7


Nationalizing states in the old “New Europe” – and the new

Rogers Brubaker


Nationalism can be understood as a form of remedial political action. It addresses an allegedly
deficient or “pathological” condition and proposes to remedy it. The discourse that frames, and in
part constitutes, nationalist political action – and the subdiscursive sentiments which
‘nationalist political stances seek to mobilize and evoke – can be conceived as a set of variations
on a single core lament: that the identity and interests of a putative nation are not properly
expressed or realized in political institutions, practices, or policies.

This allegedly deficient condition comes in two basic forms: a nation may be held to lack an
adequate polity, or a polity may be held to lack an adequate national base. Two corresponding types
of nationalism may be distinguished: polity-seeking or polity-upgrading nationalisms that aim to
establish or upgrade an autonomous national polity; and polity-based, nation-shaping (or
nation-promoting) nationalisms that aim to nationalize an existing polity.[1]

The literature on nationalism as a form of politics – leaving aside the broader literature on
nationalism as an idea, or sentiment, or state of mind – has focused on polity-seeking nationalist
movements, paying much less attention to the nationalization of existing polities. This chapter
reverses the emphasis. It develops a framework for the analysis of what I call “nationalizing
states.” These are states that are conceived by their dominant elites as nation-states, as the
states of and for particular nations, yet as “incomplete” or “unrealized” nation-states, as
insufficiently “national” in a variety of senses to be explored below.

Almost all of the twenty-odd new states of post-Communist Eurasia can be understood as
nationalizing states in this sense, although there is a great deal of variation in the strength and
forms of nationalizing policies and practices. Without directly analyzing developments in these
incipient states – a difficult task when so much is still in flux – this chapter seeks to develop
an analytical vocabulary for addressing contemporary projects and processes of “nationalization.”
It does so by way of a sustained examination of one particular nationalizing state – the newly
resurrected Polish state – during the interwar period. The chapter begins, though, with a more
general analytical discussion of nationalization.


Nation-building and nationalization

Although the literature on nationalist politics has focused on state-seeking nationalisms, one
developed body of literature has addressed policies and processes of nationalization within the
frame of existing states. This is the literature on “nation-building” and “national integration”
that developed in the 1960s, stimulated by the emergence of new states in the former colonial
territories of Asia and Africa. The central idea of this literature is that the population of the
state – the citizenry – is progressively welded into a “nation” in the crucible of a bounded and
relatively homogeneous transactional and communicative space, a space defined and delimited by the
state and by state-wide social, political, economic, and cultural institutions and processes. In
place of a welter of more parochial loyalties and identities, the citizenry is progressively
united, through the gradually assimilative workings of these state-wide institutions, processes,
and transactions, by a common “national” loyalty and identity.

Although analytically sophisticated in at least some of its variants, notably those developed by
Karl Deutsch and Stein Rokkan and some of their followers,[2] much of this literature is flawed by
a teleological model of development toward “full” national integration. Moreover – and particularly
relevant for the present analysis – “nation” and “national” are conceived in this literature as
definitionally coextensive with the citizenry and with the territorial and institutional frame of
the state. The “nation” is simply the citizenry, to the extent that it becomes a unit of identity
and loyalty – to the extent, that is, that citizens recognize one another as “belonging together”
in a subjective, “internal” sense rather than as simply belonging to the state in a formal,
external sense. Similarly, “national” is primarily a term of scale and scope: it often means no
more than “state-wide.” In this perspective, as a result, “nation-building” and “national
integration” are axiomatically inclusive.

Articulated during the high noon of modernization theory, and deeply influenced by its assumptions,
much of the early nation-building literature either ignored ethnicity or conceived it, like other
local and particularistic attachments, as progressively attenuated by the multiple solvents of
modernity, in particular by such universalizing, homogenizing, and thereby nationalizing social
forms and forces as markets, bureaucracies, armies, cities, school systems, transportation and
communication networks, and so on.[3] Nationhood, by contrast, was seen as strengthened, indeed
constituted, by these modernizing forces. “Ethnicity and nationhood were understood as
definitionally antithetical, and as operating at different levels of social and political process.
The resilience of ethnicity in modernizing contexts, to be sure, soon came to be widely
appreciated; and a sophisticated literature on ethnic conflict in postcolonial states developed,
culminating in major synthetic works by Crawford Young, Donald Horowitz, and others.[4] Yet the
definitional opposition between ethnicity and nationhood persisted. Ethnicity could be understood
as a potentially serious impediment to nation-building and national integration, but was not easily
conceptualized as a major component of these processes.

This prevailing opposition, in studies of postcolonial states, between the definitionally
state-oriented category of the “nation” and the definitionally sub-national category of ethnicity
reflects the striking and consistent territorialism of anticolonial nationalisms and postcolonial
states. Especially in African colonies, territorial boundaries – as established by the colonial
powers, and accepted, for the most part, as legitimate by anticolonial nationalists – were not even
approximately congruent with cultural boundaries. For this reason it has been nearly impossible to
equate, even approximately, an ethnocultural group with a potentially sovereign “nation.” The
“nation” in the name of which sovereignty over those territories could be claimed by anticolonial
nationalists was therefore almost universally conceived in territorial terms.[5]

In other settings, however, “ethnicity” (more precisely ethnolinguistic ally or ethnoreligiously
embedded culture) is understood and experienced as constitutive of nationhood, not as opposed to
it. In these cases, the dynamics of nationalization are quite different. Yet they have not been
adequately explored. There is of course a large literature on ethnic nationalism; but it chiefly
concerns polity-seeking nationalism, directed against the framework of existing states, rather than
“nationalizing” nationalisms within the framework of an existing state. The literature on
“nationalizing nationalisms,” on the other hand, has focused on nationalization in a territorial
rather than an ethnocultural mode, concentrating on two classes of cases: postcolonial states, and
the “advanced” states and societies of northwestern Europe and North America, conceived (at least
by the early wave of nation-building and national integration theorists) as models and exemplars
for the post-colonial states.

This selective focus is understandable. It reflected the emergence of the nation-building
literature in the early 1960s, at a moment of high political confidence in Western models of
political development and their transferability to the developing world,[6] sustained by robust
epistemological confidence in a generalizing style of social science capable of discovering
universal patterns of social and political development and of validating policies aimed at
promoting such development. At this forward-looking conjuncture, there was every reason to be
interested in the territorial nation-building projects of the newly independent states of Asia and
Africa, and to seek to analyze, and further, the “development” of those states along Western lines
then widely accepted – in accordance with the intellectual and political spirit of the time – as
normative for political development generally. There was, on the other hand, no reason to be
especially interested in the more ethnocultural modes of nationalization prevalent in the earlier
wave of new states that had emerged in the rubble of the great multinational land empires –
Habsburg, Ottoman, and Romanov. To the extent that they were considered at all, these programs and
practices of ethnocultural nationalization, together with so much else of interwar Europe, could be
dismissed as marginal, as vestiges of a past peculiarly ridden with putatively ancient and
singularly intractable ethnonational conflicts, or as pathological symptoms of the failure to
modernize.

Today, however, the experience of the new nation-states of interwar Europe – itself, at the moment
of its creation, a much-heralded “New Europe” – does not seem so marginal. As a point of
comparative reference for the analysis of today’s new nation-states – the twenty-odd states that
have succeeded to the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia – the new states of interwar
Europe seem far more relevant than the postcolonial states of mid century or the old state-nations
of Western Europe, on which the nation-building and national integration literatures have focused.

Far from being vestigial or unmodern, the dynamics of ethnocultural nationalization in the new
nation-states of interwar Europe represented a distinctively modern form of politicized ethnicity,
pivoting on claims made, in the name of a nation, to political control, economic well-being, and
full cultural expression within “its own” national state. Similar claims are being made today. This
chapter therefore approaches today’s newly nationalizing states by way of a reconsideration of one
of the newly nationalizing states of the interwar period – the newly reestablished Polish state.


