Pragmatic Nationalism and Rural Groupness in Volhynia and the Chełm Lands, c. 1914-1945

Pragmatic Nationalism and Rural Groupness in Volhynia and the Chełm Lands examines how rural populations in Volhynia and the Chełm lands, regions straddling the Polish-Ukrainian borderlands, understood and performed national belonging from the late imperial era through the ethnic violence of the Second World War. Focusing on Polish- and Ukrainian-speaking villagers, the study challenges linear narratives that depict the countryside as a site of steady nationalization or inevitable radicalization. Instead, it argues that rural attachments to national groupness were socially contingent, situational, and pragmatic. Drawing on Polish and Ukrainian archival materials alongside memoirs, ethnographic studies, and oral history, the dissertation traces how local communities navigated a series of political and social ruptures: imperial Russification campaigns, First World War and subsequent Polish-Ukrainian War, the consolidation of the interwar Polish nation-state, the 1937 Polonization and Revindication Action, and the overlapping Nazi and Soviet occupations. These shifting regimes and events transformed the meanings and practical consequences of belonging to a given nation. National groupness emerged most forcefully at historical flashpoints, when affiliating with a particular nation offered tangible advantages, protection, or access to scarce resources. In this way, this dissertation seeks to contextualize localized Polish-Ukrainian violence during the Second World War in this region. In these contexts, pragmatic concerns such as safety, land acquisition, and the preservation of religious practice often outweighed abstract ideological commitments. National identification thus operated as one of several nested identities that coexisted with local loyalties, familial ties, and confessional affiliations. The study also highlights periods of coexistence and the persistence of alternative frameworks of belonging that challenged the hegemony of the national paradigm in organizing everyday life. By foregrounding the interplay between pragmatic nationalism, local solidarities, and alternative moral economies, this project reframes the history of interwar and wartime Volhynia and Chełm not as a linear progression toward ethnic conflict, but as a complex and historically contingent social terrain. It contributes to broader debates on nationalism, everyday groupness formation, and the dynamics of violence and coexistence in East Central Europe’s borderlands.

Author dc:creator

• Joanna M Dobrowolska (23292130)

• history
• nationalism
• Poland
• Ukraine
• ethnic conflict
• interwar period

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright
• Open Access after 2028-01-01

DOI dc:identifier

https://doi.org/10.25417/uic.31451872.v1

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:figshare.com:article/31451872