Developmental Migration: Human Mobility, Populationist Politics, and the Transnational Engagements of the Interwar Polish Second Republic

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel examines the entanglement of the interwar Polish Second Republic in transnational debates and negotiations over populationist politics, controlled migration, and developmentalist pathways. Engaging with recent scholarship on international migratory regimes, (de)globalization, developmentalist thought, and ethnonationalism, the presentations on this panel analyze how state officials and ordinary Polish citizens envisioned this newly reconstituted country’s “civilizational” place in Europe and further afield in the interwar years.
Nikolas Weyland investigates the participation of Polish officials in interwar-era debates with German authorities over the citizenship status of “Ruhrpolen”—German citizens of Polish descent living in the Ruhr region—who had acquired Polish identity documents to emigrate to northern France and later sought to re-obtain their lost German citizenship. Zachary Mazur moves the panel’s focus to the Second Republic itself, analyzing the role of state planners in building up the so-called Central Industrial Area (COP) in the 1930s and their efforts to draw skilled Polish labor migrants, including people living abroad, to this burgeoning economic center. Finally, Małgorzata Mazurek’s paper examines how Polish representatives to international organizations sought to promote an acceptance of emigration as a “national right to exist” for developing countries. Mazurek contends that this political drive wielded the language of developmental growth and demographic stability to justify ethnonational homogenization.
In sum, this panel seeks to foreground diplomats, planners, and ordinary citizens of the Second Republic as active, assertive participants in the interwar period’s international arena and to deepen scholars’ understanding of the relationship between autarkic statist ambitions and transnational politics.

Sub Unit

• History: 1900-1945

Chair

• Jan Musekamp, German Historical Institute Warsaw (Poland)

Papers

• A National No-Man’s Land: Polish Citizens, French Connections, and the Politics of Citizenship in the German Ruhr, 1920-1939 - Nikolas Weyland, Harvard U

• Industrialization and Migration: The COP Plan for Poland - Zachary Adam Mazur, POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews (Poland)

• The Strange Rise of the 'Right to Migrate' (1936-1938): Poland, the League of Nations, and the Normalization of Ethnic Unmixing - Małgorzata Mazurek, Columbia U

Discussant

• Kathryn Ciancia, U of Wisconsin-Madison