The old “New Europe”: nationalizing states in the interwar period

The new states that emerged from the decay and disintegration of the Ottoman, Habsburg, and Romanov
empires were all created as nation-states, legitimated by their claim to be the states of and for
particular nations. All, moreover, were not only nation-states but nationalizing states. The
politics and processes of nationalization varied widely in form and intensity in these states, but
they characteristically involved the following elements: (1) the existence (more precisely the
conceived or understood or “imagined” existence) of a “core nation” or nationality, defined in
ethnocultural terms, and sharply distinguished from the citizenry or permanent resident population
of the state as a whole; (2) the idea that the core nation legitimately “owns” the polity, that the
polity exists as the polity of and for the core nation; (3) the idea that the core nation is not
flourishing, that its specific interests are not adequately “realized” or “expressed” despite its
rightful “ownership” of the state; (4) the idea that specific action is needed in a variety of
settings and domains to promote the language, cultural flourishing, demographic predominance,
economic welfare, or political hegemony of the core nation; (5) the conception and justification of
such action as remedial or compensatory, as needed to counterbalance and correct for previous
discrimination against the nation before it had “its own” state to safe-guard and promote its
interests; (6) mobilization on the basis of these ideas in a variety of settings – legislatures,
electoral campaigns, the press, associations, universities, the streets – in an effort to shape the
policies or practices of the state, of particular organizations, agencies, or officials within the
state, or of non-state organizations; and (7) the adoption – by the state, by particular state
agencies and officials, and by non-state organizations – of formal and informal policies and
practices informed by the ideas outlined above.

This sketch is deliberately drawn in broad and general terms. This is partly because it attempts to
capture features common to a variety of nationalizing states. But it also reflects the fact that
state-based, nation-promoting nationalisms – the post-independence nationalisms of nationalizing
states – are inherently more diffuse than state-seeking nationalisms. Central to the latter are
distinct movements with clear goals. Even where nationalisms are not unambiguously state-seeking
but (as is often the case) split between movements for independence and movements for increased
autonomy within an existing state, there are still distinct movements with definite, if contested,
goals. “Nationalizing” nationalisms within the frame of independent states, by contrast, do not
usually involve distinct movements with clear and specific goals. Consequently, it is harder to
pinpoint what is specifically “nationalist” about politics in such states.[7] In such settings,
nationalism becomes an “aspect” of politics – embracing both formal policies and informal
practices, and existing both within and outside the state – rather than a discrete movement. It is
that diffuse and pervasive yet nonetheless distinctive aspect of politics that I want to analyze
here, by way of a discussion of the politics of nationalization in the region’s most populous
state, the newly reestablished Polish state.


Interwar Poland as a nationalizing state

The Polish state that was resurrected in the aftermath of the First World War differed radically
from the old Polish Commonwealth that had disappeared from the map of Europe in the late eighteenth
century after being thrice partitioned between Prussia, Austria, and Russia. The old Commonwealth
had never been a nation-state or nationalizing state. It was a loosely integrated polity whose
great ethnolinguistic heterogeneity was not seen as problematic. The nation” in the old
Commonwealth was defined by social and political status (membership m the ruling szlachta or
gentry), not by language or ethnicity; it was conceptually located above non-privileged status
groups (above all the Polish-speaking and non-Polish-speaking peasantry) in the same territory
rather than alongside other coordinate nations.

During the century and a quarter of partition, however, Polish nationhood was redefined m
ethnolinguistic terms.[8] This redefinition had two aspects, which one might designate as “social
deepening” and “ethnic narrowing” respectively. On the one hand, the eclipse of the status-bound
notion of the “gentry nation” reflected the democratization or popularization or “social deepening”
of the concept of nation throughout Europe that began in the late eighteenth and continued through
the nineteenth century; everywhere “nation” was reconceived in a “populist” idiom that expressly
included all social classes or strata. On the other hand, the increased salience of language as a
nation-bounding diacritical marker reflected the experience of prolonged statelessness, which
prevented the development of a state-oriented, state-framed, “civic” or “territorial” understanding
of nationhood. This ethnonational self-understanding was reinforced by the prevailing narrative of
the nineteenth-century Polish national movement, which presented this movement as the oft-martyred
Polish ethnonation’s heroic struggle for independence, and by the armed struggles of 1918-21 that
accompanied the formation of the new state, pitting Poles against Germans in Poznania and Upper
Silesia, Poles against Ukrainians in eastern Galicia, and Poles against the Red Army (represented
by the Polish nationalist Right as a “Judeo-Bolshevik” force) in the eastern borderlands.[9]

The new Polish state, therefore, was conceived as the state of and for the ethnolinguistically (and
ethnoreligiously) defined Polish nation, in part because it was seen as made by this nation against
the resistance of Germans, Ukrainians, and Jews. A clear distinction was universally drawn between
this Polish nation and the total citizenry of the state. By official count, which clearly
overstated the relative predominance of Poles, the citizenry included large numbers of Ukrainians
(14% of the population in 1921), Belarusians (4%), Germans (4%), and Jews (8%).[10] Not that the
boundaries of the Polish nation were thought to be fixed. Ukrainians – especially outside of
Galicia – and Belarusians were considered candidates for membership in the Polish nation; policies
toward them tended therefore to be assimilationist. The assimilation of Germans and Jews, however,
was generally viewed as unlikely (in the case of Germans, especially those living in territories
ceded by Germany after the war) or undesirable (in the case of Jews). Policies toward them were
therefore more “dissimilationist” or “differentialist,” based on differential treatment by
ethnocultural nationality among citizens of the Polish state. Thus nationalizing policies and
practices varied sharply. Broadly speaking, in eastern rural districts the aim was to nationalize
the borderland East Slav population; in the cities and in the west, the aim was rather to
nationalize the territory and economic life, by replacing Germans and Jews with Poles in key
economic and political positions, and by encouraging their emigration.


Nationalizing the western borderlands

Ethnic Germans, particularly those in the long German-ruled western borderlands of the new
state,[11] were trebly vulnerable to nationalizing programs and practices. To begin with, the
borderland regions had for the preceding four decades been subjected to harsh, although
ineffective, nationalizing policies by their Prussian and German rulers. These policies had
succeeded only in stimulating national solidarity and stiffening nationalist resistance among
Poles. Nonetheless, the sustained (and openly acknowledged) German efforts to nationalize the
German-Polish borderlands during the Kaiserreich provided a convenient rationale for analogous
Polish measures after the First World War. It permitted such measures to be presented as remedial
and compensatory, as needed to reverse the political, economic, cultural, and ethnodemographic
legacy of the decades-long policy of Germanization.

Furthermore, Germans in the restored Polish state had the misfortune to “belong,” by ethnocultural
nationality, if not legal citizenship, to a powerful neighboring state with unconcealed revisionist
ambitions.[12] Under the leadership of Gustav Stresemann, foreign minister from 1923 until his
death in 1929, Weimar Germany achieved a rapprochement with Western powers, but it continued to
make border revision in the east – albeit peaceful, negotiated border revision – a top foreign
policy priority. The border with Poland, particularly the “Polish corridor” that cut off East
Prussia from the rest of Germany, was universally viewed as an insupportable “national
humiliation,” unjustly imposed on a prostrate Germany.[13] Poles just as universally – and no doubt
correctly – perceived borderland Germans as favoring, even if not actively supporting, a
restoration of German rule in the borderlands. Thus Germans were perceived from the beginning as a
dangerous “fifth column,” stimulating, by their very existence, revisionist claims in Germany and
unlikely, in any crucial test, to prove loyal to the Polish state.

Germans’ third vulnerability lay in their preeminent economic position in the western borderlands –
especially since this could be attributed to privileges they had enjoyed under a nationalizing
German regime.[14] In Poznania and Pomerania, at the end of the period of German rule, Germans
monopolized the civil service, held a disproportionate share of large landed estates and
medium-sized farms, and were also disproportionately represented among professionals, merchants,
and artisans. In Upper Silesia, Germans predominated among owners, managers, and workers of
industrial enterprises.[15] This favorable economic position, like that alleged to be occupied by
Jews, would be a focus of nationalist concern throughout the interwar period.[16]

These three features conditioned Germans’ immediate vulnerability, in the new Polish nation-state,
to a politics of nationalization. But what kind of nationalization? To characterize it, as is often
done, as an effort at “Polonization” is insufficient. For Polonization can refer to two different,
even antithetical processes. On the one hand, it can designate an attempt to remake the human
material of the state, to nationalize the citizenry by turning Germans, and others, into Poles. In
this sense, nationalization is a form of assimilation, that is, of “making similar”: it involves
making a target population similar to some reference population, whose putative characteristics are
conceived as normative for the citizenry as a whole. On the other hand, nationalization can be
directed at spheres of practice rather than groups of people. In this sense it involves
dissimilation rather than assimilation. Far from seeking to make people similar, it prescribes
differential treatment on the basis of their presumed fundamental difference. Instead of seeking to
alter identities, it takes them as given. Assimilationist nationalization seeks to eradicate
difference, while differentialist nationalization takes difference as axiomatic and foundational.

