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"Reinventing Galicia" Mykola Riabchuk
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A simple glance at the Google references to the word Galicia reveals nearly 700,000 entries for “Galicja” in Polish and Галичина in Ukrainian, and three times fewer for Galizien in German – even despite the fact that the German web is generally richer than the Polish, let alone the Ukrainian. These findings roughly reflect the topicality of the term in different national discourses – relatively high, if asymmetrical, in the Ukrainian and Polish, and rather low, though still significant, in the German / Austrian.

Galicia was invented by Austrians, appropriated by Poles, and reinvented and ultimately re‑appropriated by Ukrainians. For all these reasons the history of Galicia is “the history of a place as an idea, as a cultural accumulation of meanings” , something that ultimately emerged as the interaction of different discourses, of which the youngest and weakest paradoxically emerged the winner. One may easily attribute this victory to the external political forces that changed radically all the discursive field – either those that after the First World War stamped out the Habsburg empire, or those that after the Second World War replaced Polish dominance in Eastern Galicia with Soviet. But the problem can also be seen from a different angle. Neither the Austrian nor the Polish myths of Galicia appeared vital enough to withstand the political changes – changes that were harmful to the Ukrainian myth as well, at least in the aftermath of the First World War but also, if somewhat ambiguously, after the Second World War.

The vitality of all three “Galician” myths depended therefore not only on external factors but also on the internal qualities of those myths, on certain of their strong and weak points. We shall try to examine them in more detail in the next three parts of the essay.

Imperial “mission civilisatrice”

The piece of land that was eventually designated the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria under the Habsburg crown was incorporated into the Habsburg Empire in 1772, after the first partition of Poland. Its name was a reference to the medieval Principality of Galicia‑Volhynia (Lat. Galicia et Lodomeria) that once upon a time, in the twelfth century, was under Hungarian auspices. In 1795, after the third (and last) partition of Poland, the Habsburgs acquired one more piece of land, which was this time simply tacked onto the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria without any attempt at historical legitimization and in fact without any history of the application of the name Galicia to that land. The Age of Enlightenment ushered in a new mode of legitimization of dubious territorial acquisitions – something that had been applied for centuries by colonial powers in “barbarian” lands of Asia, Africa, and America.

The myth of Galicia elaborated by the Austrians was a typical Enlightenment myth of the superiority and civilizing mission of the West vis‑à‑vis wild, backward, poor Eastern lands. Larry Wolff provides a detailed analysis of this myth in his illuminating books „Inventing Eastern Europe. The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment” (1994) and, especially, „The Idea of Galicia. History and Fantasy in Habsburg Political Culture” (2010). He bases his study on multiple sources that include letters, diaries, travelogues, newspaper articles, books, and theater productions. In most of these sources, truthful accounts of local life are whimsically juxtaposed with various anecdotes, sometimes absolutely incredible but presented as real, like, for example, the recurring story about a landlord who forced a Jew to climb a tree and shot him down just for fun, or the apocryph about the emperor who got stuck with six horses in a deep morass of excrement in the middle of Lemberg.
Polish landlords were the main targets of the scathing reports, probably for two reasons. First, they represented the upper, presumably most educated and cultured stratum of the local society. The savagery of the lower classes could therefore be imagined on an even greater scale. And second, the Polish nobility, with its proverbial “unruly, anarchic spirit”, was reasonably perceived as the main, if not only competitor of the German newcomers in the province and a potential (at least) challenger to the imperial dominance. Other groups, too, however, were not spared their share of blame, systemic “othering” and deprecation.

Predictably, the authors of such texts contended that “in German monasteries even the pigsties were customarily cleaner than the kitchens and refectories here”; the Uniate ritual was just a “low comic burlesque”; and local peasants seemed to possess “no more than human form and physical life”. The huge number of Jews in Galicia was presented as just another sign of its oriental, uncivilized character that had to be fixed by enlightenment. Assimilation, promotion of hygiene, and German‑language education were to make the inhabitants of the province more familiar with a civilized way of life – “less coarse, less given to drink and idleness”.

In sum, as Larry Wolff aptly notes, the imperial discourses sought to describe the process of development that led from backward Poland through the progress of Galicia to the civilization of Europe. “The supposedly Polish aspects of Galicia – a cruelly oppressive nobility, a brutalized alcoholic peasantry, fanatical and superstitious Roman Catholicism, and the alien presence of so many Jews – were dramatized all the more forcefully to vindicate and legitimate the Habsburg government and its program of enlightened Josephine reforms”.

