Poland is a “historic” nation with an indigenous national elite and a powerful sense of distinctiveness and identity. However, until World War II, its national identity to a large degree remained in the repository of a small social and political elite that perpetuated a peculiar collective memory of the idea of Poland – a Poland that was rooted in a commonwealth with Lithuania, that covered vast areas of contemporary Ukraine and Belarus and perceived itself as a great military power, armed with the messianic notion of having been endowed with a civilizing mission and a racially superior ruling class. It was the collective memory and the state of mind of this elite that gave content to the domestic and foreign policies of the Polish Second Republic (1919–39).