Vis-à-vis Germans, nationalization was dissimilationist rather than assimilationist. There was no
attempt to transform Germans into Poles. Many Germans, to be sure, did acquire Polish citizenship,
as most residents of the ceded territories were entitled to do by the Versailles Treaty.[17] But
they did not understand themselves (nor were they understood by Poles) as having thereby acquired
Polish nationality. Citizenship and nationality, legal membership of the state and ethnocultural
membership of the nation, were seen as sharply distinct by Germans and Poles alike (and were indeed
seen as sharply distinct throughout East Central and Eastern Europe). There was no attempt to
transform Germans’ nationality, to make Germans into Poles in an ethnocultural sense. This was
viewed as unrealistic. Much cultural assimilation – in both directions – had indeed occurred over
the centuries in the German-Slav borderlands. But by the late nineteenth century, a hardening
national struggle in the eastern districts of Prussia, in the context of an overall increase in
social mobilization, led to the intensification of national identifications on both sides, and to
their extension to strata formerly indifferent to, or only tenuously aware of, nationality.[18] In
this new context of struggle between mobilized nationalities, assimilation was much less likely to
occur. It continued to occur in some regions outside the focus of the national struggle, for
example among Poles who had migrated from eastern Prussia to the Ruhr industrial districts. And
certain zones of mixed, fluid, and ambivalent national identification remained, notably Upper
Silesia, where political orientation and language often did not coincide.[19] But on the whole the
trend since the 1880s had been toward a sharper crystallization of boundaries between ethnonational
groups. In this context it was implausible to think that the new Polish state might assimilate its
German minority, highly mobilized and strongly conscious of its distinct ethnocultural nationality.

Nor was there a serious attempt to cultivate the political loyalty of Germans to the Polish state –
to assimilate them politically while tolerating their ethnocultural Germanness. Such an attempt
would have presupposed (1) an understanding of Germans’ political loyalty and identity as open and
contingent, and (2) an understanding of the Polish state as the state of and for all its citizens,
not merely the state of and for Poles. But neither was forthcoming. Germans were widely perceived
as unremittingly hostile to the Polish state and as sympathetic to German irredentism. And the
Polish state was widely understood as “belonging” specifically to the Polish nation and existing to
further its particular aims and interests. Given these prevailing understandings of German
hostility towards, and Polish “ownership” of, the state, attempts to cultivate the political
loyalty of Germans were condemned in advance as futile.

Policies and practices of nationalization thus were directed neither at the ethnocultural
assimilation of Germans nor at turning them into loyal, if culturally unassimilated, citizens of
the Polish state. They were directed at the nationalization not of Germans, but of Polish territory
and of political, cultural, and economic life within it. They were differentialist, not
assimilationist. By virtue of their distinct ethnic nationality – and in spite of their common
citizenship – the ethnically German citizens of the new state were to be treated differently from
ethnically Polish citizens. Nationalizing initiatives sought to build the Polish state as a
specifically Polish state, that is, as a state that would embody and express the will and interests
of the Polish nation. Such initiatives sought to Polonize the borderlands, the civil service, the
professions, the industrial base of Upper Silesia, the school system, and so on, not by making
Germans into Poles, but by displacing or excluding Germans from certain key positions and, more
generally, by weakening Germans as an organized group, thereby preventing them from exercising
undue influence over the political, cultural, or economic life of the new state.

The most visible form assumed by ethnic nationalization in the early years of the restored Polish
state – indeed in anticipation of the restoration of Polish statehood – was a large-scale migration
of ethnic unmixing, as Germans fled to Germany from the Prussian borderlands that were ceded to
Poland.[20] Some two-thirds of the roughly 1.1 million ethnic Germans in these territories (not
including Upper Silesia) had left by the mid-1920s, including 85 percent of the urban German
population and 55 percent of rural Germans.[21] The main towns of Poznania and Pomerania, almost
all majority German before the war, now contained only small German minorities. The exodus, to be
sure, cannot be attributed solely, or even primarily, to the nationalizing policies of the new
state. Some migration was to be expected, notably on the part of those civil servants and military
personnel who had no roots in the borderland region and had been sustained there only by the
Prussian and German state, and on the part of those who, regardless of the anticipated policies of
the new Polish state, preferred to cast their lot with the more economically and politically
powerful and culturally familiar German state. Furthermore, large-scale migration began before the
new state was even established. Yet even this early migration – occurring in anticipation, rather
than as a result, of the transfer of sovereignty – reflected a dynamic of nationalization:
departing Germans anticipated (correctly) that the transfer of sovereignty would reverse the
dynamic of nationalization, substituting Polonization for Germanization. Moreover, the migration
was certainly welcomed, indirectly fostered, and on occasion explicitly demanded, by Polish
officials.[22] Migration was also encouraged by popular anti-German demonstrations, including some
violence against Germans.[23] The most thorough, and most detached, recent study of the migration
concludes that “Poland’s basic policy, at least during the period of National Democratic influence
to 1926, was simply to encourage as many Germans as possible to leave the country.”[24] This does
not mean that the migration was “forced,” as many Germans claimed.[25] It does mean, however, that
the anticipated and actual nationalization of life in restored Poland was a major cause of the mass
migration (keeping in mind, of course, that this nationalization followed, and mirrored, two
generations of rule by a nationalizing Prussian/German state).[26]

A less visible, but equally important, dimension of nationalization involved efforts to displace
Germans from key positions in the economy. Central to economic nationalization throughout East
Central Europe in the interwar period, for example, was land reform. By “expropriat[ing] ethnically
‘alien’ landlords,” while sheltering landlords of the “correct” ethnic nationality from the brunt
of agrarian reform, states sought to defuse an explosive social issue at minimal political
cost.[27] Not only German but also Russian, Polish, Hungarian, Bulgarian and other landlords whose
estates lay outside “their own” nation-state found themselves expropriated in this manner.[28] In
Poland the most conveniently expropriable “alien” landlords were Germans in the western borderlands
(though there were also some Russian as well as a few Ukrainian and Lithuanian estate owners in the
eastern borderlands). Although policies formally applied to estates owned by Poles as well as to
those owned by members of national minorities, in practice land reform was implemented most
vigorously vis-à-vis Germans.[29] Distribution of the expropriated land, too, was guided by
ethnopolitical considerations – a point that especially aggrieved the desperately poor Ukrainian
and Belarusian peasants in the east, who saw Poles resettled on lands expropriated from Russian
estate owners. Apart from land reform, state officials used administrative discretion to pursue a
nationalizing agenda through such techniques as the selective denial of licenses required to
practice certain professions, the exclusion of German firms from state contracts, the
nationalization of the civil service, and pressure on industrial firms (especially in the
strategically crucial heavy industrial district of Upper Silesia) to Polonize their managerial
staffs and their labor force.[30]

A final dimension of nationalization can be broadly characterized as cultural, although in this
sphere too specifically cultural concerns were intertwined with geopolitical and security concerns
and with economic interests. Here questions of language were central. Polish was made the sole
official language of the state. From 1924 on, Polish officials were instructed not to accept any
communications in German, and postal authorities would not deliver mail using the German spelling
of place names.[31] But the main arena of language politics – and of cultural nationalization in
general – was the school system. The Minority Protection Treaty obliged Poland (like other East
Central European states) to provide elementary education in minority languages where minorities
formed a “considerable proportion” of the population.[32] The latitude allowed governments in
interpreting these provisions, coupled with a cumbersome and ineffective enforcement procedure,
made them easy to circumvent. The number of German-language schools dropped sharply, even after the
end of mass German out-migration, declining in Poznania and Pomerania from 1250 in 1921-22 to 254
in 1926-27 (by which time mass emigration had ended) to 60 in 1937-38.[33] In the German schools
that remained, the administration and teaching staff as well as the curriculum were increasingly
Polonized. These measures seem to have aimed less at assimilating German schoolchildren than at
preventing Germans from controlling – and from using toward ends inimical to the Polish
nation-state – the powerful organizational and ideological resources of “their own” school system.
In this respect Polish school policy reinforced other measures aimed at inhibiting, hindering, or
controlling the associational and organizational life of Germans, and thereby at hindering the
organizational articulation and expression of specifically German interests.


