Mateusz Rodak

Areas of social exclusion in the Second Polish Republic

Finding the answer to the question of what defines social norms in complex historical communities, such as states, nations and social strata can sometimes help understand the rules that they were governed by. This becomes possible by means of research, the aim of which is to reconstruct the areas of social exclusion specific to the particular epoch, that is, the zones where the so-called “statutory indeterminacy”can be observed. Some of the effects of this phenomenon may include the processes of social exclusion. In the paper submitted here, I make an attempt to indicate and describe typical areas of the Second Polish Republic that were conducive to social deprivation. The criteria that guided my choices included, first and foremost, the actual impact on the nature of the social relations and, secondly, their mass scale. In my research I use two essential terms, namely, social exclusion, understood as the state of “non-participation of an individual/family or group in various areas of social life”and margins of society, described both as “structural margins”, after Zbigniew Galor, and as “social margins”. Among the causes leading to the sense of social exclusion I distinguish, 1) the privileged position the Roman Catholic faith and ethnic Poles as representatives of the dominant nation; 2) the standards of exercising political power, especially those adopted after 1926; 3) the civilizational differences; 4) the gap between the centre and the periphery; 5) disparity in the access to health care and social services, etc. Of key importance to some of these processes were, in my opinion, the economic issues, mainly related to restrictions on access to the labour market resulting in increased unemployment and poverty, as well as homelessness and, in the extreme cases, dysfunctional behaviours. I also emphasise the significant impact of the Great Depression on the phenomena that I describe. At the same time, I make an attempt to counterbalance this description with some positive processes in the Second Republic that favoured social inclusion (e.g. universal education and the military service). In conclusion I advance the thesis that despite the significant progress of modernisation, interwar Poland was a state with an excess of processes that favoured the broadly understood exclusion.

* Artykuł powstał w ramach realizacji grantu finansowanego przez Narodowe Centrum Nauki (grant: „Biologiczny standard życia w Polsce 1800–1950. Przemiany wysokości i masy ciała”, nr 2016/21/B/HS3/00028).