Ethnopolitics: The Making of Scientific Knowledge and Utopian Projects in Interwar Poland

My argument grows out of a question: Is there a prehistory of Area Studies on Eastern Europe in the region itself? If so, what was the rationale behind the development of these ‘indigenous’ regional studies? In my paper, I propose to focus on ‘ethnopolitics,’ a hybrid of politics and science, considered as a defining moment for research on Eastern Europe done by Eastern Europeans. This hybrid appeared in interwar Poland (1918–1939) as a result of the state’s seemingly internal concern for control over the multicultural society it governed and the increasing desire to manage processes of social transformation toward a ‘civilization of the future’. It also occurred against the backdrop of the emergence of new political powers, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, both aggressively intervening in science and academia and using expertise for modern authoritarian political purposes.

I look at the historical development of scientific multidisciplinary expertise on the borderlands region of the former Habsburg and Russian empires which after the First World War became the eastern part of the interwar Polish state. I will show how the academic establishment and the burgeoning growth of social sciences, with respect to research based on ethnographic fieldwork, interacted with different regional legacies on the one hand, and traditional as well as new intellectual links to global scholarly milieus on the other. I argue that both this transnational context and the specific politics of interwar Poland shaped the paradigmatic concerns and the professional code of ethics of this emerging scholarly field and community.