Nationalizing the urban economy

Toward Jews, as toward Germans, the nationalizing policies and practices of interwar Poland were
dissimilationist rather than assimilationist. Yet while the dissimilationist stance toward Germans
reflected the general belief that Germans could not be assimilated, the dissimilationist stance
toward Jews reflected the prevailing view that Jews should not be assimilated. Rather than seeking
to assimilate Jews, or to cultivate the loyalty of acculturated though unassimilated Jews, policies
and practices of nationalization sought on the whole to displace Jews from their all-too-visible
positions in the urban economy and, especially after the Nazi seizure of power in Germany, to
encourage their emigration.

The identities of Jews – their religious, cultural, and political self-understandings – were
exceedingly varied and intensely contested among Jews themselves in interwar Poland. There were
deeply rooted political, cultural, economic, and demographic differences between Jews of Galicia,
Congress Poland, and the eastern borderlands. And throughout Poland, Jews were torn between the
Yiddish, Polish, and Hebrew languages, between religious and secular identities, between socialist
and antisocialist ideologies, between Zionists and their opponents (both secular and religious).
Consequently, generalizations about Polish Jews as a whole are exceedingly hazardous. Still, it
seems safe to suggest that unlike Germans, and precisely because of the great flux in Polish Jewish
self-understandings, a substantial minority of Jews were potentially “available” as members of the
Polish nation during the interwar period, and more would have been or become available if the new
Poland had not been the “most anti-Semitic state in Europe” at the beginning of the interwar
period.[34]

Most Jews, to be sure, were linguistically and culturally unassimilated when the Polish state was
reestablished. But this was a period of great mobilization, rapid acculturation, and linguistic
assimilation, especially for the younger generation. Even at the beginning of the period, about a
quarter of those who identified their religion as Jewish in the 1921 census identified their
nationality as Polish rather than Jewish.[35] Yet apart from the Polish Left, which favored the
assimilation of Jews, Poles generally did not encourage assimilation. While the Left remained a
strong oppositional force throughout the interwar years (distinguishing Poland from most other East
European countries), the predominant nationalizing policies and practices in interwar Poland were
emphatically not those of the Left. So while a substantial fraction of Poland’s Jewish population
either already identified with Polish nationality or might have come to identify with it, Jews were
excluded from that nationality by prevailing Polish understandings of nationhood and practices of
nationalization (and of course also tended to exclude themselves from that nationality in response
to those understandings of nationhood and practices of nationalization).

Germans in the west and Ukrainians and Belarusians in the east were borderland minorities. All were
concentrated in areas adjacent to neighboring states that contained large populations of their
ethno-national kin, that claimed (across the boundaries of state and citizenship) to protect and
represent their interests, and that harbored unconcealed irredentist designs on the borderland
territories they inhabited. Polish nationalizing stances toward these borderland minorities were
determined by the felt need to Polonize (though in different ways, dissimilationist in the west,
assimilationist in the east) the ethnic borderlands and thereby secure them against the irredentist
designs of Germany and the Soviet Union.[36]

This, of course, was not the case of Jews, whose external national homeland – for those who
considered it such – was still in the making, a homeland distant not only in space but also (given
British limits on Jewish immigration to Palestine) in time. The absence of a proximate, putatively
irredentist homeland, to be sure, did not prevent Polish nationalists from questioning the loyalty
of Jews. Indeed, suspicions of Jewish disloyalty were behind the outbreaks of anti-Semitic
violence, including several major pogroms, that accompanied struggles against Ukrainian
nationalists, the incipient Lithuanian state, and the Red Army over contested borderland regions of
the new state in 1918-20.[37] But the territorial dimension of nationalizing policies and
practices, so pronounced in the case of borderland minorities, was missing in the case of the Jews.
Vis-à-vis territorially concentrated, rooted, homeland-linked Germans and East Slavs, Poles sought
to nationalize the ethnic border-lands; vis-à-vis Jews, they sought instead to nationalize the
urban commercial and professional economy.[38]

Jews were indeed prominent in Polish cities, and predominant in commerce and certain professions.
In terms of demography and socio-economic structure, the contrast with the population as a whole
was sharp. Jews constituted nearly a third of the urban population of Poland in 1921, and half of
the urban population in the backward eastern borderlands, while comprising just over 10 percent of
the population as a whole. While 60 percent of the total population depended on agriculture for
their livelihood in 1931, this was true of only 4 percent of Jews. In 1921, Jews comprised over 60
percent of those employed in commerce; in 1931, they accounted for more than half of the doctors, a
third of the lawyers, and substantial shares of other professions. In fact, the large majority of
Polish Jews were very poor, and the single most striking economic fact about Polish Jews in the
interwar period was their progressive pauperization. Nearly four-fifths of Jews active in commerce
were self-employed, and did not employ other workers: “the typical Jewish ‘merchant’ was a small
shopkeeper, or owner of a stall in the local market, working alone or with the help of his family.”
Yet the visible ethnic division of labor and statistics such as those given above “were interpreted
by Polish anti-Semites as proof that Polish cities were dominated by ‘foreigners,’ against whom a
holy war must be waged by the native middle class.”[39]

Economic nationalization vis-à-vis Jews was both governmental and extra-governmental. Jews were
systematically excluded from state-controlled sectors of the economy. They were not hired in the
civil service, municipal administration, state hospitals, schools, or universities (where, even
without an official numerus clausus, the proportion of Jewish students declined by two-thirds).
Credit and work licenses were distributed differentially. Sunday work was forbidden, putting
religious Jews who could not open their shops Saturdays at a competitive disadvantage. Governmental
anti-Semitism was checked in the late 1920s under Piłsudski, but pressure on Jews intensified again
with the onset of the Great Depression. After Piłsudski’s death in 1935, the government, declaring
it only “natural that Polish society should seek economic self-sufficiency,” and openly endorsing
“economic struggle [against the Jews],” renewed its campaign of economic nationalization.
Governmental nationalization from above was complemented by extra-governmental nationalization from
below. Right-wing students harassed, humiliated, and physically attacked Jews in universities.
Centrist as well as right-wing parties campaigned against the economic position of Jews. The
centrist Peasant Party, for example, even while rejecting violence and professing to endorse equal
rights for Jews, blamed Jews – an unassimilable, “consciously alien nation within Poland” – for the
alleged fact that “the Poles have no middle class of their own,” and concluded that it was vital
that “these middle-class functions shall more and more pass into the hands of the Poles.” In the
second half of the 1930s, a large-scale boycott of Jewish businesses was organized; and direct
violence, unchecked by the state, was increasingly employed against Jewish shop-keepers and
craftsmen.[40]

If nationalizing policies and practices vis-à-vis Jews sought in the short term to exclude them
from the professional and commercial economy, the long-term aim was to promote Jewish emigration.
Here the Polish government and right-wing nationalists made common cause with Zionist
organizations. “If Zionism meant Jewish emigration to {Palestine], no one was more Zionist than
Poland’s leaders in the late 1930s.” And as both economic crisis and anti-Semitism intensified,
many Jews were willing to emigrate. Precisely in the late 1930s, however, the British government
sharply curtailed Jewish immigration to Palestine, the number of Polish Jews immigrating dropping
from a peak of 30,000 in 1935 to about 4,000 per year in the late 1930s. It was thus, ironically,
against the wishes of Poland’s virulently anti-Semitic government that the vast majority of Polish
Jews remained in Poland to face the unimaginable catastrophe that would soon follow.[41]


Nationalizing the eastern borderlands

The eastern borderlands presented yet another picture. To the east, the territory of the Polish
state extended far beyond that of the Polish language, including a nearly 200-mile-wide strip in
which the language of the countryside was Belarusian (in the northeast) and Ukrainian (in the
southeast).[42] Outside the cities, Belarusians and Ukrainians comprised large local majorities in
these borderlands, and they formed over 20 percent of the population of the state as a whole.[43]

The economic and social condition of Belarusians and Ukrainians contrasted sharply with that of
Germans and Jews. While Jews were 80 percent urban, the East Slavs were almost 95 percent rural
(Germans were initially mixed but became heavily rural as a result of disproportionately heavy
urban emigration).[44] Belarusians and Ukrainians occupied no desirable economic or political
positions from which there was any interest in excluding them. They were recognized – while Germans
and Jews were not – as autochthonous; no one sought to encourage them to emigrate.

