Page 38 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

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Russian aggression. In the opposite corner, members of the right-wing Endecja, under the leadership
9
of Roman Dmowski, viewed such federalist schemes as anachronistic and politically foolish.

Drawing instead on ideas of Social Darwinism—that nations were locked in a desperate struggle for

survival—they sought instead to create a version of Poland that would be large enough to survive in

the geopolitically hazardous zone between Germany and Russia, but one whose eastern border would

reach only those non-Polish populations that could be nationally assimilated. In Paris, it was the

National Democratic voice that was the louder of the two. Although they did not prioritize Volhynia,

a region that lacked the economic allure of oil-rich eastern Galicia or coal-rich Upper Silesia, in

March 1919 Polish representatives in the French capital proposed an eastern border that would

10
include the western and central parts of the former Russian governorate.
Members of both camps did, however, write themselves into the broader spirit of the times by

arguing that Poland would be a democratic—and democratizing—state. Of course, they did not share

a common definition of what democracy actually meant, either with Entente politicians or with one

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another. Already by the late nineteenth century, members of the Endecja had been more interested
in using the concept as a way of disciplining the Polish masses in the service of nationalist goals than

in creating and sustaining a set of liberal civic practices (particularly toward non-Poles), while

Piłsudski and the Polish Socialists had long argued for a more nationally inclusive definition of

8 The precise contours of Piłsudski’s policy and the extent to which he was consistently committed to federalism
have been debated. On how policies toward federalism changed after August 1919, see Benjamin Conrad, “Das
Ende der Föderation: Die Ostpolitik Piłsudskis und des Belweder-Lagers 1918-1920,” in Kommunikation über
Grenzen: Polen als Schauplatz transnationaler Akteure von den Teilungen bis heute, edited by Lisa Bicknell (Berlin,
2013), 11-32. See also Piotr Wandycz, Polish-Soviet Relations, 1917-1921 (Cambridge, 1969), 90-117; M.K.
Dziewanowski, Joseph Piłsudski: A European Federalist: 1918-1922 (Stanford, 1969).
9 Stanisław Kozicki, Pamiętnik, 1876-1939 (Slupsk, 2009), 400.
10 On the so-called Dmowski line, see Jerzy Borzęcki, The Soviet-Polish Peace of 1921 and the Creation of Interwar
Europe (New Haven, 2008), 320, fn. 44.
11 For a useful discussion of the multiple meanings of democracy in interwar Europe more generally, see Andrea
Orzoff, “Interwar Democracy and the League of Nations,” in The Oxford Handbook of European History, edited by
Nicholas Doumanis (Oxford, 2016), 261-281.

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