Race and the Colour-Line: The Boundaries of Europeanness in Poland

Especially since the second Russian aggression in Ukraine, scholars have made efforts to “decolonize” the history of Eastern Europe. Debates continue about what this “decolonization” should entail, but certainly it suggests bringing attention to racial and colonial practices, not only those that Russia has employed in its imperial politics but also the less apparent ones that lingered below the surface in the histories of other countries in the region. Bolaji Balogun's academic debut constitutes an attempt at decolonial treatment of Polish history, which is much appreciated. Unfortunately—and I write this with great regret—it is a failed one.Race and the Colour-Line: The Boundaries of Europeanness in Poland is a book that escapes simple classification, since the sources and methods used therein are both historical and sociological—the author defended his PhD dissertation in sociology. Balogun's main point of reference is David Theo Goldberg's argument about the intertwined history of modern states and their racial politics, as manifested in Jim Crow America, Nazi Germany, or apartheid South Africa (p. 5).1 In line with this idea, the author's thesis is that racism has played a crucial role in shaping the Polish national identity and modernity. The book's structure is both chronological and thematic. The first, historical, half of the book encompasses three chapters, which correspond to the years 1569–1795, 1880–1939, and 1900–1950. The second, sociological, part is also subdivided into three, with chapter 4 “making sense of race and racism in contemporary Poland,” chapter 5 tackling “racial microaggressions,” and chapter 6—Polish racial nationalism in politics. As a historian, I will mostly deal with the first part of the book.Balogun's methodological deficiencies become apparent as one reads the first chapter, which aims to inscribe Eastern Europe into a global colonial system. It is a synthesis of secondary sources written by other scholars—Immanuel Wallerstein, Marian Małowist, Jonas Kreienbaum, and Christoph Kamissek, among others—which are presented in an uncritical manner. The influence of the European geographical “discoveries” on the economy of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries warrants further study, but Balogun does not contribute empirically to the topic. Instead, he imputes that the Commonwealth's economic contacts with the colonial powers are a racial aspect of this early-modern state, writing that “colonial profits were not only integral to the development of the West but also essential in the development of ‘other’ colonial global economy” (p. 37). After Małowist, Balogun underlines the role of the Polish “associated trade” in grain and timber, which was carried out from Gdańsk and “indirectly helped to sustain transatlantic slavery” (p. 41). In particular, the argument continues, the English and Dutch colonial enterprises in America could not succeed without shipments from the Baltic region. Perhaps aware of the tenuousness of this connection, the author also points out that the Commonwealth contributed not only raw materials but also people, such as the (in)famous Krzysztof Arciszewski (1592–1656), to Western European colonial efforts—without clearly stating that these nobles did not act on behalf of the Polish-Lithuanian state.Another “colonial” characteristic mentioned is the idea of “White on White imperialism”: that Polish-Lithuanian nobles abused their great-latifundia serfs in ways similar to the treatment of slaves in the American South, to increase profit and accumulate luxury goods from the Middle and Far East (p. 45). This, of course, resembles the thesis put forward by scholars such as Adam Leszczyński, associated with the turn toward a “people's history” of Poland—but any discussion of it should at least mention its critics, such as Mateusz Wyżga, whose nuanced research on the mobility of serfs contradicts the analogy.2 In addition to these disjointed points, supposed to illuminate “the ways in which the region is connected to the benefits of global white supremacy,” the author also presents the Polish nineteenth-century economic emigration to other continents in terms of the “racial contract” (p. 52). Whereas some Polish elites indeed imagined that Polish emigrants could be used for commercial and settlement purposes, especially in South America, one cannot speak of peasants being purposely sent away from the Polish lands by nefarious colonial forces. Balogun fails to mention the realities of life under the partitions, in particular the socioeconomic situation in Galicia that forced masses to emigrate. As other phenomena in this chapter, the author paints the picture of Polish emigration in broad strokes, also confusing the mass emigration of peasants with the earlier so-called Great Emigration of nobles, trying to situate it in Laura Doyle's “inter-imperial” model.The second chapter suffers from still more methodological and empirical flaws. As an analysis of Polish colonial aspirations from the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it is more closely connected to the overarching thesis of the book—Polish racism as the catalyst of the modern state. Once again, using secondary sources, Balogun flattens the topic at hand and misconstrues the cited studies. After Ureña Valerio, the author tackles the colonial project of Stefan Szolc-Rogoziński in the Cameroons in the 1880s, rightly pointing out the problematic nature of his contacts with the British colonial forces and flawed attitude toward Africans. This episode is presented as a prelude to the Polish colonial ambitions and discourse from the interwar period, as supported by the Maritime and Colonial League. Racism played a role therein and was always present under the surface, and sometimes took a front stage in the Polish efforts, for example, during a brief colonial partnership with the Portuguese in Angola. Nonetheless, Balogun reduces a multifaceted phenomenon to one dimension, ignoring a wide array of other factors that precipitated the Polish colonial agitation: the continuing emigration in the 1920s, worsening socioeconomic situation during the Great Depression, diplomatic games against Nazi Germany, just to mention a few. Ironically, the author denies agency to Africans—Liberians and Ethiopians, in particular—by failing to mention that it was often their initiative that prompted the Polish state to pose a challenge to the colonial order in place. Furthermore, the contention that interwar Poland attempted to “develop a labour control