Page 23 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

subject it to rigorous historicizing. Why, he asks, did nationalists create borderlands in the first

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place? What did they celebrate and what did they fear about such spaces?

Tracing the work of the second-tier actors builds on these questions and methodologies by

showing how various people constructed the Volhynian borderland, first and foremost, as a space of

competition. Tropes of backwardness, I will argue, helped these Polish elites to separate local people

out into appropriate categories along national lines, with Polish civilizers claiming that Poles alone

could bring European values to both Volhynia’s largely Jewish towns and its predominantly

Ukrainian villages. But competitions cut across, as well as ran along, national lines. If at the end of

the First World War, Polish elites had issued joyful proclamations of national unity, the story of

Volhynia suggests that they were simultaneously engaged in vociferous arguments about which types

of ethnic Poles were qualified to lead the state along the path toward civilization, based on their

experiences of the various partitioning empires. As these complex processes unfolded on a day-to-

day level, interethnic battles in—and over—this contested space frequently intersected with political

rivalries between members of the same national “group.” Competing for power in post-imperial

Poland, these men and women created, rather than simply accepted, the idea of Volhynia as a

borderland, using it as a foil to assert the centrality of their institutional and professional roles. In

other words, constructing civilizational hierarchies between national groups was a process that

always operated in tandem with attempts to create the nation itself.

While the book builds on the rich and well-established scholarship on east European

borderlands, however, it also offers a new approach by reimagining the framework of “national

indifference” that has proved so influential in the field. For Judson, Tara Zahra, and many others,

national side-switchers in the Habsburg and German empires engaged in, rather than removed

themselves from, modern politics by choosing not to settle for a single national identity. From

36 Judson, Guardians of the Nation, particularly 17-18. As Judson points out, those who lived in what German and
Czech nationalists saw as a “language frontier” did not perceive of their environment in such terms.

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