Page 36 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

The Guard by no means represented Polish opinion as a whole—indeed, it was made up of a

relatively small number of people who frequently clashed with rival groups that also claimed to be

acting on behalf of the new Polish state. But if Polish historians have tended to overlook the Guard’s

engagement with the global moment, a close reading of the rich collection of records that its activists

left behind reveals how they not only mobilized prevailing concepts of civilization and anti-imperial

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democracy but also shaped those concepts for their own national and local purposes. Most
importantly, a focus on Poland’s Wilsonian moment in Volhynia—from the spring of 1919, when

Polish troops entered the region, to the spring of 1920, when Poland and Ukraine launched a joint

attack on Bolshevik Russia—shows how the creation of new hierarchies and exclusions emerged

from, rather than in spite of, attempts to import the ultimate civilizing force to the region—

democracy.

DEMOCRACY VERSUS IMPERIALISM: VOLHYNIA ON THE WORLD STAGE

From Bessarabia and the Banat to Silesia and the Sudetenland, eastern Europe appeared in 1918 as a

patchwork of contested multiethnic borderlands, characterized by what the British academic C. A.

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Macartney would later call a “belt of mixed population.” Once again a site of geopolitical

contestation, Volhynia made up part of this confusing canvas. The arrival and retreat of multiple

armies during and after the First World War had brought claims to the region from both dying

empires and new, often short-lived polities. The western part of the Russian imperial governorate had

fallen under the occupation of the Austro-Hungarian army in 1915 and was partially recaptured by

the Russian army the following year, only to then experience the shockwaves of imperial collapse.

4 Examples of Polish historiography on the Guard include Tadeusz Nowacki, ZET w walce o niepodległość i budowę
państwa: szkice i wspomnienia (Warsaw, 1996), 130-141; Nina Zielińska, Towarzystwo Straży Kresowej, 1918-1927
(Lublin, 2006); Joanna Gierowska-Kałłaur, Straż Kresowa a Zarząd Cywilny Ziem Wschodnich. Współdzialanie czy
rywalizacja? (Warsaw, 1999).
5 C. A. Macartney, National States and National Minorities (London, 1934), 179.

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