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RESEARCH PRODUCT

The Polish Nation: From a Multiethnic to an Ethnically Homogenous Nation-State

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In Chapter 4 I focused on the stateless noble natio of partitioned Poland-Lithuania that sought to transform itself into a Polish nation. The Polish-Lithuanian noble leaders paid lip service to the French model of the nation-state but, apart from a few lonely dissenting voices, had no intention to broaden the confines of the planned Polish nation to embrace the ‘third estate,’ that is, the peasantry and burghers. The social barrier of serfdom alone kept the nobles from associating with peasants. In the cities, a large and sometimes predominant, segment of the population was made up of German-speakers and Yiddish-speaking Jews. Their idioms disqualified them from participation in the emerging Polish nation due to the ideological fixation of the Polish national movement on the Polish language, which was imagined to be an invisible ersatz Polish nation-state in lieu of the partitioned Arcadia of Poland-Lithuania. Polish-Lithuanian political thinkers from the period of the Enlightenment could not foresee the vagaries of the nation-making and historical processes, which led to the dissociation of the Polish nation from the Polish-Lithuanian nobility beginning at the turn of 19th century.