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.
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, 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. 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. 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.
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, 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. 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. 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.
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%). 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, 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. 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. 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. 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. This favorable economic position, like that alleged to be occupied by Jews, would be a focus of nationalist concern throughout the interwar period. 
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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Migration was also encouraged by popular anti-German demonstrations, including some violence against Germans. 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.” This does not mean that the migration was “forced,” as many Germans claimed. 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).
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. 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. 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. 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.
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. 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. 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. 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.
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. 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.
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. 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.
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.”
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.
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.

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). 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.
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). 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.
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.
It was the latter, nationalizing approach to the eastern borderlands that prevailed. 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.
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.” 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
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. 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.
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; 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. 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.