ABSTRACT
As a multiethnic and multicultural state, the Second Republic had quickly to address a series of leading questions about how best to establish a positive relationship with those of its citizens, approximately one in three, who did not regard themselves in any meaningful way as being ‘Polish’. Were the five or six million Ukrainians, over three million Jews, one and a half million Byelorussians and some 800,000 Germans to be encouraged to assimilate and thus to become wholly ‘Polish’ over time, or were they to be assimilated only to a certain degree and permitted to retain in some sense a dual national consciousness? The answer was provided from several sources. In the first instance, the concept of the nation-state was almost universally accepted in Europe after 1918 and had been a crucial part of the postwar peace settlement, so that nationalist sentiment was running at historically high levels.
