Page 265 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

These proposals relied on new ways of technocratic thinking about the eastern borderlands as

a space. Drawing on an idea that was articulated most famously by the deputy Prime Minister and

Minister of the Treasury Eugeniusz Kwiatkowski in a speech in February 1936, elites began to speak

of a Poland that was divided into two regions: Poland A, which was characterized by economic

development, and Poland B, which remained mired in backwardness. But Kwiatkowski saw this

schema not simply as a domestic issue. Referring to an idea articulated by a French official at the

League of Nations, whereby Europe itself was divided between a more developed Europe A and a

less developed Europe B, Kwiatkowski argued that the European line ran through Poland itself. The

international mandate system was also based on such a schema, with countries divided into

categories of A, B, and C, depending on their relative levels of civilizational development.

Conceptualizing versions of Poland, Europe, and the world that were divided into developmental

zones, Polish modernizers tapped into a discourse of ordering that imposed crude distinctions onto

complex problems. Polish organizations that were invested in “developing” the eastern borderlands

quickly picked up on such language, arguing that they provided the instruments for carrying out the

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state’s task of “evening out the chasm that divided Poland A from Poland B.”

The idea of sending people eastward to promote the area’s simultaneous modernization and

Polonization was no innovation in the late 1930s. Not only had the military settlement program of the

early 1920s been cast as an internal “civilizing” initiative, but the very concept of “internal”

colonization in historically Polish areas had an intellectual heritage that dated back to the years prior

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to the First World War. At the same time, however, when ideas of large-scale settlement had been
discussed during the 1920s, their anticipated results had often seemed too meager. As early as 1926,

the National Democrat Stanisław Głąbiński had doubted that the eastern borderlands would provide a

comprehensive answer to the population problems that Poland faced, which he believed would best

52 Ludwik Grodzicki, “Polska A i Polska B,” Rocznik Ziem Wschodnich (1937), 22.
53 Benjamin P. Murdzek, Emigration in Polish Social-Political Thought, 1870-1914 (Boulder, 1977), 175.

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