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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 January 2015
Prior to World War II, the founder and key theorist of Poland's Christian Democratic movement—the Silesian political revolutionary Wojciech Korfanty—developed a sophisticated “Catholic rights-talk” in conversation with trends in Western European Catholic thought. In the wake of the Holocaust, however, both in ephemeral political opposition on Polish soil and in subsequent exile, Poland's Christian Democrats abandoned their interwar rights discourse. This essay explores that shift, locating its source in interwar Polish Catholic anti-Semitism. Given the Holocaust's perverse fulfillment of Polish Christian Democracy's crucial 1930s advocacy of restricting the political and economic life of Poland to rights-endowed Christians—necessitating the removal of Jewish “non-persons”—the Poles’ transnational postwar advocacy vacillated between Cold War cooperation with American-aligned governments and a desire to participate in the governance of a Poland that, even if Communist, had finally become a “nationally homogeneous state.”
The author thanks Duncan Kelly, Brian Porter-Szűcs, and the three journal reviewers for their feedback on earlier versions of this essay, as well as participants in the February 2013 New Histories of Transnational Christianity workshop at Harvard University.
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