The Integration Myth
When Polish elites utilized the language of state integration during the early-to-mid-1920s, they highlighted their own centrality in competitive civilizing projects in Volhynia. At the moment when the post-imperial state was itself being constituted, these actors crafted myths about who was foreign, based on civilizational hierarchies between—and even within—the zones of the former partitions. If the right-wing Endecja relied on the antisemitic trope that Jews were eternal foreigners in Volhynia, Polish military settlers also faced accusations of national and social foreignness from Volhynia’s Ukrainian-speaking peasants and Polish-speaking landowners alike. Moreover, in locations beyond Warsaw, notably Poznań and Lublin, urban elites fashioned their cities as civilizational leaders by offering to usher Volhynia’s Poles, particularly those in the provincial capital of Łuck, toward modernity.