Page 247 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

management, migration, and assimilation. Indeed, Polish scholars frequently participated in

conferences about the pan-European challenges of national and international demographic control.

After Piłsudski’s coup in 1926, the Polish government had already signaled its desire to carry

out scientific research into the state’s various national minorities and to provide funds for institutions

that mobilized the skills of the best and brightest within Polish academia. The most well-known of

the research initiatives, the Institute for Research into Ethnic Affairs (Instytut Badań Spraw

Narodowościowych; hereafter IBSN), had been founded in 1921, but became increasingly important

within the context of the Sanacja’s new attitude toward the state’s national minorities. Its journal,

Ethnic Affairs (Sprawy Narodowościowe), which was published from 1927 onward, included articles

on nationality questions from leading scholars and traced the activities of both national minorities

within Poland’s borders and Poles living as minorities in other states.

If the IBSN sponsored research into populations across the whole of Poland (and abroad), the

Commission for Scientific Research into the Eastern Lands (Komisja Naukowych Badań Ziem

Wschodnich; hereafter KNBZW), under whose auspices many of the IBSN’s experts carried out

6
research, was established at the beginning of 1934 with a specific focus on the eastern borderlands.

The year was a significant one in the official reconfiguration of Poland’s national minorities issue. In

September 1934, the Polish foreign minister Józef Beck told the League of Nations that Poland

would unilaterally renounce the Minority Treaty of 1919, citing what he saw as the inequalities

between the countries of western Europe and the successor states. Replacing the legalistic

international system for protecting minorities (which had actually long been a dead letter), the new

approach focused instead on demographic research and internal state-led planning.

Although its official task was to obtain “rational objective data for scientific and economic

policies in the east,” the Commission provides a good example of the close links between academic

6 For a good overview of the history of eastern borderland research in intewar Poland, see Wanda Paprocka,
“Instytucje i Organizacje Polskie na Kresach Wscodnich 1920-1939,” Etnografia Polska (2001) no. 1-2: 9-22.

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