The project of the province’s transformation also envisioned the creation of a new identity for its inhabitants. The Habsburg administration was well aware of the religious, linguistic, and ethnic heterogeneity of Galicia and sought to promote a provincial identity fully compatible with imperial loyalty. The Polish gentry, as the only political class in Galicia, was the major concern of Chancellor Metternich, who reasonably suggested “not to make Poles into Germans all at once, but above all first to make true Galicians, since only through this course of stages can one hope to achieve the ultimate goal, and any other conduct by the government would not only lead away from it, but could become at the present moment even dangerous”.

“The imperfect intermediary Galician identity [Larry Wolff comments on Metternich’s project] was in fact ideally adapted to the political circumstance of submission to the Habsburg monarchy. The invention of Galicia in the eighteenth century called for the invention of Galicians in the nineteenth century”. The project produced only partial success. A regional “Galician” identity was forged but its correlation with the overarching imperial identity proved much more complex and controversial. For the smaller – more advanced, cosmopolitan, and ambitious – part of the gentry (and, eventually, of the bourgeoisie and intelligentsia) the Galician identity did become a convenient signifier of certain local / corporate interests subordinated to the needs of the imperial career, status, and self‑esteem. For the majority of Galicians, however, the Galician identity within the Empire still meant belonging to a backward, impoverished, uncivilized region, openly despised by the imperial elite.

Whereas the Empire promised Galicians some fruits of Enlightenment and civilization in the remote future, to be achieved gradually by hard work, education, and discipline, the nascent nationalism offered them status and self‑esteem immediately, by a sheer act of imagination. Galicia as a part of an idealized primordial Polish (or Ukrainian) nation was much more attractive than the real Galicia within the Habsburg realm. Poles, Ruthenians, and even Jews were converted into Galicians, but most of them still remained Poles, Ruthenians and Jews,
with increasingly stronger loyalty to their imagined “nations” than to the Habsburg state.

The Polish schism

By the end of the 18th century the Polish nation was still a nation of Polish gentry who felt themselves to have much more in common with the cosmopolitan, mostly French‑speaking nobility all over Europe than with their own peasants or burghers. Such an elite would probably have been able to accept the newly invented Galician identity within a broader Austrian (Habsburgian) noble nation if this had promised them additional privileges and higher status. Instead, the Empire offered them the role of the poor provincial relatives of the established imperial aristocracy, castigated for wildness, futility and obscurantism, and demanded that they shed their customary habits and privileges for the sake of enlightenment, progress and the common good. Moreover, the Galician “nation” was envisioned as a nation of all the ethnic, religious, and social groups inhabiting the province – hardly an attractive idea for conservative 18th‑century aristocrats. Hence, the Galician identity, as Larry Wolff notes, was conditioned by a “sense of resentment against Habsburg officials and observers who supposedly maligned ‘the nation’– that is, the Poles”.

The powerful metaphor of the crucified Polish nation striving for resurrection became an effective ideological antidote against the Habsburgian project of making Poles into Galicians and incorporating them through enlightenment and reforms into the multi‑ethnic imperial nation. Romantic nationalism scored a victory against rationalistic cosmopolitanism all over Europe, and the ultimate fall of the Habsburg empire prefigured, in Timothy Snyder’s acerbic words, today’s troubles of the Euro pean Union with local, largely irrational nationalisms and particularisms.

In the meantime, the 1795 abolition of the Polish‑Lithuanian Commonwealth and the incorporation of its southern remnants into the Habsburg Empire contributed to the Polish character of the emerging Galician identity in a number of ways. First, the new lands, defined as “Western Galicia” made the entire province much more Polish in ethnic terms. Secondly, the new lands included the royal city of Cracow, historical capital of the Polish Kingdom and, thereby, a powerful symbol of Polishness. And thirdly, the very disappearance of the Polish state and placing of the two other parts of it under the more repressive regimes of the Romanovs and the Hohenzollerns charged Galicia with a special (and honorable) duty of preservation of Polish culture in the absence of the Polish state.
In sum, the ground was well prepared for both Herder’s ideas of Kulturnation and the Napoleonic vision of la nation des citoyens. The latter, explicitly egalitarian view was not easy for the Polish nobility to adopt; only after having experienced a number of humiliating defeats in uprisings did they dare to reconsider the notion of a Polish nation and to spread it beyond the upper classes. Still, it took many years and much mundane “organic work” to make illiterate peasants into nationally conscious Poles.

By the mid‑19th century the “party of Mickiewicz” had won in Galicia over the “party of Schiller”. That meant, in particular, a strong expansion of the Polish language in education (including Lemberg University), administration, the media, and cultural institutions, and de facto Polish self‑rule in the province. The side effect of this success story was the principled exclusion of Ruthenians from this ethnocentric, inherently Catholic project and their increasing alienation. Maciej Janowski, a Polish historian, remarks that the Poles in Galicia, exactly like the Germans in Bohemia, were deeply surprised by the emergence of the “other” nationality in the country they believed they owned unilaterally. “Before the Spring of Nations, they had not ever thought that their stance vis‑à‑vis Ukrainians or Czechs could be deemed nationalistic. Polish or German was just a “natural” language of the upper strata, indispensable for social advance or access to the high culture.”