As territorially concentrated borderland minorities, linked to large populations of co-ethnics in
neighboring states, the East Slavs did of course share certain features with the Germans. But the
national question in Poland’s eastern borderlands was more complex than it was in the west. In the
west, Germans and Poles faced one another as mobilized and opposed nationalities. There were, to be
sure, zones of mixed settlement and others of uncertain national identity. But the contending
identities were clearly profiled and deeply rooted even well before the reestablishment of Polish
statehood.

In the eastern borderlands, the contours of national identity were more indeterminate. Between the
Poles and Russians lay a vast zone extending from the Baltic to the Black Sea where national
movements had developed only in the last few prewar decades, and where incipient national
identities, articulated and propagated by a small urban intelligentsia, had yet to acquire a
substantial social base among the still overwhelmingly peasant populations.

The major exception to this eastern pattern was in eastern Galicia. Unlike the rest of this zone,
which had belonged to the Russian Empire, Galicia had been a Habsburg province, with Poles
predominating in its western, Ukrainians in its eastern half. There, for half a century before the
First World War, conditions for cultural and even political nationalist mobilization were much more
favorable than they were in the more authoritarian Romanov territories. Consequently, a strong
Ukrainian nationalist movement developed, led, as everywhere, by an urban intelligentsia, but
mobilizing the peasantry as well, and generating, by the outbreak of the First World War, a more
deeply rooted sense of national identity.

The collapse of Romanov, Habsburg, and Hohenzollern empires in the First World War as well as the
postwar turmoil associated with the Russian Revolution and subsequent civil war left the political
fate of these regions radically uncertain. These turbulent years witnessed a welter of competing
political projects for the region, sponsored by Germans, Poles, Bolsheviks, and various native
intelligentsias, supported or undermined by a succession of armies, and ranging from creation of
new sovereign states through various federalist and confederalist schemes to proposals for outright
incorporation by larger powers.[45]

In the immediate postwar years, there were two contending Polish visions of the eastern
borderlands. One, associated with Piłsudski and the Left, favored an expansive federal Poland that
would incorporate the extensive eastern territories of the historic Commonwealth, grant their
incipient nationalities wide autonomy, and encourage them to develop their national individuality –
all as a buffer against Russia, presently prostrate, but likely, on this view, to revive and
constitute the main future threat to Poland. The second vision, associated with Dmowski and the
rightist National Democrats, favored a more compact state (though still one extending well beyond
ethnographically Polish territory) whose East Slav-inhabited territories (albeit less extensive
than those envisioned by Piłsudski) would be incorporated into a unitary Polish state, and whose
East Slav inhabitants would be expected to assimilate.[46]

It was the latter, nationalizing approach to the eastern borderlands that prevailed.[47]
Piłsudski’s federalist scheme came to naught, as Lithuania insisted on – and was able to sustain –
full independence and as the Belarusian-Ukrainian borderlands, following the Polish-Soviet War of
1920, were partitioned, their western parts incorporated integrally into the Polish state. East
Galicia too, which Polish troops had occupied in 1918-19, crushing the “West Ukrainian People’s
Republic” that had been proclaimed in November 1918 and driving out its army, was incorporated in
unitary fashion into Poland, despite the autonomy that had been promised by the Polish legislature
in order to win Allied approval for Polish claims to sovereignty there.[48]

While it was widely believed that Germans could not and Jews should not be assimilated, the
assimilation of Belarusians and Ukrainians was seen as both possible and desirable, even as
necessary. As leading National Democrat Stanislaw Grabski put it, referring to the eastern
borderlands, “the transformation of the state territory of the Republic into a Polish national
territory is a necessary condition of maintaining our frontiers.”[49] Outside eastern Galicia,
where Ukrainian national consciousness was strong, the prospects for assimilation in the eastern
borderlands were indeed relatively favorable. These areas were extremely underdeveloped
economically and culturally. Under tsarist rule, they had lacked nearly completely the educational
and cultural facilities that could support a public sphere through which national consciousness
could develop and diffuse.[50] The nationalist intelligentsia was tiny and lacked any substantial
constituency. The Belarusian and Ukrainian inhabitants were overwhelmingly rural; their concerns
were overwhelmingly economic, not national. Their identities were seldom, and then only weakly,
articulated in national terms. Some identified themselves simply as tuteshni (“from here”). Others
– notably Catholic Belarusian speakers in the area around Wilno (Vilna, Vilnius) – already
identified themselves as Poles.

 Yet far from furthering the assimilation or even securing the loyalty of borderland East Slavs,
Poland’s inept nationalizing policies and practices in the interwar period had just the opposite
effect, producing by the end of the period what had not existed at the beginning: a consolidated,
strongly anti-Polish Belarusian and – to an even greater extent – Ukrainian national consciousness.
This happened through heavy-handed efforts to nationalize the land, the schools, and the churches
of the region, and through the harsh repression of Belarusian and Ukrainian nationalist and
social-revolutionary movements.

Although it had assimilationist aims, the new state’s land policy in the eastern borderlands
employed differentialist, discriminatory means. Just as the nationalizing German Kaiserreich had
sought to Germanize the lands of its predominantly Polish eastern borderlands by promoting
ethnically German at the expense of ethnically Polish landowners – through state sponsorship of
what was forthrightly called “colonization” and state control over land sales – so the
nationalizing Polish state pursued similar policies vis-à-vis Belarusians and Ukrainians, settling
soldiers and other Poles from western territories on estates in the eastern borderlands; indeed
Poles were well aware of the parallels between the national struggles in the German-Polish and
those of the Polish-East Slav borderlands.[51] Yet just as the German colonization program provoked
sustained Polish opposition (and was in any event ineffective), so too the Polish colonization
efforts, while only marginally affecting ethnic demography and land ownership, powerfully
antagonized the local, land-starved Belarusian and Ukrainian peasants.[52] This antagonism was
compounded by the failure of the Polish state to carry out a radical land reform; but such a reform
was unthinkable, for it would have meant expropriating Polish landlords (who held the great
majority of large estates in the eastern borderlands) for the benefit of non-Polish peasants –
precisely the reverse of the situation that made radical land reform politically profitable (and a
perfect instrument of nationalization) elsewhere in East Central Europe, where ethnically alien
landlords could be expropriated for the benefit of “national” peasantries.[53] The embittered
agrarian situation allowed Belarusian and Ukrainian agitators to interpret economic grievances in
national terms, and thereby contributed to the “nationalization” of the East Slav populations – but
in a sense opposite to that intended by the Poles.

In the spheres of education, culture, and religion, policies toward the two East Slav nationalities
initially differed. Before the war, the Belarusian national movement had been directed against
Russia and Russification, while the most vigorous part of the Ukrainian national movement (in
Austrian eastern Galicia) had been directed against Poles (who were dominant in Galicia as a
whole). At first (before the triumph of the unitarist, assimilationist National Democrats), the new
state sought to take advantage of this anti-Russian orientation of Belarusian nationalism. It
therefore not only tolerated but actively supported Belarusian school and cultural institutions,
seeking to further the sense of Belarusian distinctiveness from Russia and thereby to secure the
loyalty of the Belarusian population. Within a few years, however, this support was withdrawn and
assimilationist policies were adopted throughout the eastern borderlands. Belarusian and Ukrainian
schools were replaced with nominally bilingual but in fact predominantly Polish ones, and the
activities of Belarusian and Ukrainian cultural organizations were restricted in a variety of ways.
The Ukrainian university that had been envisioned when Poland was seeking Allied approval of its
claims to Galicia was not established, and the existing Ukrainian-language chairs at Lwów (Lviv)
University were abolished. In the 1930s, attempts were made, sometimes with force, to convert
Orthodox Ukrainians (i.e. those living outside Galicia, where Ukrainians were Uniate Catholics) to
Roman or Uniate Catholicism, and numerous Belarusian and Ukrainian Orthodox churches were closed
down, or pressed to use Polish liturgical texts.[54]

In terms of their own objectives, the exclusionary, dissimilationist nationalizing policies and
practices of interwar Poland towards Germans and Jews can be said to have “succeeded,” at least in
part. By contrast, the assimilationist nationalizing stance towards Belarusians and Ukrainians
failed conspicuously on its own terms. Far from being absorbed into the Polish nation, Belarusian
and Ukrainian speakers in the Polish borderlands developed much stronger Belarusian and Ukrainian
national identities during the interwar period. Worse still, from the Polish point of view,
whatever feelings of loyalty they might have had, or developed, toward the Polish state were
replaced by hostility. When Poland was partitioned in 1939 between Germany and the Soviet Union,
few Belarusians or Ukrainians regretted the end of Polish rule, though worse, by far, was in store
for them under Soviet rule, and though the attractiveness of the Belarusian and Ukrainian national
“republics” within the Soviet Union – considerable in the 1920s, when Belarusification and
Ukrainization were vigorously promoted – had long since been spoiled by news of the purges,
collectivization, and famine of the 1930s.

