Page 69 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

integration was ubiquitous. It rested on an assumption, shared by many members of the European

political elite, that the state constituted a centripetal force, one that would integrate borderland

regions that had, until recently, been a part of other states. French officials claimed to be integrating

the erstwhile German regions of Alsace and Lorraine, Italians sought to incorporate South Tyrol,

which had previously been part of the now defunct Austro-Hungarian empire, and Romanians sought

to create Greater Romania by consolidating state rule over Transylvania, which was coveted by

3
irredentist Hungarians. The methods proposed for such schemes were also similar. Governments
attempted to impose state laws and administrative codes, they sent in civil servants, teachers, and

settlers to fulfil the state’s tasks, and they created new national imaginaries through maps,

guidebooks, and journals. But if the language of integration in Poland and the other so-called

successor states that emerged from the ruins of the empires, such as Czechoslovakia, the Baltic

states, and Yugoslavia, fits into a broader set of pan-European trends, in each of these east European

cases there existed a heightened disorientation about where the center was located. Those European

states that predated the war—including France, Italy, and Romania—had obvious political centers

into which recently added territories could be absorbed. In the successor states that appeared on the

map in 1918, however, people were forced to contend with the question of who, precisely, should be

integrated into whom. In Poland, where areas of the new state had, until recently, been under very

different types of imperial rule, the question was particularly pressing.

As this chapter will show, Volhynia became an arena in which multiple competing visions of

the new state were constructed, some of which were espoused by people in the province itself, others

by those who never set foot in its marshlands, rolling hills, and small towns. By focusing not only on

the viewpoints of politicians in the putative political center in Warsaw, but also on other groups who

were invested in the development of the eastern borderlands—namely incoming military settlers and

3 Carrol, The Return of Alsace to France; Irina Livezeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania: Regionalism,
Nation Building and Ethnic Struggle, 1918-1939 (Ithaca, 1995); Pergher, Mussolini’s Nation-Empire.

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