Page 24 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

Bohemia, Styria, and eastern Galicia to Upper Silesia and Saxony, these people constituted a thorn in

37
the side of totalizing national projects. By making national indifference visible, historians have

attributed greater agency to those people whom an older generation of scholars had assumed were

38
little more than the passive receptors of elite-led nationalism. And yet if we are sensitive to local
stories, it soon becomes apparent that the concept of national indifference cannot be applied

unproblematically to all multiethnic borderlands. While scholars have frequently focused their

attention on areas in which local people could—and did—shift between national identities that were

sanctioned and institutionalized by the state, the case of Volhynia shows how Polish elites

simultaneously worried about national indifference and created a concept of national indeterminacy

(or proto-nationality), which allowed them to connect uncrystallized levels of national consciousness

with “backwardness.” By deliberately highlighting national indeterminacy—a concept that was just

as constructed and just as politically expedient as that of either “the nation” or the “nationally

indifferent”—they attempted to invalidate rival political claims to sovereignty, particularly during the

late 1930s. Indeed, the apparent liminality of a borderland like Volhynia meant that it was

simultaneously feared as a place in which people (Poles) might lose their national consciousness and

promoted as a wellspring for potential (or lost) members of the nation.

If a close study of the interactions between self-declared civilizers and the local populations

whom they encountered on the margins displaces the overly neat divide between strains of Polish

nationalism, it also invites us to ask new questions about what kind of state this was and how it can

be understood within the global context. In short, should historians see the Second Republic as a

post-imperial nation-state (albeit one with a large non-Polish population) or as a mini-empire? The

37 See many of the works cited in footnote 35.
38 For a useful overview, see Tara Zahra, “Imagined Non-Communities: National Indifference as a Category of
Historical Analysis,” Slavic Review 69, no. 1 (2010): 93-119. Older works that look at the more mechanical
processes of modernization and nationalism, see Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, 1983); Weber,
Peasants into Frenchmen; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of
Nationalism (London, 1983).

24