become a canonical

distinction between two versions of nationalism, which itself corresponds with a broader division

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between civic and ethnic nationalisms in modern European history. On the one hand is the so-called
civic nationalism of Józef Piłsudski, who advocated for a more inclusionary definition of the Polish

nation; on the other, is that of Roman Dmowski, whose National Democracy movement (known in

Polish as Endecja) developed an increasingly exclusionary nationalist ideology from the late

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nineteenth century onward. If the former encouraged the participation of Jews, Ukrainians, and

other Polish citizens in the national project, the latter assumed that Ruthenians and eastern Slavic

minorities more broadly were not fully developed national groups (and would therefore be

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assimilated) and saw Jews as a threatening internal “other” that could never be considered Polish.

Much of the literature on interwar Poland has highlighted one side of this dichotomy or the

other. Studies of Polish anti-Semitism have understandably focused on the hateful rhetoric of the

right, in which Jews were accused of being both communists and capitalists and were compared to

23 For a critique of the general distinction beyond the Polish case, see Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity Without Groups
(Cambridge, Mass., 2004), 132-146.
24 Fairly typical is a section of Norman Davies’s Heart of Europe entitled “The Duel: Dmowski versus Piłsudski.”
Norman Davies, Heart of Europe: The Past in Poland’s Present (Oxford, 2001), 113-129.
25 On the Endecja’s approach to the Ruthenians, see Tomaszewski, Rzeczpospolita wielu narodów, 96.

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