Page 99 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

Turczynowicz and the editors at the Lublin-Kresy Review did not represent all political

factions in Lublin, a fact that reminds us that no city has a singular voice or viewpoint, however

much its loudest representatives want us to believe this to be the case. But regardless of the precise

political vision that they held, Lublin’s elites, like their Poznanian counterparts further west, were

united in their approach—each discussed Volhynia in ways that allowed them to emphasize their

city’s commitment to the Polish national cause and to claim their critical role as the conduit of

European civilization. While such acts of self-fashioning were used to support rival claims to

political power in the post-imperial Polish state, each side agreed upon the basic premise that

civilization and Polishness went hand-in-hand.

***

In 1928, on the tenth anniversary of the establishment of an independent Poland, R. A. Leeper of the

British Foreign Office wrote to the Foreign Secretary Austen Chamberlain in London about the work

that the Polish state had been trying to accomplish. “During the last ten years,” he wrote, “enormous

progress has been made in welding the Poles together and undoing the evil consequences of the

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partitions.” Utilizing the same language that Isaiah Bowman had invoked seven years earlier,
Leeper’s emphasis on welding together post-imperial fragments and their populations was by no

means unusual, but instead spoke to a broader consensus about what state-building entailed. In

Poland itself, as we have seen, arguments about the need to reintegrate a national borderland after the

historical deviation of Russian imperialism formed a compelling and enduring narrative.

But while the relationship between the kresy and other parts of the new Polish state was

depicted as organic, this chapter has shown that the very idea that a central actor called “Poland”

96 “Mr R.A. Leeper to Sir Austen Chamberlain” (December 12, 1928), NAL FO 417/24/59.

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