When Nationalism Began to Hate: Imagining Politics in Nineteenth-Century Poland (review)

This is a very serious work of intellectual history. By closely analyzing the critical role of language in shaping the content and determining the trajectory of nationalism, it finds itself in the tradition of Begriffsgeschichte propagated by Reinhart Koselleck, Vergangene Zukukunft: zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten (Frankfurt, 1979). Because it takes an innovative theoretical approach to the phenomenon of Polish nationalism itself, Porter's work will appeal to a broad readership. In this regard, Porter succeeds in doing what all East European specialists should strive to accomplish now that the artificial political division between Eastern and Western Europe has fallen by the wayside: formulating and tackling questions that are relevant for Europe as a whole. Together with Robert Blobaum, Rewolucja: Russian Poland, 1904-1907 (Cornell, 1995), Porter's monograph belongs to the most important recent English-language works in the field. In fact, the two can be read in tandem, since Porter elucidates the intellectual background to the bitter conflicts that surfaced within Polish society during the first Russian revolution of the century.

It often goes unmentioned that the Russian partition of the Polish lands provided the hottest focal point of sustained revolutionary activity in 1905. During this ferment, the two main representatives of modern Polish nationalism, the Polish Socialist Party (pps) and National Democracy (endecja), the subject of Porter's study, engaged in an intense and violent struggle for leadership over the national cause. These two political orientations grappled with modernity in very different and mutually incompatible ways. Whereas socialism put its faith in class and the laws of history derived from materialism, the endecja, armed with its own brand of sociological empiricism, preached national solidarity and unrelenting struggle. Paramount was Polish society's lamentable state in the here and now and the necessity to alter it in accordance with what Roman Dmowski, the endecja's leader, dubbed "national egoism."

Porter has reread the traditional story of how modern Polish nationalism emerged, employing as his analytical fulcrum the notion of historical time-specifically, debates about whether historical development was teleological or, instead, bereft of any clear-cut, foreseeable, and positive end. The development of Polish nationalism in the wake of the failed January uprising of 1863 is a well-known story; however, Porter's approach to the subject and the lens that he creates in the process are wholly original and innovative. What he provides is a new analysis of how the exclusionary and intolerant version of modern Polish nationalism arose by rejecting romanticism, the dominant creed of the stateless nation's struggle before the cataclysm of 1863/64.

The endecja embraced certain key principles of positivism, which itself rejected romanticism, but it did so while simultaneously forging a new and peculiar understanding of the nation's place in time. No longer able to rely on the belief in historical progress-let alone the supposition that Poland's fate was linked to some greater, international cause-the nation, the endeks argued, would have to transform itself in the present and, in the process, enter into conflict with the non-Polish inhabitants of the territories that made up the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Influenced by classical British liberal ideas about social change and organization and profoundly illiberal toward other ethnic groups, the endecja became the repository of virulent antisemitism. As Porter correctly emphasizes, the appearance of this kind of prejudice in the endecja's doctrine offered the surest measure of the movement's ascension (or descent) to the status of a radical right, that quintessential component of twentieth-century European politics and society.

There is little to criticize in this work, which is well organized and well edited. Porter has done an excellent job translating often-complex Polish-language texts into English. One missing element is politics, but, given Porter's methodology and concerns, this is not really a shortcoming per se. That being said, the political and social landscape in which the endecja operated...