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On Civilization's Edge

In 1918, as Europe’s continental empires were violently replaced with a patchwork of nominally post-imperial nation-states, elites in Poland drew on the global language of civilization to launch an internal state-building mission. This book focuses on how these processes took shape in Volhynia, an eastern borderland province that was home to Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews, between 1918 and 1939. By following in the footsteps of an eclectic group of men and women that included border guards, military settlers, provincial administrators, regional activists, health professionals, urban planners, teachers, and academics, the book traces how imperial hierarchies of global civilization—in which Poles themselves were often viewed as uncivilized—were domestically recast. Throughout, doubts about the national strength of local Poles, competitions between diverse groups of self-declared civilizers, and mounting anxieties about the rise of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union turned Volhynia into a testing ground in which these second-tier actors redefined the precise contours of the modern Polish nation. Rather than simply a successor state embroiled in the quintessentially east European problem of “national minorities,” Poland became a place where the very distinction between empire and nation-state was contested.