Page 76 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

similarly warned readers about the dangers of seeing the eastern borderlands as “foreign” or “exotic”

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and railed against those who erroneously treated Polish land “as an overseas colony.”

DEFINING FOREIGNNESS

If Poles tended to reject the idea that Volhynia could be conceived as an internal colonial space, they

understood that the very concept of the kresy implied both distinctiveness and familiarity in relation

to the more homogenous Polish ethnographic core to the west. This realization of the blurriness

between two types of space allowed elites to draw politically self-serving lines in order to denote

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who was “foreign” (obcy) and who was genuinely “Polish.” By linking foreignness to the Russian

imperial period and referring back to the Polish state’s historical footprint here, Polish elites argued

that these lands shared civilizational traits with the rest of Poland, while acknowledging that the

kresy needed to be integrated into a more civilized “center” further west. Accusations of foreignness

and backwardness continued to run both along and across national lines, with serious implications for

the place of Jews and left-wing Poles in emerging right-wing constructions of the Polish nation.

The conflation of foreignness, backwardness, and Jewishness was most pronounced on the

National Democratic right, whose representatives dominated the governments in Warsaw in the

period between Piłsudski’s retreat from politics in 1922 and his coup d’état in 1926. The results of

parliamentary elections in November 1922 had given the National Democrats an opportunity to argue

that the kresy would not be integrated easily into Poland as long as the national minorities there were

democratically encouraged to push for their interests as minorities. As a result of the election, all

sixteen of the parliamentary representatives from Volhynia came from a coalition of minority parties

known as the Bloc of National Minorities, a situation that sparked uproar in the national right-wing

26 Zalewski, “Województwa wschodnie,” 14.
27 It is important to note that these Poles tended to use the word obcy, which means foreign in the sense of strange or
alien, rather than in the sense of a “foreign country,” for which the appropriate Polish term would be zagraniczny.

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