Ethnic Politics in the Borderlands

This chapter explores how the diffuse ethnic divides of the era of nationalist mobilization during the 19th and 20th centuries re-emerged as specific partisan disputes in independent Poland. These political disputes—over economic redistribution, state ownership, and the proper limits of minority autonomy—colored life in virtually every community and provided the context in which the deadly violence of 1941 would ultimately occur. By translating ethnic demography into political weight, democratic politics in interwar Poland heightened ethnic tensions. Where powerful and articulate Jewish nationalist political parties and movements emerged, Poles and Ukrainians came to understand that the region’s Jews would not and could not be part of their respective nation-building projects.