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European mainstream, however, we must avoid relying on the assumption that interwar Poland can

and should be measured against sets of “European” norms—like liberalism, democracy, and

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modernity. In other words, if we decide to take up Brian Porter-Szűcs’s call to steer Polish
narratives away from the mold of exceptional tragedy and to place it squarely within a global

framework, we must simultaneously remind ourselves that modernity is neither a one-size-fits-all

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concept nor a morally superior set of characteristics.
This is, therefore, not a story about Polish modernity or civilization, but rather about the

myths and self-justifications that accompanied evocations of those terms. As the anthropologist

James Ferguson argued in his exploration of the Zambian Copperbelt, “the narrative of

modernization was always bad social science; it was (and is) a myth in the first sense, resting on

fundamental misperceptions about the modern history of urban Africa.” And yet, as Ferguson goes

on to reveal, it is also true that “the myth of modernization (no less than any other myth) gives form

to an understanding of the world, providing a set of categories and premises that continue to shape

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people’s experiences and interpretations of their lives.” In asking how diverse groups of Poles
created the categories that shaped—and were shaped by—their experiences in interwar Volhynia, I

am interested in engaging with this second idea. Instead of celebrating the “modern” aspects of

interwar Polish history, I foreground the question of what modernity and civilization came to mean in

the 1920s and 1930s, as well as how these concepts shaped—and were adapted into—local life.

It is also worth adding that modernity and civilization were by no means synonymous with

one another in the kresy. If civilization was generally seen as a positive, albeit vague, concept,

Social Rights,” Humanity: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 3,
no. 3 (2012): 297-319.
55 Tara Zahra, “Going West,” East European Politics and Societies 25 (November 2011): 785–91.
56 For the most recent challenge to the martyrdom narrative and an attempt to place Poland within global narratives,
see Brian Porter-Szűcs, Poland in the Modern World: Beyond Martyrdom (Chichester, UK, 2014).
57 James Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban life on the Zambian Copperbelt
(Berkeley, 1999), 14.

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