Page 68 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

CHAPTER TWO:
THE INTEGRATION MYTH

In 1921, the same year that the Polish province of Volhynia was officially created, the famed

American geographer Isaiah Bowman stated in his book The New World that the government of

Poland had to do nothing less than “weld together three unlike sections,” which had previously been

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part of the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian empires. Now, unmoored from their former
imperial centers, whether in Berlin, Vienna, or Saint Petersburg, the lands of Poland needed to be

brought together around a center in the new state capital, Warsaw. It appeared to be an almost

insurmountable challenge. In the early 1920s, Poles and non-Poles alike commented on the extent to

which different areas of the new state bore the marks of the three partitioning powers. In their

institutions, trade networks, currencies, languages, education systems, and preponderance of national

minorities (among other things), these places seemed more different than alike. And yet while

historians of interwar Poland have since used Bowman’s framework of state integration as their own,

and although objective differences between the previously partitioned areas were real, we should

think twice about replicating a narrative that casts “the state” as a monolithic and central actor that

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“integrated” its various peripheries. Indeed, during the early-to-mid-1920s, questions about who

actually constituted the state—and where the center was located—informed critical public debates

across Poland. Instead, we might ask a different question: How did Poles of various political stripes

utilize narratives of incorporation, particularly in borderland regions like Volhynia, in order to

highlight their own importance for the emerging state project?

In order to explore the answers to this question, the specificities of the Volhynian case must

be placed within the broader European framework. Across the continent, the language of state

1 Isaiah Bowman, The New World: Problems in Political Geography (Yonkers-on-Hudson, N.Y., 1921), 351.
2 Davies, God’s Playground: Volume II, 401-402. Most general surveys of the interwar period begin with an
assessment of the significant differences between the formerly partitioned lands that made up the Polish state. See,
for example, Polonsky, Politics in Independent Poland, 1-44.

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