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national separateness dwindled, schemes that had long been discussed—internal colonization,

administrative reorganization, religious conversion, and mass emigration—began to gain greater

political currency, and, in some cases, were even partially implemented. They were the natural

corollary of a new—and increasingly impatient—approach.

DEMOGRAPHIC ANXIETIES, DEMOGRAPHIC SOLUTIONS

In the early 1930s, Polish state officials, political commentators, and academics were already

highlighting what they saw as the demographic basis for their state’s persistent political problems.

Their obsession echoed that of their counterparts across Europe whose concerns about increased

freedom of movement across the globe had, since the late nineteenth century in particular, led to

attempts to ossify state borders, increase surveillance over migrants, and carry out full-scale attempts

4
to limit human mobility. In the wake of the First World War and the emergence of nation-states as

the normative units of sovereignty in Europe, elites continued to assume that national groups

competed against one another for demographic dominance. Across the continent, many Europeans

expressed their concerns about the effects that declining birthrates would have on the titular

nationality of a nation-state. Most famously, the French government created pronatalist schemes and

attempted to replenish its populations with more “assimilable” white European immigrants (including

5
Poles). While academics in Poland primarily concerned themselves with the opposite problem—that

of overpopulation—they were nevertheless deeply engaged in global debates about population

4 For more on this argument about the state’s increased role in the processes of both emigration and immigration in
various nineteenth-century European contexts, see Tara Zahra, The Great Departure: Mass Migration from Eastern
Europe and the Making of the Free World (New York, 2016). On surveillance over emigrants, see Mark Choate,
Emigrant Nation: The Making of Italy Abroad (Cambrduge, MA, 2008); on surveillance over immigrants, see
Sammartino, The Impossible Border; Clifford D. Rosenberg, Policing Paris: The Origins of Modern Immigration
Control Between the Wars (Ithaca, 2006).
5 Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (New York, 1998), 76-103. On France, see
Camiscioli, Reproducing the French Race.

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