Page 30 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

modernity solicited more ambivalent responses from the second-tier actors. As we shall see, they

exhausted much effort in trying to create a stable, respectable, and “civilized” state, while

simultaneously drawing on what they saw as pre-modern Polish traditions and pushing against the

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ills of the modern world. Their attempts to steer through these difficult waters not only expose the
predicament of a “civilizing” state on the edge of civilized Europe, but also suggest the wider

tensions embedded in constructions of sovereignty across the interwar world.

A LOOK AHEAD

In addition to the introduction and conclusion, the book contains seven chapters, which are arranged

into three parts and progress both chronologically and thematically. While each chapter focuses on

particular groups of people, some of these groups appear multiple times in the book, moving in and

out of the narrative.

Part I charts early competitions—between Poles and non-Poles and among various

representatives of Poland—as elites attempted to shape the character of the emerging Polish state at

global, national, and local levels. In Chapter 1, I trace how a group of young nationalist activists

created a vision of anti-imperial democracy during the turbulent period of political and military

conflict between the declaration of Polish statehood in November 1918 and the official creation of

the Volhynian province in 1921. At a time when empire was derided and nation-state democracies

celebrated, Poles attempted to navigate conversations about self-determination and sovereignty in

which civilizational scales still mattered. Picking up the story in 1921, Chapter 2 challenges the

usefulness of a narrative based on the Polish state’s attempt to integrate the eastern borderlands and

traces instead how various competing groups—from incoming military settlers to representatives of

58 As Jerzy Jedlicki pointed out, nineteenth-century Polish thinkers also felt ambivalent about many aspects of
Western civilization (most notably capitalism) and recognized that it was no panacea for the ills of the partitions.
See Jerzy Jedlicki, A Suburb of Europe: Polish Nineteenth-Century Approaches to Western Civilization (Budapest,
1999).

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