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that had previously been part of the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and German empires, citizens spoke

a mixture of languages, including Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian, Ukrainian, German, Belarusian,

Lithuanian, and Czech, with those who spoke Polish as their mother tongue constituting just 69% of

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the total population on the 1931 census. Historians have typically looked at the question of national
diversity through the framework of relations between different national groups. Was Poland good or

bad for the Jews, Ezra Mendelsohn famously asked, and countless books on the Polish state’s

policies toward its so-called national minorities—whether Germans, Ukrainians, Belarusians, or

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others–have attempted to answer variants of that question. There seem to be good reasons for

focusing on the interactions between Poles, on the one hand, and the national minorities, on the other.

The nationalistic violence, most notably the Holocaust, that engulfed the lands of interwar Poland

after 1939 suggested that the “ethnic relations” story was the one that mattered and led historians to

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ask if Polish Jews, in particular, were already “on the edge of destruction” by 1939. At the same

time, however, this focus on domestic ethnic relations has prevented a full exploration of how global

discussions of civilizational hierarchies and the construction of difference between nominally equal

citizens became entangled.

Blurring the boundaries between Poland and the rest of the world requires that we track the

changes in global conversations about sovereignty over the turbulent 1920s and 1930s. As we shall

see, the interwar story was one in which support for democracy and the rights of national minorities

8 Jerzy Tomaszewski, Rzeczpospolita wielu narodów (Warsaw, 1985), 35.
9 Ezra Mendelsohn, “Interwar Poland: Good for the Jews or Bad for the Jews?” in The Jews in Poland, eds. Chimen
Abramsky et al. (Oxford and New York, 1986). For examples of Polish-language historiography that relies on the
framework of national minorities, see Jerzy Tomaszewski, Ojczyzna nie tylko Polaków: Mniejszości w Polsce w
latach 1918-1939 (Warsaw, 1985); Andrzej Chojnowski, Koncepcje polityki narodowościowej rządów polskich w
latach 1921-1939 (Wrocław, 1979); Robert Potocki, Polityka państwa polskiego wobec zagadnienia ukraińskiego w
latach 1930-1939 (Lublin, 2003); Eugeniusz Mironowicz, Białorusini i Ukraińcy w polityce obozu
piłsudczykowskiego (Białystok, 2007); Mirosława Papierzyńska-Turek, Sprawa ukraińska w Drugiej
Rzeczypospolitej, 1922-1926 (Kraków, 1979); Ryszard Torzecki, Kwestia ukraińska w Polsce w latach 1923-1929
(Kraków, 1989). In German, see Cornelia Schenke, Nationalstaat und nationale Frage: Polen und die Ukrainer in
Wolhynien 1921–1939 (Hamburg and Munich, 2004).
10 Celia Heller, On the Edge of Destruction: Jews of Poland between the Two World Wars (New York, 1977).

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