Ironically, Ukrainians rather than Germans became the Poles’ main rivals in Eastern Galicia. An even greater irony stemmed from the fact that Ukrainian nationalism – with all its arguments, claims, institutions, and ideology – was nothing other than a mirror image of the Polish exclusivist, ethnocentric original. “The ‘nationalistic’ programs of each of the camps,” Danuta Sosnowska notes, “had little in common with the reality of life, and had nothing good to offer, for either they failed to take account of the arguments of the Polonized or Polish population of Galicia, or they ignored those of the Ruthenians, who had no intention of rescinding their national independence.” 

Unexpected Ukrainians

By the mid‑19th century the emergence of a separate Ukrainian nation had not been predetermined in either Austrian Eastern Galicia or Russian‑ruled Dnieper Ukraine. Ukrainians in Galicia (or Ruthenians / Rusyns, as they called themselves at the time) had at least four different options for eventual collective self‑identification. The most probable scenario was a gradual assimilation into the greater Polish nation – something that the Ruthenian elites had been doing for centuries since the incorporation of the Principality of Galicia‑Volhynia into the Polish Kingdom in 1340. The only obstacle on this path was the exclusivist character of Polish nationalism. It could accommodate the narrow circle of those of the Ruthenian elite who could be tempted to change their language and even their confession, but was barely suitable for the broad Ruthenian masses who were increasingly entering the political scene in the 19th century. Many of these could follow the path outlined by Miroslav Hroch in his seminal study of the nationalism of small European nations. The Habsburgian “Kingdom of Galicia” provided them with alterative template for eventual nation‑building. They could fill the “invented tradition” with genuine Ruthenian content. The idea was not so odd since the medieval Galicia had indeed been Ruthenian in both ethnic and linguistic and religious terms.

If the Habsburgs had really been interested in developing the Ruthenian nationality as a primarily anti‑Polish project, they could have bet on the ethnicization / Ruthenization of the medieval Galicia‑Lodomeria and (re)establishment of the historical continuity between the old and new entities. The idea was not entirely alien to Austrian / German intellectuals. Some of them, for example, occasionally tempered the arrogance of the Polish landlords by reminding them that they were “no more and no less alien in Galicia than the Germans”. But the Habsburg establishment was apparently not interested in nationalistic argumentation, remaining attached to dynastic legitimacy and the civic / non‑ethnic notion of imperial citizenship.

In the meantime, the Ruthenian national project unexpectedly received a boost from two other corners – the Ukrainian and the Russian. Both the Russian imperial and Ukrainian national projects subsumed Galicia within a greater Ruthenian myth centered on Kyivan Rus (Ruthenia) and elaborated respectively in a pan‑Slavonic or pan‑Ukrainian way. The “local” Ruthenian project was thus not rejected but rather extended and reinterpreted to enable the self‑identification of the Habsburg Ruthenians with both the medieval Galician Principality and the medieval Kyivan Rus – the precursor of modern Russia in one version and modern Ukraine in the other.
Both the Ukrainian and Russian projects (unlike the Polish one) appeared inclusive; neither of them required the Ruthenians to sacrifice any element of their identity – either linguistic, or cultural, or religious. They merely offered them the possibility to gain additional strength vis‑à‑vis the dominant Poles through symbolic self‑identification with the alternative cultural / civilizational center. At first glance, the (all‑)Russian project had better chances of winning the Ruthenians’ souls since it was real, resourceful and perfectly institutionalized. The Ukrainian project was largely imaginary, supported only by the Kulturwerk of a very small stratum of national intelligentsia.

There were two factors, however, that enabled it to successfully compete with the (all‑)Russian project in Galicia – actually more successfully than in Dnieper Ukraine. Firstly, Ruthenians had always been much closer to Ukrainians than to Russians in all respects. And secondly, the Habsburgs were much more seriously concerned at Russian inroads into Galicia than Ukrainian ones. Their relatively liberal policies enabled Ruthenians to institutionalize their nation‑building project – first through the Uniate Church, which received equal rights with the dominant Catholic Church in Galicia, and then via education, media, cultural institutions, civic organizations and finally political parties.