This draining of loyalty from the borderland population, to be sure, cannot be blamed solely on
Poland’s nationalizing policies and practices. More important, probably, was the government’s
harshly repressive response to the strong social-revolutionary and radical nationalist movements
that developed in the borderlands; for the repression touched not only the extremists, who openly
espoused and practiced terror against Polish officials, but fell heavily on moderate nationalists
and apolitical villagers as well.[55] But the state’s nationalizing policies and practices were
crucial in generating and aggravating the grievances that provided a fertile seedbed for borderland
militancy.


Coda: nationalizing states in the new “New Europe”

Can the model of a nationalizing state sketched above, and illustrated with reference to interwar
Poland, help us think about today’s new nation-states, the incipient successor states to the Soviet
Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia? A sustained discussion of this question is beyond the scope
of this chapter. But a few general observations can be offered.[56]

A caveat is required at the outset. I do not try here to draw lessons from the Polish case. As has
been shown in detail, Polish nationalizing policies and practices were shaped by the specific (and
internally varied) political, geopolitical, economic, and cultural contexts that framed the
relations between Poles and minorities. To say anything specific about nationalizing policies and
practices in the new states, and about how they might resemble or differ from those of interwar
Poland, would require sustained attention to their formative contexts – contexts that differ
sharply from those that shaped nationalizing stances in interwar Poland (and that vary considerably
from one new state to the next). To address these varied contexts is impossible here. My concluding
remarks are necessarily on a much more general level, and take as their point of departure not the
detailed discussion of Poland but the general model of the nationalizing state presented toward the
beginning of the chapter.

A nationalizing state, I have suggested, is one understood to be the state of and for a particular
ethnocultural “core nation” whose language, culture, demographic position, economic welfare, and
political hegemony must be protected and promoted by the state. The key elements here are (1) the
sense of “ownership” of the state by a particular ethnocultural nation that is conceived as
distinct from the citizenry or permanent resident population as a whole, and (2) the “remedial” or
“compensatory” project of using state power to promote the core nation’s specific (and heretofore
inadequately served) interests.

In the new states of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, these key elements are clearly
present. The new states (with the partial and ambiguous exceptions of Bosnia-Hercegovina, rump
Yugoslavia, and the Russian Federation) are closely identified with particular ethnocultural
nations. This is the legacy of their prior incarnation as the major ethnoterritorial units of
nominally federal multinational states, in which they were already defined as the (nominally
sovereign) states of and for the particular ethnocultural nations whose names they bore. The Soviet
regime, as I argued in Chapter 2, deliberately constructed its constituent republics as national
polities “belonging” to their respective eponymous nations, while at the same time severely
limiting their powers of rule; the Yugoslav and (to a lesser extent) Czechoslovak regimes,
following the Soviet model, did the same. Today, the institutionalized sense of ownership and
ethnonational entitlement persists, but is now coupled with substantial powers of rule. Successor
state elites can use these new powers to “nationalize” their states, to make them more fully the
polities of and for their core nations.

In almost all of the new states, the ethnoculturally defined, state-”owning” core nation is sharply
distinct from the citizenry as a whole;[57] and the core nation has been represented by its elites
– or at least an important segment of its elites – as weakened and underdeveloped as a result of
previous discrimination and repression. Even the dominant nations in the preceding multinational
states, Russia and Serbia, have been represented in this light. To compensate for this, the new
state is seen as having the right, indeed the responsibility, to protect and promote the cultural,
economic, demographic, and political interests of the core nation.

Indisputably, then, the conceptual and ideological foundations for programs and policies of
nationalization are in place. To be sure, alternative models of the state are available as well.
There are three principal alternative models in circulation. First, there is the model of the
“civic” state, the state of and for all of its citizens, irrespective of their ethnicity. Second,
there is the model of binational or multinational states, understood to be the states of and for
two or more ethnocultural core nations. Note that these alternative models differ sharply from one
another: ethnicity or ethnic nationality has no public significance in the former, yet major public
significance in the latter; the constituent units of the polity are individuals in the first case,
ethnonational groups in the second. Finally, there is the hybrid model of minority rights: the
state is understood as a national, but not a nationalizing, state; members of minority groups are
guaranteed not only equal rights as citizens (and thus protected, in principle, against
differentialist nationalizing practices) but also certain specific minority rights, notably in the
domain of language and education (and are thus protected, in principle, against assimilationist
nationalizing practices).

In my view, neither the civic nor the binational-multinational model has much chance of prevailing
in the new states of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. The civic model has considerable
international legitimacy; as a result, civic principles have been incorporated into some
constitutional texts and evoked in some public declarations (especially those directed towards
international audiences). But these civic principles remain external. It is hard to imagine a civic
self-understanding coming to prevail given the pervasively institutionalized understandings of
nationality as fundamentally ethnocultural rather than political, as sharply distinct from
citizenship, and as grounding claims to “ownership” of polities (which, after all, were expressly
constructed as the polities of and for their eponymous ethnocultural nations). For the same reason,
it is hard to imagine a binational or multinational understanding of the state coming to prevail.
Ironically, the civic model – where ethnicity and nationality are not supposed to have any public
significance – may have the best chances of working in the states that most closely approximate
ethnically homogeneous nation-states, notably in the Czech Republic and Slovenia. The best chance
for the binational or multi-national model would occur if two or more successor states were to
merge into a wider federal or confederal state, defining the new unit as binational or
multinational, but preserving their own “national” character internally.

The prospects of the minority rights model might seem better. It has even greater international
legitimacy than the civic model, and international organizations such as the Council of Europe, the
European Union, and the Organization for (formerly Conference on) Security and Cooperation in
Europe have pressed the new states to adopt and implement minority rights legislation. As a result,
all new states are formally committed to nondiscrimination and to protecting minority rights. But
this was true of the new states of interwar Europe as well, all of whom were subject to League of
Nations Minorities Treaties that expressly required equal treatment, protected the use of minority
languages, and obliged the state to provide minority-language primary education in regions with
substantial minority populations. These treaties did little to hinder the dynamic of
nationalization; formal guarantees of minority rights failed to impede substantive nationalization.
It remains to be seen whether internationally sponsored minority rights regimes will be more
successful today.

Almost all of the new states, in my view, will be nationalizing states to some degree and in some
form. Already, various nationalizing policies, practices, and stances have been adopted in domains
such as language policy, education, mass media programming, constitutional symbolism, national
iconography, migration policy, public sector employment, and citizenship legislation; significant
elements of nationalization can be found even in states that have presented themselves as models of
interethnic harmony, notably Ukraine and Kazakhstan.[58] But this does not mean that the new states
will be as consistently, or counter-productively, nationalizing as was interwar Poland. There is
and will continue to be great variation between states – and within states (over time, among
parties, across regions, between sectors of the government, and so on) – in the extent to which and
the manner in which nationalizing agendas are articulated and implemented. Moreover, in all states
nationalizing agendas must compete with other social, political, and economic agendas for
attention, support, and commitment – not so much with agendas that repudiate nationalization as
with those that bypass or ignore it and thereby make it seem less urgent, compelling, or relevant
to the problems of the day. The question is therefore not whether the new states will be
nationalizing, but how they will be nationalizing – and how nationalizing they will be.


