Page 286 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

Poles in an area where the Polish population was already a minority, ethnographers, demographers,

and army men mobilized the concept of national indeterminacy in order to push for more radical

political schemes.

By the mid-1930s, the acceptance that a Ukrainian national identity existed among the Slavic

populations, which had been a hallmark of Józewski’s approach, was being replaced by several other

arguments—that these populations were yet to form a national consciousness, that Ukrainians did not

constitute a real nation in the first place, and that people might be best understood as ethnographic

raw material to be exploited by the state. This shift toward highlighting national indeterminacy

provided Poles with a way of simultaneously denying a non-Polish national identity to such

populations and prescribing policies of Polonization as the only correct path toward nationalization.

On September 1, 1939, the same day that German tanks rolled into western Poland (and just a few

weeks before the Red Army would arrive in the east), an article in the magazine of the Petty Nobles

Union stated that “the Ukrainian race, rather than the Ruthenian race, is based on lies and

falsifications of history.” 116 Like the category of “the nation” that historians are so used to critiquing,

national indeterminacy also needs to be read as a politically expedient construct.

If non-Catholic populations in the eastern borderlands faced increased discrimination, the

logic of that discrimination did not operate in the same way across the board, but instead involved the

reconceptualization of the precise conditions for inclusion (and exclusion). As Polish elites doubted

that there was such a thing as a Ukrainian national identity, they began to emphasize that Jews were a

fundamentally separate group whose foreign characteristics and lack of native roots within the region

made them inassimilable. Officials used the idea of Jewish separateness not as the basis for granting

them rights as a national minority, but rather in an attempt to push for their physical removal from

the state through emigration. As was the case with schemes to undermine the concept of the

116 “Gdzie leży Ukraina?” Pobudka: Ilustrowany Dwutygodnik Związku Szlachty Zagrodowej (September 1, 1939),
3.

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