By the end of the 19th century the issue of Ruthenian identity had essentially been sealed: the Galician peasants became Ukrainians, first in terms of their self‑awareness and eventually in self‑name. The very fact that the Ruthenian identity was conceived as a regional form of the (all‑)Ukrainian identity resulted not only in discursive nationalization – the Ruthenization / Ukrainization of the province in the nationalistic mythology – but also in the bestowal on Galicia of a special mission vis‑à‑vis the rest of Ukraine, where the envisioned “national revival” was being stalled by the repressive tsarist regime. The metaphor of “Ukrainian Piedmont” was firmly attached to Galicia after two programmatic articles by Mykhaylo Hrushevsky, published in 1906 – “Ukrainian Piedmont” and “Galicia and Ukraine”. Józef Buszko contends that the rival notion of Galicia as the “Polish Piedmont” emerged in the milieu of Polish liberals in the late 1870s, during the Russian‑Turkish war in the Balkans.

In any case, the idea was in the air – even before the actual Piedmont had played its crucial role in the Italian national unification. On the one hand, the adoption of the Risorgimento metaphor was determined by a rapid growth of both Polish and Ukrainian national consciousness in Galicia; on the other, the relative liberalism of Habsburg rule gave both Ukrainian and Polish Galicians a huge advantage over their ethnic brethren in the Russian (and in the case of the Poles, also the Prussian) Empire.

Throughout the 20th century, the myth of Galicia as a “Ukrainian Piedmont” underwent various modifications, articulations and instrumental applications. But its essence remained the same. It supported the all‑Ukrainian teleology of national liberation and statehood which assured Ukrainians that they were not a “nowhere nation” but rather a community with a long (“millennial”) history and, importantly, a long tradition of pro‑independence struggle. The myth enhanced the self‑esteem and mobilization of Western Ukrainians by endowing them with a special mission vis‑à‑vis the rest of the country, while providing all other Ukrainians with an encouraging symbol of national strength, solidarity, and resistance against multiple enemies.

National independence, despite expectations, has not reduced the topicality of the myth. Ukrainian sovereignty still is challenged in multiple ways by its former colonial master, and Ukrainian identity still is threatened by structural deformations and the advance of Russification. Galicia in this context is still seen as the bastion against both external and internal threats, including also recurrent inroads of authoritarianism in Ukrainian politics. After independence the region acquired an additional meaning that had existed in a rather rudimentary form before. Today, the “Ukrainian Piedmont”, the westernmost part of the country, symbolizes Ukraine’s Europeanness – which is vehemently denied by Russians and ambiguously questioned by other Europeans. Galicia is the only part of Ukraine whose European identity, European belonging is unquestionable. Even the ardent Russian nationalists, chauvinists, Slavophiles and anti‑Occidentalists who typically deny Ukraine any separateness or sovereignty, do agree that Western Ukraine, specifically Galicia, is different, alien, spoiled by Catholicism and the West; it is simply “not ours” – a cause definitely lost to the Moscow‑led “Russkiy mir”.

In this perspective, it is quite clear that the myth of the national “Piedmont” is much more important to Ukrainians than the equivalent myth to Poles, which predictably faded after Poland gained independence. Now, for Poles, it is largely a cultural / historical phenomenon with little political meaning beyond some marginal groups of kresowiacy. In the case of Ukrainians, the myth of Galicia as the national “Piedmont” is central to their identity – alongside two or three other “founding” myths: those of Kyivan Rus, of Cossackdom, and probably of Shevchenko‑the‑Prophet and the National Awakening (“Resurrection”) he heroically ushered in. Of all these myths, however, the myth of Galicia is the most future‑oriented, the most clearly connected to the idea of (Euro pean) modernity and modernization. The Polish myth of Galicia is more nostalgic and retrospective, in this regard; it is rather about Kresy‑that‑have‑been‑lost than about Europe‑that‑should‑be‑retrieved.

Such centrality of the myth of Galicia to the Ukrainian national consciousness and the European identity (i.e. identity defined implicitly as non‑Russian, non‑Eurasian, non‑Soviet, and not as primarily East Slavonic or Orthodox Christian) substantially complicates Ukrainians’ relations with Poles, who have their own myths of Galicia – very different and often opposed to that of Ukrainians. The myth will inevitably lose its luster as soon as Ukraine successfully solves its postand neocolonial problems, primarily those of its threatened identity and endangered sovereignty. This, however, does not seem likely to happen in the foreseeable future.

Mykola Riabchuk – a Ukrainian author and essaist, as well as a founder of Krytyka magazine. His research and articles focus on topics of Ukrainian national identity, politics, and history through a postcolonial lens. From 2014, he is the chairman of the jury of The Angelus Central European Literature Award. The laureate of the 2022 Taras Shevchenko Prize, the most important Ukrainian award given for achievements in the field of culture.
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