Page 31 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

more “civilized” cities further west—mobilized the myth of integration in order to stake out their

own political positions. Far from constituting a period of Polish cooperation, the early 1920s were

marked by the cultural and political reconstruction of imperial borders in their spectral forms.

Part II traces the imaginative and physical constructions of three types of local spaces within

Volhynia in order to show how arguments about civilization played out differently in various

locations. Chapter 3 accompanies the reader to the newly created and volatile border between Poland

and the Soviet Union in order to explore how state police and border guards attempted to reshape

local life and shore up state power. If politicians in Warsaw remained obsessed with national rhetoric

during the early-to-mid-1920s, constructions of foreignness at a local level were dependent on

perceptions of a group’s economic and political roles and their trans-border connections (each of

which was more subtly connected to perceptions of national identity).

Moving forward in time to the period after Józef Piłsudski’s 1926 coup and the ascension to

power of the Volhynian governor Henryk Józewski in 1928, Chapters 4 and 5 focus on how

supporters of the Sanacja—Piłsudski’s mission to “cleanse” Polish politics of corruption and political

in-fighting—used different types of spaces as testing grounds for their civilizing projects. Rather than

telling the story of ethnic relations within Volhynia’s towns, Chapter 4 shows how elites defined

what urban modernity meant in a predominantly rural province. Even as they rejected the anti-

Semitism of their right-wing adversaries, pro-Sanacja elites tried to turn what they saw as “Jewish”

towns into self-consciously “Polish” spaces through transforming urban environments, remaking

quotidian practices, dissolving democratically elected town councils, and expanding administrative

boundaries. In a different but related case, Chapter 5 shifts the focus away from these urban islands

and toward the rural seas that surrounded them, specifically to the ways in which civilizers tried to

create a depoliticized village by replacing old institutions, behaviors, and attitudes and warding off

what they saw as the ills of defective urban-centric modernity. As a range of agents engaged in self-

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