The Reconstruction of Nations

Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999 Paperback

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George Louis Beer Prize, American Historical Association, 2003
Przegląd Wschodni (Eastern Review) Best Foreign Academic Book, 2003
American Association for Ukrainian Studies Book Prize, shared, 2004
Jerzy Giedroyc Scholarly Award, Marie Curie-Skłodowska University, 2008
Honorable mention, Orbis-AAASS Book Prize in Polish Studies, 2004
Notable books for 2004, Philadelphia Inquirer




















“When do nations arise, what brings ethnic cleansing, how can states reconcile?

This study traces one passage to modern nationhood. It begins with the foundation of the largest realm of early modern Europe, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, in the sixteenth century. The nation of this Commonwealth was its nobility, Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant. United by common political and civil rights, nobles of Polish, Lithuanian, and East Slavic origin alike described themselves, in Latin or Polish as ‘of the Polish nation.’ They took for granted that, in the natural order of things, the languages of state, speech, literature, and liturgy would vary. After the Commonwealth’s partition by rival empires in the eighteenth century, some patriots recast the nation as the people, and nationality as the language they spoke. At the end of the twentieth century, as this study closes, the core lands of the old Commonwealth were divided among states named after nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, and Belarus. By then, the prevailing conception of nationality expected state borders to confine linguistic communities, and communities, and the languages of speech, politics, and worship to be the same. How did four modern national ideas arise from a single early modern one?

Our route through this passage follows the national ideas of the early modern Commonwealth (15691795), of the nineteenth-century empires that partitioned it (1795-1918), and of the independent states and Soviet republics that supplanted them (19181939). We will find that the early modern Polish nation survived partition and prospered under empire, its disintegration beginning in the late nineteenth century. Even then, modern national ideas emerged in intimate competition with this early modern vision, against a more distant backdrop of imperial rule. This close contest between traditional patriotism and ethnic nationalism continued in the new politics established after the First World War.”

The Great Dissolution


On Tyranny
