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argued, were of the “Nordic” type (which prevailed in Poland more generally), while those in the

northern areas of the province, such as Sarny, Kowel, and Luboml counties, were of the “Laponoid”

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type and were more closely related to the populations that lived in the province of Polesie. Color-
coded maps of predetermined and fixed racial groups suggested a scientific framework that was a far

cry from the more flexible concepts of nationality envisaged (however hierarchically) in Józewski’s

Commonwealth-based vision of Polish history.

MOVING PEOPLE, MOVING BORDERS

Scientific conclusions had real political implications. Indeed, policy-makers that sought more radical

schemes for the mass movement of people, both internally and beyond the borders of the interwar

state, mobilized the increasingly influential ideas of national indeterminacy in important ways. By

the mid-1930s, officials at the Ministry of the Interior were beginning to explore schemes that they

believed might solve the problem of overpopulation in a state where demographic growth had hit

12.3% in 1933. Unlike western European imperial powers, Poland had no external colonies to which

it could send those people whom it deemed to be surplus populations, attempts to set up settler

colonies in places like Brazil notwithstanding. While aggressive policies of emigration could

certainly serve as a way of getting rid of unwanted non-Polish populations, such as Jews and

Ukrainians, a policy long practiced in eastern Europe (and a theme to which we will return), some

elites believed that Poland’s domestic overpopulation problem could be lessened through colonizing

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the kresy itself.

50 Ibid., 225. This division was not Dworakowki’s invention, but instead built on the scholarship of Jan
Czekanowski who divided up the populations of Europe more generally into “racial types.”
51 The opening up of new areas of emigration, it was claimed, could lead in two to three years to the exit from
Poland of Ukrainian families to countries such as Canada, Ecuador, Brazil, and Argentina. Olgierd Grott, Instytut
Badań Spraw Narodowościowych i Komisja Naukowych Badań Ziem Wschodnich w planowaniu polityki II
Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej na Kresach Wschodnich (Kraków, 2013), 145-6.

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