that would ensure that black Africans would work in similar ways as they did during slavery,” as put in the conclusion (p. 218), is based on scant empirical data that ignores the fact that most Polish colonial projects failed because they placed Poles, as one critic phrased it, “on an equal [economic] footing with the murzyni.”3On top of this neglectful—if not intentional—series of omissions is the application of the theoretical concept of Lebensraum to the Polish case. It is, of course, a highly contentious effort if only because the Polish state itself became an object of genocidal Nazi policies built upon the idea of “living space” for the Germans. Balogun does not explicitly state this fact, and instead wantonly links the Nuremberg Laws and an assumed genocide that would occur in a Polish-occupied Angola or Liberia, or simply the “Polish politics in 1940 [sic!]”, to the Nazi German regime (pp. 82–83). Furthermore, the claim that Poles searched for Lebensraum on racial terms in Africa is contradicted by the fact that it was South America, if anything, that colonial pundits imagined as the space for large Polish settlements. The proposition that Poles would uproot Africans if their colonial plans came to fruition is not completely outlandish, but it is necessarily counterfactual and assumes that all racisms are created the same, and genocidal. In Africa, the Polish elites were interested in creating economic outposts–apart from northern Madagascar, where there was a brief flirtation with the idea of a Jewish, then Polish-Christian settlement. As a matter of fact, the role of Jews and antisemitism in the Polish ambitions is another significant omission in Balogun's analysis. The chapter also suffers from other factual and spelling errors and fallacies, it's not possible to list them all. Still, one jarring instance is when the author raises the topic of the “Volynia Massacres (1943–1944)” without mentioning the Polish nationality of those murdered and the Ukrainian nationality of the perpetrators. This is followed by a discussion of the Polish oppression of the Other during the interwar period, creation of a racially homogenous postwar state, and its deportations of Ukrainians and Germans, “aided by the Nazis’ elimination of the Jewish population” (p. 88). In these paragraphs, the rise of radical Ukrainian groups—or World War II, for that matter—are not factors the author deems appropriate to be discussed.The third chapter focuses on the significance of eugenics in the Polish scientific space of the interwar period. Balogun tackles the intellectual and moral positions on eugenics in a number of Polish milieus, including the Polskie Towarzystwo Eugeniczne, attributing to them a nation-building role. This is a legitimate field of research, which has been meticulously studied by scholars such as Keely Stauter-Halsted (not cited in the book).4 In this section, racial thinking as manifested in the eugenicist circles’ use of physiognomic, craniometrical, and blood classification is interpreted as a dominant Polish intellectual current, but without empirical facts to back the claim. The influence of Nazi anthropological ideas on Polish interwar science, pseudo-science, and antisemitism is underlined, and the latter stands accused of contributing more to Poland's postwar homogeneity than wartime German genocide and postwar Moscow-imposed border shifts, which are ignored in the chapter's conclusion. Balogun cannot decide whether to argue that eugenics had profound influence on the broader Polish public. He admits that this was not the case and points out, after Uzarczyk, that the German Sterilization Law of 1933 affected the Polish population of Upper Silesia (p. 120), only to state that “the allusion to Nazism was not restricted to extreme individuals in Poland; it was generally viewed as a positive action aimed at increasing the overall quality of the national identity which covertly implies a race” (p. 127). The author suggests that figures such as Zofia Golińska, a parliamentarian, and Kazimierz Dąbrowski, a psychiatrist, represented most of the interwar Polish population, and cites instances of Polish state actions arguably inspired by Nazi ideas, such as the “Military Anthropological Photograph” project. Figures opposed to German anthropological concepts, such as Jan Czekanowski, are only mentioned in passing.The second half of the book is dedicated to present-day Poland and includes the empirical findings by the author himself, which demonstrate that racism has been an indispensable element of the Polish national identity and modernity. In chapter 4, Balogun connects his proposed concept of “Polish-centrism”—an ethnic and religious identification of the nation—to whiteness and Europeanness. This is followed by chapter 5, which presents Polish societal “microaggressions” against Black people in Poland, and chapter 6, which concentrates on the racial exclusion of the non-White Other by right-wing political forces in order to bolster nationalistic feelings. Balogun's sociological research methods and profuse use of theoretical concepts are difficult to judge by a historian, although one can certainly welcome the publishing of statements by people of different ethnic backgrounds living in present-day Poland. Still, in this section one also cannot help but to be under the impression that a certain bias might be at play in the presentation of Poland as a profoundly racist nation-state. No contradicting opinions by Poles such as John Godson, the first Black person in the Sejm, or Bawer Aondo-Akaa, a Black social worker, are cited—which is not to say their opinions are “correct,” but their less critical outlook does not earn any recognition in the book.The aims of Race and the Colour-Line are not to be condemned. It is worthwhile and necessary to trace the legacies of Polish racism throughout history and to point out its continuities in the present, especially insofar as the Polish national identity is concerned. Still, the problem with this book, or at least with its historical part, is twofold: the author tackles the periodical and thematic scope, enormous to begin with, without proper empirical findings, and he attempts to insert other scholars’ arguments piecemeal into a grand thesis. This, in turn, leads to countless factual errors, logical fallacies, and ideological manipulations, undermining some interesting theoretical approaches, such as the idea of the “racial contract.” I therefore encourage the author to return to the topics touched upon in the book without a priori assumptions about the nature of racism in Poland.