Page 90 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

dynamics by which various actors asserted political claims at the moment when the precise contours

of the new state were emerging, assuming the centrality of Warsaw can itself be misleading. Looking

instead at the positions taken by a range of Poles across the state reveals how they crafted myths

about hierarchies of civilization between, and even within, the zones of the former partitions. This

was, in short, a trans-regional process.

In each case, the analytical framework of spectral imperial borders, which rested on the

assumption that continuities in civilizational developments stretched across the supposed rupture of

the war, is critical. For one, it allows us to trace the ways in which Polish elites had been conditioned

by the political, social, and economic developments in the respective empires where they had lived

prior to independence. Their behavior after 1918, in other words, makes more sense if we consider

the prewar climate in which they had learned to operate politically. But even more importantly, it

reveals how these stakeholders constructed the significance of imperial borders as they sought to

connect themselves with civilization, modernity, and Polishness—and to avoid any accusations of

national disloyalty. The examples of civilizational claims made by the civic leaders of two cities—

Poznań in the geographical west and Lublin in the center (Figure 2.1)—show how Volhynia provided

a useful foil for groups who sought to fashion themselves as civilized Poles and simultaneously push

back against the encroaching power of Warsaw.

[INSERT FIGURE 2.1]

Figure 2.1: Map of interwar Poland, marked with major towns and cities. Poznań is in the far north-
west of the state, Lublin in the geographical center, and Łuck, Volhynia’s provincial capital, in the
south-east. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

By 1921, the city of Poznań had a population of almost 167,000. Like the wider Poznanian

administrative province of which it was the capital (województwo poznańskie), Poznań had been

under German rule prior to the First World War (when it was known as Posen). In keeping with their

counterparts across the new state, local Polish elites here looked to distance themselves from imperial

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