To fix citizenship in a future Polish state to the category of „Polishness“ alone was highly irrational anyhow, and not only because of the impossibility of clearly defining it, but also because this would have meant to either disenfranchise or expatriate a third of the people living within the new state borders—a terrifying vision, if one thinks about it. Only a few years later, the Greek—Turkish War (1919—22) resulted in a human catastrophe of hitherto unknown dimension. About 1.6 million Greeks and Turks were forced to leave their homes and to cross the new border, as agreed upon in the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. The immediate consequences were disastrous: diseases, horrible living conditions, and high mortality rates amongst the refugees (or better: expellees). Philipp Ther has made it clear that this was not what such events are often called—a breach of civilization. On the contrary, this kind of engineered ethnic cleansing was „clearly a feature of European modernity“ and the dreadful, but logical consequence of ethnic nation-state building.

—Jochen Böhler, Civil War in Central Europe, 1918-1921, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 30.

The last two sentences here really struck a chord with me for several reasons: mass expulsions as a feature of modernity echoes both Zygmunt Bauman on modernity and Tadeusz Borowski’s sense of humankind. I read this in the present context of continual exposure to Western pronouncements about the rule of law being broken/upheld, democracy being threatened/defended, when little of the claimed nature is occurring.