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a shared Polish-Ukrainian culture under benign Polish guidance. By working within historically
grounded provincial units and encouraging the resurrection of premodern regional histories that were

embodied in forts, castles, and other vestiges of the Commonwealth, Polish elites reaffirmed, rather

than challenged, the contours of preexisting regions. Regionalism, then, was another Polish response

to the long-standing problem of state integration. On the one hand, the approach signaled an

appreciation of regional specificity, with regionalists arguing that the various parts of Poland had

developed in different ways under the partitions and suffered from economic, social, and national

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problems that needed to be dealt with at a provincial level. At the same time, however, regionalists

did not call for the marginalization of the state in favor of local political autonomy and instead

believed that they could reject political separatism and national homogenization alike by tailoring

state policies to fit regional conditions. As was the case with proponents of the Heimat movement in

Germany, Polish regionalists argued that an emphasis on regional characteristics would strengthen,

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rather than undermine, national and state unity.
In many ways, this faith in the project of utilizing local institutions to both draw upon and

shape a shared regional culture among Poles and Ukrainians emerged from the personal backgrounds

of regionalist leaders in Volhynia. Many of the men whom we will meet in this chapter hailed, as did

Józewski, from the Ukrainian-speaking borderlands and believed that they possessed the kinds of

insights into local mentalities that outsiders lacked. In their minds, it was not that regional identity

was a building block for national identity, but rather the reverse: only by accepting that Poles and

Ukrainians were separate national groups could the people of the province become true Volhynians.

As a British observer reported in 1930, Polish officials claimed that regional patriotism would do

15 Schenke, Nationalstaat und nationale Frage, 231.
16 Celia Applegate, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley, 1990); Alon Confino, The
Nation as a Local Metaphor: Württemburg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory, 1871–1918 (Chapel Hill,
1997); Katharine D. Kennedy, “Regionalism and Nationalism in South German History Lessons, 1871-1914,”
German Studies Review 12, no. 1 (1989): 11-33.

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