In: Brubaker, Rogers. Nationalism Reframed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 79-106.
________________________________

[1] This and the previous paragraph are based on my “East European, Soviet, and post-Soviet
Nationalisms: A Framework for Analysis,” in Frederick D. Weil, ed., Research on Democracy and
Society, vol. I (Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1993), p. 354. Since writing that article, I have
discovered a similar distinction, between the “politicization of ethnicity” and the “ethnicization
of the polity,” in anthropologist Ralph Grillo’s Introduction to “Nation” and “State” in Europe:
Anthropological Perspectives (London: Academic Press, 1980), p. 7.

[2] See among many other works Karl Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication (Cambridge, Mass.
and New York: The Technology Press of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and John Wiley,
1953); and Stein Rokkan, “Dimensions of State Formation and Nation-Building: A Possible Paradigm
for Research on Variations within Europe,” in Charles Tilly, ed., The Formation of National States
in Western Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975).

[3] For an influential critique of this modernizationist understanding of ethnicity, see Walker
Connor, “Nation-Building or Nation-Destroying,” World Politics 24 (1972).

[4] Crawford Young, The Politics of Cultural Pluralism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1976); Donald Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).

[5] For a succinct account of “territorialism” as one of the chief distinctive features of
anti-colonial nationalisms in Africa, see Anthony Smith, State and Nation in the Third World (New
York: St. Martin’s, 1983), pp. 50ff.

[6] For this conjuncture and its subsequent eclipse, see Young, The Politics of Cultural Pluralism,
pp. 7ff.

[7] As John Breuilly put it, “once a nationalist. . . opposition takes control of the state the
specifically nationalist character of politics tends to diminish. Competing groups all proclaim
their paramount concern with the ‘national interest’. In such a situation nationalism as a specific
form of politics becomes meaningless. Again, where all foreign policy is justified in nationalist
language it is difficult to identify a specific form of foreign policy which could be called
nationalist” (Nationalism and the State [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985], p. 221).

[8] Peter Brock, “Polish Nationalism,” in Peter F. Sugar and Ivo J. Lederer, eds., Nationalism in
Eastern Europe (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994 [1969]), p.316.

[9] I am indebted for this last point to Dariusz Stola.

[10] Joseph Rothschild, East Central Europe Between the Two World Wars (Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 1974), pp. 34ff.; Antony Polonsky, Politics in Independent Poland (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1972), pp. 35ff.

[11] The western borderlands had been ruled by Prussia since the late eighteenth-century partitions
of Poland (in the case of East Upper Silesia since the mid-eighteenth century), and had belonged to
the unified German state for half a century. Besides the perhaps 1.4 million ethnic Germans of
these previously German-ruled western borderlands (a number soon sharply diminished by heavy
emigration), there were some half million Germans living in the formerly Russian part of Poland and
another hundred thousand in the formerly Austrian part. As Richard Blanke has argued, these are
fundamentally different cases. Germans in the formerly Russian and formerly Austrian parts of
Poland did not suffer so dramatic a reversal in status; they were not regarded as so dangerous by
Poles; and they did not, consequently, bear the brunt of programs and practices of nationalization.
I neglect them in this account. See Richard Blanke, Orphans of Versailles: The Germans in Western
Poland 1918-1939 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993), pp. 3 – 4. On the size of the
German population in interwar Poland, see ibid., p. 31, and Walter Kuhn, “Das Deutschtum in Polen
und sein Schicksal in Kriegs- und Nachkriegszeit,” in Werner Markert, ed., Polen (Cologne and Graz:
Böhlau, 1959), pp. 140-2.

[12] On interwar German homeland nationalism vis-à-vis ethnic Germans in western Poland, see
Chapter 5.

[13] Detlev J. K. Peukert, The Weimar Republic, trans. Richard Deveson (New York: Hill and Wang,
1993), pp. 201ff.

[14] On “privilege” as a motif in Polish historiography, explaining German economic pre-eminence,
and justifying remedial Polish nationalizing efforts, see Blanke, Orphans of Versailles, pp. 6-7.

[15] Blanke, Orphans of Versailles, pp. 51-3.

[16] On the economic dimensions of nationalizing states, Hans Jürgen Seraphim, Wirtschaftliche
Nationalitätenkämpfe in Ostmitteleuropa,” Leipziger Vierteljahrsschrift für Südosteuropa 1, no.4
(1937-38), is an analytically sophisticated statement.

[17] The entitlement to formal citizenship, granted to those who had been born in the ceded
territories or had resided there since 1908, was not undisputed, for Poland construed the residence
requirement as strictly as possible – in a manner ultimately invalidated by the Permanent Court of
International Justice – so as to minimize the number of eligible Germans (Blanke, Orphans of
Versailles, pp. 65-6).

[18] Geoff Eley, “German Politics and Polish Nationality: The Dialectic of Nation-Forming in the
East of Prussia,” East European Quarterly 18 (1984).

[19] See Blanke, Orphans of Versailles, p. 28; Kuhn, “Das Deutschtum in Polen,” p. 143.

[20] For a comparative discussion of migrations of ethnic unmixing in the aftermath of empire, see
Chapter 6.

[21] Blanke, Orphans of Versailles, p. 49; Hermann Rauschning, Die Entdeutschung West-preussens und
Posens (Berlin: Reimar Hobbing, 1930), pp. 338ff., esp. 348-9

[22] In 1919, for example, Stanislaw Grabski, then chairman of the Sejm committee on foreign
affairs, and later Minister of Culture, articulated the ruling National Democrats’ view of the
German-Polish borderlands: “We want to base our relationships on love, but there is one kind of
love for countrymen and another for aliens. Their percentage among us is definitely too high;
Poznania can show us the way by which the percentage can be brought from 14 percent or even 20
percent down to 1.5 percent. The foreign element will have to consider whether it will not be
better off elsewhere; Polish land for the Poles!” (quoted in Blanke, Orphans of Versailles, p. 63
and in Rauschning, Die Entdeutschung Westpreussens und Posens, p. 45). See also Blanke, Orphans of
Versailles, pp. 63-5.

[23] Although violence is generally a crucial determinant of migrations of ethnic unmixing (see
Chapter 6), it does not appear to have been central in this case. Violence Germans and Poles was
much greater in Upper Silesia in 1919-21 than in Poznania and Pomerania; yet emigration was heavier
from the latter regions. One reason for the lesser migration from Upper Silesia is that the
disposition of this territory was not settled until October 1921, when the territory was divided
between Germany and Poland following a plebiscite in March of that year in which 60% (including a
substantial fraction of Polish-speakers) had voted for the territory to remain with Germany. On the
immediately postwar years in Upper Silesia, see Bogdan Koszel, “Nationality Problems in Upper
Silesia,” in Paul Smith, ed., Ethnic Groups in International Relations (Aldershot, UK and New York:
Dartmouth Publishing Company and New York University Press, 1991); and Blanke, Orphans of
Versailles, pp. 26-31.

[24] Blanke, Orphans of Versailles, p. 64.

[25] On the limited analytical usefulness of the concept of forced migration, see the discussion in
Chapter 6, esp. pp. 168, 171.

[26] Blanke, Orphans of Versailles, pp. 40-3, 63-5.

[27] Rothschild, East Central Europe Between the Two World Wars, p. 15.

[28] Seraphim, “Wirtschaftliche Nationalitätenkämpfe in Ostmitteleuropa,” pp. 47-50.

[29] A confidential memorandum of 1929 from the wojewode of the Polish province of Pomorze clearly
indicated the underlying ethnopolitical rationale of land reform. In undertaking land reform, he
argued, one must consider the “loyalty of the affected citizens, their nationality, their religion,
and their general attitude toward the vital interests of the state.” Especially the strategically
vital “Polish corridor,” the main target of German irredentism, “must be cleansed of larger German
holdings” and “settled with a nationally conscious Polish population” (quoted in Blanke, Orphans of
Versailles, p. 113).

[30] Blanke, Orphans of Versailles, pp. 116-20. The initiative did not always come from the state.
Nationalist associations in the borderlands, drawing their membership heavily from such
state-dependent groups as teachers and civil servants, “staged anti-German rallies, organized
boycotts of German businesses, [and] pressured employers to give preference to ethnic Poles”
(ibid., p. 94).

[31] Ibid., p. 67.

[32] C. A. Macartney, National States and National Minorities (London: Oxford University Press,
1934), p. 505.

[33] Blanke, Orphans of Versailles, p. 79; Kuhn, “Das Deutschtum in Polen,” p. 147.

