The Un-Polish Poland, 1989 and the Illusion of Regained Historical Continuity by Tomasz Kamusella

Author:Tomasz Kamusella
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

Abstract

This chapter describes how the Polish nation-state founded in 1918 was designed to be a revived Poland–Lithuania, nationally reinterpreted as an early Poland. Almost all the interwar state’s territory was Polish–Lithuanian. However, quite ironically, over half of the Commonwealth’s lands found themselves in the Soviet Union, making this communist polity more Polish–Lithuanian than Poland itself. From the ethnolinguistic and ethnoreligious point of view interwar Poland was still multiethnic, Slavophone Catholics (or ‘potential Poles’) accounting for two-thirds of the country’s inhabitants. This made interwar Poland similar to Poland–Lithuania. However, the nationally inflected ideological insistence that all the population be assimilated to the ethnolinguistically defined Polish nation, understood as the totality of Polish-speaking Catholics, was very un-Polish–Lithuanian in its character.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.