The conception of space in the synthesis of the history of Poland by Józef Szujski and its political determinants

Józef Szujski (1835-1883), the eminent Cracow-based historian, rejected the Ro-mantic idea of the exceptional nature of the history of Poland, indicating that the situation of a country on the peripheries of the West, relatively late intro-duced to Christian civilisation, together with the absence of a foundation com-posed of ancient culture and a strategic threat from the East, defined both the specificity of its history and a number of difficulties affecting its social and po-litical development. In his opinion, a state union with the much more backward and sprawling terrains of Rus' and Lithuania as well as the effort of their coloni-sation and civilising resulted in a flow of forces from native Poland towards the East and hampered modernisation and social stratification. The first rulers from the Jagiellonian dynasty did not comprehend the necessity of embarking upon a reorganisation of society and state, carried out by the last Piast ruler, nor continued this task. The policy pursued by Kazimierz Jagiellon, striving towards basing the throne upon petty knights unable to play a independent political role, contributed to a premature emergence of a parliamentary system, which turned into an instrument serving the interests of this particular estate and which via anti-burgher statutes and anti-peasantry statutes fundamentally dis-turbed the social equilibrium. This state of things was intensified and consoli-dated in the wake of the 1569 union, which produced the hegemony of mag-nates from the East Borderlands, owners of enormous landed estates. The participation at the Sejm conventions of Lithuanian deputies dominated by magnates hindered the development of a democratic system and exerted an es-sential impact on its anarchisation. The colonisation of Lithuanian-Ruthenian lands also denoted the transference of Polish interests to the East and called for an imperial policy and a permanent army that, in turn, collided with the fears of the ruling estates as regards the introduction of absolutism. An assessment of the political outcome of expansion was negative, while an appraisal of its contri-bution towards civilisation was positive. True, Poland erroneously implemented the Christian idea of liberty and the autonomy of the individual vis-à-vis the claims made by the state-Moloch; nonetheless, this idea lived on not solely in its history but became dispersed within the region of the heretofore domination of the Eastern rite Church, unfamiliar with it and sanctioning the system of tyran-ny. Szujski regarded the introduction of this cultural model to be a permanent achievement and perceived the Greek Catholic creed as a premise for moulding the Ukrainian nation, which from the point of view of civilisation now belonged to the West and acted as Poland's ally against Russia. A revision of the opinion about the centuries-long involvement of Poland in the East probably aimed at convincing public opinion about the necessity of resigning from Polish political presence in those lands. It is quite possible that it was also to serve tactical con-ciliation with Russia, which unconditionally demanded such a relinquishment. The connection between the theory of space and a vision of the development of a situation in which the place of the Commonwealth of old would taken by an anti-Russian Ukraine appears to be even clearer and would denote a permanent transformation of the configuration of forces in the East, more favourable for Poland