[34] The quotation is from Ezra Mendelsohn, the leading historian of European Jews in the interwar
period; see Mendelsohn, “A Note on Jewish Assimilation in the Polish Lands,” in Bela Vago, ed.,
Jewish Assimilation in Modern Times (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1981), p. 145.

[35] Ezra Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe Between the Two World Wars (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1983), pp. 23, 29. These figures for self-identified nationality of Jews
are suggestive, and reveal strong regional variation in Jewish identification with Polish
nationality (this being strongest in Galicia, where Jewish assimilation to the dominant Polish
language and culture had been strong under Habsburg rule, and weakest in the eastern borderlands).
However, the artifactual character of these figures must be borne in mind. The 1921 census obliged
all respondents to identify their nationality, regardless of whether nationality was a meaningful
category of self-understanding for them. Clearly, for many Jews, nationality was not a meaningful
category: many Jews, perhaps the majority, identified neither with Polish nationality nor with
Jewish nationality; they defined their Jewishness not in national terms but in traditional
religious terms. But my point here is that this traditional, non-national self-understanding was
eroding and in flux as a result of pervasive processes of mobilization and acculturation, and that
this process of reidentification in national terms created the potential for membership in the
Polish nation.

[36] This is an instance of the triadic relational nexus, analyzed in Chapter 3, between
nationalizing states, national minorities, and the external national “homelands” to which the
minorities belong by shared ethnic nationality though not by legal citizenship. This relation is
examined from the point of view of the German “homeland” in Chapter 5.

[37] Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe Between the Two World Wars, pp. 40-1.

[38] By emphasizing here Polish efforts to “nationalize” the urban and commercial economy, I am not
suggesting that Polish anti-Semitism was somehow essentially economic. Indisputably, it had deep
cultural roots; but they are beyond the scope of this discussion, which is concerned not with the
origins of anti-Semitism but with the nature of interwar nationalizing practices and policies.

[39] Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe Between the Two World Wars, pp. 23-9 (the
quotations are from pp. 28 and 23 respectively); Joseph Marcus, Social and Political History of the
Jews in Poland, 1919-1939 (Berlin: Mouton, 1983), pp. 29-31; Polonsky, Politics in Independent
Poland, pp. 42-4.

[40] Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe Between the Two World Wars, pp. 42-3 and 69-74
(the quotations are from pp. 71 and 72); Rothschild, East Central Europe Between the Two World
Wars, pp. 40-1; Polonsky, Politics in Independent Poland, pp. 465ff.

[41] Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe Between the Two World Wars, pp. 71, 79-80 (the
quotation is from p. 71); Polonsky, Politics in Independent Poland, pp. 467-8.

[42] Paul Robert Magocsi, Historical Atlas of East Central Europe (Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 1993), p. 131. What constituted a “language” rather than a “dialect” was of
course a matter of dispute. The prevailing Polish view (like the prevailing pre-Revolutionary
Russian view) was that Ukrainian and Belarusian were dialects rather than languages, and that the
speakers of these dialects did not constitute distinct nations but were rather a kind of
“ethnographic raw material” capable of being molded into Poles (or Russians). See Jerzy
Tomaszewski, Rzeczpospolita wielu narodów (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1985), p. 96.

[43] Rothschild, East Central Europe Between the Two World Wars, p. 36. Census figures for 1921 on
religion showed 21.7 percent of the population were Uniate or Orthodox, almost all of whom were
East Slavs; in addition, some Belarusians were Catholic. Census figures for 1921 by nationality
showed the Ukrainians as more than three times as numerous as Belarusians, but this almost
certainly exaggerated the disparity of size between the groups, since Catholic Belarusians were
classified as Polish by nationality.

[44] Ewald Ammende, ed., Die Nationalitäten in den Staaten Europas: Sammlung van Lageberichten
(Vienna: Wilhelm Braumüller, 1931), p. 57, reporting results of the 1921 census.

[45] On the Ukrainian lands, see Geoff Eley, “Remapping the Nation: War, Revolutionary Upheaval,
and State Formation in Eastern Europe, 1914-1923,” in Howard Aster and Peter I. Potichnyi, eds.,
Ukrainian-Jewish Relations in Historical Perspective, 2nd edn (Edmonton. Canadian Institute of
Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta, 1990). On the mobilization of Ukrainian ethnic identity
under conditions of war, revolution, and imperial collapse, see Mark von Hagen, “The Great War and
the Mobilization of Ethnicity in the Russian Empire,” manuscript (1995).

[46] On the historical background of these competing visions of the eastern lands of historic
Poland, see Brock, “Polish Nationalism.”

[47] More generally, the National Democrats established the basic parameters of interwar Poland’s
nationalizing policies and practices. Piłsudski himself, to be sure, returned to power in a 1926
coup and remained in power until his death in 1935. Yet although he made certain conciliatory
gestures towards minorities, he did not depart from the nationalizing course set by the National
Democrats. See for example Pawel Korzec, “The Minority Problem of Poland, 1918-1939,” in S. Vilfan,
ed., Ethnic Groups and Language Rights (Aldershot, UK and New York: Dartmouth Publishing Company
and New York University Press, 1993), pp. 205,210.

[48] Hans Roos, “Polen zwischen den Weltkriegen,” in Markert, ed., Polen, pp. 22-30; Pawel Korzec,
“The Ukrainian Problem in Interwar Poland,” in Paul Smith, ed., Ethnic Groups in International
Relations.

[49] Quoted in Jerzy Tomaszewskj, “The National Question in Poland in the Twentieth Century,” in
Mikulas Teich and Roy Porter, eds., The National Question in Europe in Historical Context
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) p. 229.

[50] Eley, “Remapping the Nation,” pp. 211, 226- 7.

[51] Brock, “Polish Nationalism,” p. 344.

[52] Polonsky, Politics in Independent Poland 1921-1939, p. 140; Rothschild, East Central Europe
Between the Two World Wars, pp. 42-3; Ammende, ed., Die Nationalitäten in den Staaten Europas, pp.
62-3,134-5.

[53] Rothschild, East Central Europe Between the Two World Wars, pp. 12-13, 67.

[54] Nicholas P. Vakar, Belorussia: The Making of a Nation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1956), pp. 121ff., 128-32; Encyclopedia of Ukraine, ed. Volodymyr Kubijovyc, 5 vols.
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984-93), vol. IV, pp. 81, 108,248-50; vol. V, p. 633.

[55] Vakar, Belorussia, pp. 125ff.; Roos, “Polen Zwischen den Weltkriegen,” pp. 42, 51.

[56] For initial appraisals of nation-building in the Soviet successor states, see Ian Bremmer and
Ray Taras, eds., New States, New Politics: Building the Post Soviet-Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, forthcoming 1996); Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic
Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe (Baltimore
and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), especially chapters 2, 19, and 20; and Paul
Kolstoe, “Nation-Building in Eurasia;” forthcoming in Journal of Democracy (1996).

[57] Exceptions include the Czech Republic, Slovenia, and Armenia, where the over-whelming majority
of the population belongs to the core nation; and Belarus and Ukraine, where the boundary between
the respective core nations and Russians, who comprise the largest minority in both states, is
blurred. In Estonia (and to a lesser extent in Latvia), the citizenry is relatively homogeneous,
but the total population of the state is not; this discrepancy is the product of a politics of
nationalization that, in the name of protecting the interests of the core nation, has so far
excluded the bulk of the non-Estonian and non-Latvian population from citizenship. I have addressed
the question of citizenship in “Citizenship Struggles in Soviet Successor States,” International
Migration Review 26 (1992).

[58] See Dominique Arel, “Language and Group Boundaries in the Two Ukraines,” and Ian Bremmer,
“Russians as Ethnic Minorities in Ukraine and Kazakhstan,” both presented at the conference on
“National Minorities, Nationalizing States, and External National Homelands in the New Europe,”
Bellagio Study and Conference Center, Italy, August 1994; Anatoly Khazanov, After the USSR
(Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), chapter 5; and Robert Kaiser and Jeff Chinn,
“Russian-Kazakh Relations in Kazakhstan,” Post-Soviet Geography 36 (1995). Nationalizing stances
have been weakest in Belarus, where, in a May 1995 referendum, large majorities favored increasing
economic integration with Russia, making Russian a “state language” alongside Belarusian, and
restoring Soviet state symbols; see Ustina Markus, “Lukashenko’s Victory,” in Transition 1, no. 14
(1995), 77-8.