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feature film that traced the Ukrainian-Polish conflict after 1943 in graphic detail opened with scenes

of prewar Volhynia’s interethnic heterogeneity, if not always harmony—an interfaith wedding

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between a young Polish woman and her Ukrainian beau.
Civilizational hierarchies were not, however, erased in the brave new world of the 1990s. On

the contrary, if the revival of interest in the kresy implied a celebration of Poland’s tolerant past, it

also showed, once again, that narratives of tolerance need to interrogated for the hierarchies and

exclusions that lie within them. As the anthropologist Agnieszka Pasieka has convincingly argued,

the image of “multicultural Poland,” of which the prewar kresy plays a central (if not the central)

role, paradoxically reaffirmed the idea that Poles sit at the top of an imagined hierarchy. The

discourse of modern “multiculturalism” thus proved a convenient way of showing how the very

presence of “others” is thanks to what Pasieka calls “traditions of Polish tolerance and a Polish

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civilizing mission among neighboring nationalities.” In exploring the case of Volhynia—or any of

Europe’s diverse regions—we need to be conscious of the precise mechanisms by which certain

populations could be included in one context and excluded in another. Indeed, this tension is central

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to modern multiculturalism more generally.

There is no end of history. If I began this project as a graduate student in the mid-2000s, a

moment at which the multicultural narrative, however problematic, seemed entrenched, I end it at a

time when Poland moves increasingly toward a vision of the nation that excludes non-ethnic Poles

and recreates the idea of a pernicious “foreign” threat to Polishness. As right-wing nationalists

29 The movie is Wołyń (dir. Wojciech Smarzowski, 2016). A book on the Polish victims of Ukrainian violence
similarly juxtaposes grizzly photographs of dead bodies with cheerful images of prewar Volhynian communities.
See Ewa Siemaszko, Wołyń naszych przodków: śladami życia - czas zagłady: album z okazji 65. rocznicy
ludobójstwa dokonanego przez nacjonalistów ukraińskich OUN-UPA na ludności polskiej Wołynia (Warsaw, 2008).
30 Agnieszka Pasieka, “Wielokulturowość po polsku. Polityka wielokulturowości jako mechanizm umacniania
polskości,” Kultura i Społeczeństwo 3 (2013): 129-155. The Polish literary critic Bogusław Bakuła argues that the
“borderlands discourse” is characterized by a one-dimensional and “saccharine” picture of “paradise, community,
harmony.” Bakuła, “Colonial and Postcolonial Aspects,’” 45.
31 For an illuminating study that explores the tensions of multiculturalism in modern Britain through the lens of
Indian food, see Elizabeth Buettner, “‘Going for an Indian’: South Asian Restaurants and the Limits of
Multiculturalism in Britain,” Journal of Modern History 80, no. 4 (2008): 865-901.

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