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3 ||| The Rise of Political Parties, 1890–1914 Robert E. Blobaum The rise of modern political parties in the immediate decades before the First World War, through their inclusion and representation of mass constituencies , symbolized a fundamental transformation of Polish political culture. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, participation in Polish political life was effectively confined to a narrow elite among the nobility, as it had been in prepartition times. The szlachta itself may have been divided into conflicting camps of various ideological persuasions, but its larger role as the de facto political class continued well into the second half of the century . Nonetheless, social, economic and cultural change, especially following the ill-fated January Uprising of 1863–64, gradually undermined the szlachta’s political hegemony and, by the beginning of the twentieth century, its claim to leadership. The decline of the szlachta was accompanied by a gradual broadening and democratization of the social base of Polish politics to include at first a weak middle class and an emerging intelligentsia, and by the 1890s independent peasant proprietors, artisans, and industrial workers. The transformation of Polish political life, ultimately reflected in the rise of mass parties, followed on the heels of modernizing forces that for several decades had been chipping away at the premodern agrarian-based economy, social relations, and popular culture. The emancipation of the peasantry, rapid population growth, the linking of town and country by railroad and the mass-circulation press, the spread of educational opportunities and increased literacy, industrialization , urbanization, and mass migration and emigration—to name the most important of these forces—could not but alter the landscape of Polish politics. 62 | Robert E. Blobaum Already in the 1870s, as we saw in the previous chapter, and even more emphatically in the 1890s, nationalism, socialism, and populism, the ideological movements of the new politics, appeared on that altered landscape. Although the principal proponents of the new ideologies came from a traditional elite that itself was being transformed—an urban intelligentsia descended largely from a displaced szlachta—the movements themselves resulted from and responded to an entirely modern phenomenon, the emergence of the “mass nation.” Indeed, the appearance of nationalism, socialism, and populism on the political stage corresponded to a change in the very meaning of the naród (or nation) in Polish discourse. In the traditional political culture, the naród had been a concept confined to the social estate of the szlachta, a politically privileged “civic nation” distinct from the lud (people). With the ascent of the new ideological movements, the concept of naród was expanded to include the lud, a development symbolizing the democratization not only of Polish political thought but also, more fundamentally , of the social base of Polish political life itself. The emergence of the mass nation coincided with the formation of a modern civil society, which was characterized above all by the proliferation of voluntary associations. Throughout partitioned Poland, but especially in the territories under German and Russian imperial rule, the institutions of civil society were as important as the mass parties in expanding the arena of political participation. As the modern naród and society (społeczeństwo) became more inclusive in one sense, however, they became less so in others. The civic nation of the szlachta, though bounded by estate privilege, did not define itself in terms of religion, race, or ethnicity.1 In contrast, those who spoke of and for the modern nation by 1914 did so exactly in those terms. As Polish national identity (polskość) was increasingly defined by ethnoreligious criteria, membership in the imagined nation became effectively restricted to Catholic Poles. From there it was but one small step to imagining the “other” as “alien” and “harmful”; in response, the non-Polish, non-Catholic, and non-Christian “minorities” formed modern political organizations of their own, which often mirrored their Polish Catholic counterparts. Women, even if ethnically Polish and Roman Catholic, straddled the border between inclusion and exclusion in both the modern nation and civil society as secondclass citizens in these imagined communities. The place of women in both nation and society gave rise to a “woman question” in Polish political dis- The Rise of Political Parties, 1890–1914 | 63 course as well as to the first organized feminist movement.2 Though overshadowed by the major political movements, feminism, too, could trace its origins to the transformations of the modern age. Political modernization in all its forms was nonetheless complicated by several factors. The structures of...

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