The scientific novelty of this dissertation lies in a comprehensive study of the functioning of the concept of «Galicia» and its counter-concepts as regional names in the interwar period through the prism of the history of concepts. The concept of Galicia, which has been one of the key concepts in the public discourses of Central-Eastern Europe for more than two centuries, demonstrating unprecedented vitality despite various challenges and obstacles on its way, is of particular interest for such a study. The interwar period was a time when Galicia itself as an administrative unit had just ceased to exist, and its concept was subjected to strong competition from alternative terms and spaces.
Galicia in the interwar period was a concept and a region caught between competing national projects and burdened by post-imperial legacies. Both Ukrainian and Polish national movements attempted to establish their political and symbolic control over this fragment of the newly vanished empire and integrate it into their national space. As this paper shows, Galicia was at the intersection of interethnic and post-imperial borders, and thus the national and post-imperial components shaped the discourses around it.
The interwar period in Eastern Europe, according to Rogers Brubaker, was an era of nationalizing states, of which Poland was a classic example. As this work shows, it was the active nationalization of the disputed post-imperial space that caused two main problems Galicia as a concept and a region faced in the interwar period. The first one was terminological, when four competing terms appeared to designate its territory, each with its own meaning. The second was spatial, when Poland divided its territory into separate provinces while Ukrainians proclaimed it part of a wider «Western Ukrainian» space. This thesis therefore explores how, in these circumstances, yesterday’s Galicians continued to imagine the boundaries of their region, how they named it, and what meanings they attached to it.
This thesis is the first to trace the functioning of the term «Galicia» and its counter-concepts in the daily press throughout the interwar period. The practical significance of the thesis lies in the fact that its results can be used for further study of the discourses of Galicia in the twentieth century, for broader research on Ukrainian and Polish regional discourses and concepts, and for study of the contemporary functioning of the concept of Galicia in Ukrainian society. Finally, the results of this thesis can also be used for comparative studies of discourses of European frontier or post-imperial regions.
As the study shows, Eastern Galicia remained the basic region in which local Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews operated and which the central government dealt with until the end of the interwar period. The entire former Galicia for Poles, as well as the entire «Western Ukrainian lands» for Ukrainians, were the intermediate superstructures between their basic region and their national/state space. The separation of Eastern Galicia from Western Galicia, as well as integrity of the former, were determined by a combination of the post-imperial institutional and infrastructural heritage, built around the two centres of Lviv and Krakow, and the national factor: Ukrainians perceived this region as a «single Ukrainian territory», and that required a «unanimous counteraction» from the Poles.
In the case of Eastern Galicia, three factors mattered in the selection of region’s names and the meanings attached to them: the national interpretation of the term, its historical validity, and its relation to the post-imperial heritage. The thesis shows how, in the national question, each of national discourses built its own spectrum of names, from the most to the least loyal one. «Western Ukraine» (Zakhidna Ukraina) and «Lesser Poland» (Małopolska) took opposite positions here and caused the sharpest controversy between two camps. Meanwhile for Ukrainians, «Western Ukraine» served not only a tool to resist the policy of the nationalizing state but also as link to their «external homeland» beyond the Zbruch River. The thesis also suggest a hypothesis of the emergence of the concept «Eastern Lesser Poland» in 1919.
The struggle on the historical front went between «Galicia» (Halychyna) on the one side and «Red Ruthenia» (Ruś Czerwona) and «Cherven Land» (Ziemia Czerwieńska) on the other around three main criteria: historical state affiliation, cultural and civilizational role, and primordial ethnic character. For Poles, «Red Ruthenia» made the territory of Eastern Galicia a political and civilizational achievement of the Polish state, while «Cherven Land» made it an original, «indigenous» Polish ethnic land.
