"So weit die polnische Zunge klingt?" Nationalist Rhetoric of the National Democrats at the turn of the 19th and 20th century
Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to provide an analysis of the national discourse of Roman Dmowski and Zygmunt Balicki as the main protagonists of the National Democracy at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. In the context of the aversion of the National Democracy for loyalistic, positivist or socialistic political conceptions (which were sceptic or even hostile about the idea of national political progress) one has to realize that the efforts of the National Democrats to emphasize the national theme was necessarily connected to the clarification of two questions: 1) what is the essence of the Polish identity; 2) which area the independent Polish nation should occupy in the future.
In the case of the first question, it is necessary to focus attention mainly on the dilemma of the openness or closeness of the national self-identification. It means that we have to define to what extent the concept of National Democrats was expressed by the idea of ethnic purity and to what extent it was perceived as the political one, which was supported not by primordial but by value principles.
In this respect, it is obvious that the problem of the principles of national identity was closely associated with the second question, because the range of the sovereign Polish state and the delimitation of its boundaries were dependent on the ability of the National Democrats to take into account the problem of non-Polish minorities. Hence it is advisable to understand the main intention of this paper - the explication of the essence of the Pole and the delimitation of the "Great Poland" by the National Democracy - as the mutually interconnected problems.