A Kulturkampf comes to Curitiba: the political cultures of partitioned Poland and Polish emigrant colonialism in Brazil

Starting in the 1890s, expansion-minded Polish nationalists advocated the settlement of the Brazilian state of Paraná, hoping to create a bridgehead for a ‘New Poland’ in South America. This article examines why, around 1900, colonialists began framing the Polish-speaking settlements of Paraná as another front in the ‘culture wars’ that pitted German and Polish nationalists against each other in the eastern regions of Prussia. Presenting the colonial cause as an extension of the nationalist ‘cultural struggle’ in Europe, Polish colonial activists sought to capitalize on popular support for resisting Germanization. The article enriches Polish colonial history by highlighting a parallel transformation in colonial thought. As colonial boosters borrowed from the playbook of European mass politics, they overhauled their political vision for Polish communities in Brazil. They abandoned their earlier aim to forge an independent state and recast their political designs as a democratic, federative effort to establish Polish cultural autonomy within the Brazilian state. The rising prominence of federalist policies, practices, and political ideas in relation to demands for national autonomy in the Habsburg and Romanov Empires shaped this federalist turn of the Polish colonial idea, revealing the lasting impact of partitioned Poland’s political cultures on Polish settler colonialism overseas.