[BRIEF NOTE] The Upper Silesian Question

[rfmcdonald]

In Transitions Online, Tomasz Kamusella documents ("Doing It Our Way") how the culturally and linguistically distinct Silesian minority living in the Polish region of Silesia is finding it difficult to gain recognition.

[T]he 173,000 people who stated in [the 2002] census that there nationality was Silesian were glaringly absent from the list of groups affected by this year's minorities act. That count made them the largest national minority in Poland, followed by the Germans (153,000), and – in much smaller numbers – Belarusians and Ukrainians. Between the time the census data was collected and the official publication of the results, a stroke of the bureaucratic pen re-defined the Silesians as a “social group” rather than a "nationality," and their right to claim any of the advantages offered to official national and ethnic minorities was effectively massaged out of existence. This decision hence effectively cut the number of members of Poland’s recognized national and ethnic minorities to 298,000, or 0.82 percent of the population.

As Tim K. Wilson observed recently in his Canadian Review of Studies of Nationalism article, "The Polish_German Ethnic Dispute in Upper Silesia, 1918-1922: A Reply to Tooley" (PDF format), ethnic identity in the region of Upper Silesia--populated in the main, it seems, by people speaking a West Slavic dialect closely identified with Polish and who themselves identified with Poland while also using the German language--was intensely politicized in the interwar era. Following Upper Silesia's division by plebiscite, both the German and the Polish nation-states tried to assimilate their respective shares of the Upper Silesian population into the titular nations. The 1945 transfer of Silesia to Poland led to a definitive process of Polonization, with Poles displaced from areas taken by the Soviet Union settling in a Silesia emptied of its German-identified population. This population change, however, did not ensure the assimilation of the Upper Silesians.

Millions of what Polish authorities called “indubitable Germans” were expelled, but those Silesians referred to as “autochthons” or “ethnic Poles insufficiently aware of their Polishness" were allowed to stay on, after being were sifted out from “indubitable Germans” by a process of “national verification” that was not, in truth, too rigorous: to qualify, it was enough to speak some of the Upper Silesian Slavic dialect, or just to have a Slavic-sounding surname.

A heavy-handed forced assimilation policy adopted by Warsaw deprived the post-1945 Silesian generations of their command of German, but, paradoxically, made them into convinced Germans, enchanted with the prospect of taking part in the West German "economic miracle." Nearly 600,000 Silesians emigrated to West Germany during the communist era, and between 1990 and 2002 another quarter-million gained German passports without having to leave Poland. Most remained in Poland, though many took up seasonal jobs in Germany or in the Netherlands.

However, since the early 1990s, Silesians in the eastern part of Upper Silesia have found the option of obtaining a German passport largely closed to them, on the grounds that the region had not been German territory prior to World War II. This – and the traumatic experience of de-industrialization that this stronghold of Polish heavy industry underwent after 1989 – made Silesian-ness into a viable social and political option in the Katowice Voivodship, or region (confusingly re-named Silesian Region in 1999): many Upper Silesians felt rejected both by Poland and Germany.

Poland's Second Republic and the People's Republic have historically been highly concerned with the boundaries of the Polish nation-state, both territorially and ethnically, fearful that outside powers might use any sign of ethnic heterogeneity as casus belli for an invasion. This sensitivity is particularly acute in Silesia, which was gained only after the Second World War and was long claimed by vocal expellee groups in West Germany. Kamusella concludes his piece by noting ironically that the growth of Upper Silesian identity may be as much a consequence of the Polish state's excessive sensitivity and the sharp stratification of post-1989 Polish society as it is a product of Upper Silesian identity. In the Czech Republic, he notes, Silesians have tended overwhelmingly to assimilate themselves into a more mobile Czech society. As always, the Upper Silesians remain in command of their fate.