Page 271 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

[INSERT FIGURE 7.2]

Figure 7.2: Map indicating changes to be made to the administrative borders of Poland during Phase I
of the plan. Source: AAN MSW (Part 1) 178/18.

While the changes were not implemented before the outbreak of the Second World War, their

endorsement by the Ministry of the Interior indicated a mounting consensus among civilian and

military leaders alike that the administrative and political unit of Volhynia had failed. Military

schemes were certainly discussed approvingly in civilian government circles. An inter-ministerial

commission at the Ministry of the Interior agreed with the military that Volhynia’s northern counties

deserved special treatment, and it placed its faith in the idea that redrawing administrative borders

would affect the fundamental characteristics of the area. After being annexed by Polesie, the

70
commission concluded, northern Volhynia would become part of a “purely Polesian” region. The

concept of national indeterminacy thus continued to provide an academic justification for radical

demographic policies.

(RE)POLONIZING VOLHYNIANS

Both the physical movement of people and the reconfiguration of borders around existing

populations rested on the widespread consensus that people were in the process of becoming

national. But a third demographic solution, which also emerged during the late 1930s, was based on a

slightly different narrative of national indeterminacy, one that imagined a sub-set of the population

not simply as ethnographic raw material that could be shaped into Poles, but rather as people who

had once been Poles only to have lost their Polish consciousness as a result of denationalizing

imperial policies. Again, such ideas were by no means new. Activists in the Borderland Guard had

70 Enclosure Nr. 2, AAN MSW (Part 1) 178/22; Letter of Ministry of the Interior (December 9, 1938), AAN MSW
(Part 1) 178/55.

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