Page 70 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

civic leaders in cities beyond Volhynia’s provincial borders—I trace how second-tier actors

competed for power within the unstable political environment of the early-to-mid-1920s. While these

diverse groups mobilized pairs of concepts that were common in discussions about state sovereignty

across the world—center and periphery, civilization and backwardness, rootedness and foreignness,

difference and similarity, rupture and continuity—such terms took on particular significance in the

post-imperial kresy, where people did not agree on what they meant. Paradoxically, while the

narrative of borderland integration seemed to suggest that all Poles were invested in a series of

centralizing policies that transcended older divisions, in reality the opposite was the case. As Polish

elites mobilized the concept of spectral imperial borders in order to push for their own agendas, they

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emphasized difference as much as similarity.

CHALLENGES OF (RE)INTEGRATION

On one level, the creation of Volhynia replicated an administrative process that occurred all over the

new state. With the birth of the province in February 1921, a law was passed on Volhynia’s official

borders and it was divided into nine counties (powiaty), each of which included numerous smaller

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districts (gminy). Here, as across Poland, the state administration existed in two tiers: the provincial

authorities (II Instanz) and the district authorities (I Instanz), with the former based in the provincial

capital Łuck and the latter centered around various county seats. A range of departments, including

those for finance, the military, justice, schools, mail, and railroads, also developed at this local level,

while a provincial governor (wojewoda) was directly appointed by the President of the Republic,

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based on the recommendation of the Council of Ministers in Warsaw. In short, the creation of the

4 The concept of spectral borders draws from a recent project on “phantom borders.” See Béatrice von Hirschhausen
et al., Phantomgrenzen: Raume und Akteure in der Zeit neu denken (Göttingen, 2015), as well as the website
associated with the project “Phantom Borders in East Central Europe.” Accessed online: http://phantomgrenzen.eu/
5 Adam Janusz Mielcarek, Podziały terytorialno-administracyjne II Rzeczypospolitej w zakresie administracji
zespolonej (Warsaw, 2008), 45.
6 Schenke, Nationalstaat und nationale Frage, 73.

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