The past quarter century of research has demonstrated how borderlands can both decenter our understanding of the nation and exhibit where nations have been made. Even after the supposed triumph of Wilsonian national self-determination in 1918, national ideas remained inchoate in these deeply complex frontiers. While total war conditions persisted across central and eastern Europe for another four years after the Great War's “end” in 1918, hybrid local identities outside the urban national core thrived for decades in the successor states to the Habsburg, Romanov, Hohenzollern, and Ottoman empires. Poland itself coalesced out of three imperial borderlands. Ample scholarship has exhibited how nationalism in partitioned Poland was a protean, usually elite phenomenon. While Brian Porter-Szücs has illustrated the contested evolution of nationalist ideas, Nathanial Wood has demonstrated that even in Cracow, Polish identity coexisted with Habsburg-imperial and local pride. In post-1918 Poland's western borderlands, meanwhile, substantial research by scholars including James Bjork, Brendan Karch, and Peter Polak-Springer has excavated overlapping local, religious, and national identities. Delving into the political, social, and economic flux of interwar Poland's eastern borderlands, Kathryn Ciancia offers a magisterial case study of Volhynia: a former Russian-imperial province where self-identified Poles formed a heterogeneous minority amid Jewish-dominated towns and a Ukrainian-dominated countryside.

Drawing from periodicals, memoirs, and fourteen archives in five languages, Ciancia offers a western-“democratic” counterpart to the Soviet-“communist” nationalities policies Kate Brown has explored in Biography of No-Place (2005) just across the militarized post-1921 Polish-Soviet border. In Brown's analysis, a host of modernizers arrived to forge national enclaves (notably “Polish” Marchlewsk) out of “backward” locals, whose murky national affiliations were perceived as evidence of their need for modern Enlightenment. On the Polish side of the border, Ciancia reveals how “second-tier” activists—border guards, military settlers, teachers, intellectuals, urban planners, and health workers—imagined themselves as furthering a historic Polish civilizing mission to “the East.” While scholars have traditionally contrasted the rightwing anti-Semitic, social-Darwinist “hateful” nationalism of Endecja with leftwing Piłsudski-backed multinational-imperialism, Ciancia convincingly highlights how national missionaries from both camps embraced interchangeable discourses that presumed Polish superiority to other cultures in the region. Simultaneously, the trope of Polish victimhood under recent imperial occupation legitimized blatantly imperialist behaviors that Polish civilizers defended as continuous with the (nationally reimagined) Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth's supposedly peaceful civilizing heritage.

Ciancia's chapters can be divided into two overlapping epochs of “civilizing” trends. First, during the decade after the 1921 Treaty of Riga, Polish civilizers from disparate “core” urban areas like Warsaw, Poznan, and Lublin descended on Volhynia's war-torn swamps, hills, and towns with a putatively inclusive platform favoring heterogenous regionalism they choreographed to supplement narratives of Polish “democratic” superiority. While Polish-speaking landowners were tasked to prioritize Polish patriotism over their partition-era social dominance, Ukrainian-speaking Orthodox peasants and Russian/Yiddish-speaking Jews were called to integrate through “the hierarchical logic that had long been central to Western civilizing missions,” in this instance that “Poles were the sole civilizational leaders who could bring democracy to the region” (45). Particularly intriguing is chapter five's exposition on the civilizers’ apprehension about Volhynia's omnipresent mud: outsiders yearned not just to transform the muddy marshes into arable farmland, but also to draw feudalistic locals from the metaphorical mud of illiteracy and superstition, which they feared made Volhynians vulnerable to agitation from communists and Ukrainian nationalists.

Second, by the 1930s and especially after Josef Piłsudski's death in 1935, the Polish civilizing mission degenerated into an aggressive push for Jewish emigration and Ukrainian assimilation. As Warsaw's governing cadre embraced homogenizing nationalist schemes traditionally favored by Endecja, Volhynian military authorities prevailed in pushing Polonization schemes that provoked Ukrainian nationalism. Building on Tara Zahra's claims about national indifference, Ciancia illustrates how civilizers imagined nationally uncommitted Orthodox populations as ancient Poles, who could be “renationalized” through forced conversions to Catholicism euphemistically called “revindications” (219). By contrast, Jews were framed as ethnically irredeemable. As Ciancia concludes: “if non-Polish Slavs were increasingly being conceptualized as a version of us, rather than of them, it was also becoming clear that Volhynia's Jews were always them and never us” (221).

Like Lenny Ureña Valerio's 2019 examination of pre-1918 Polish “civilizing” exploits across the world, Ciancia's local analysis translates broad conceptions of nationalism, empire, and civilization into everyday human quandaries in flux. Ciancia goes so far as to argue that, akin to her interwar examples, contemporary “multicultural” parlance about “inclusion” of largely eliminated groups (Ukrainians, Germans, Jews) in Polish historical narratives takes place “on Polish terms only” (236). Should an affordable paperback edition appear, this book will enrich discussions in graduate and advanced undergraduate seminars.