Page 26 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

transformed itself from a victim of empire under the partitions to an imperial force within its own

multiethnic borderlands, one whose representatives looked down upon and mistreated the region’s

majority non-Polish population.

For many Poles, the concept of a “Polish empire” was, and continues to be, deeply

problematic, with much of the resistance coming from those who are invested politically in obscuring

44
Poland’s historical connection to empire in any shape or form. Since empire has often been
connected with violence, illegitimacy, and national oppression, characterizations of the early modern

Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as a non-imperial polity that peacefully expanded eastward, rather

than conquered far-flung territories, have proved powerful, as has the narrative that the

45
Commonwealth was the innocent prey of empires. Similarly, since 1989, some political
constituencies have argued that Poland is a post-colonial nation, an approach that, in the opinion of

one scholar, simply constitutes “another manifestation of the phenomenon of Polish obsession with

46
innocence.” It is also true that interwar Poland, unlike France, Italy, or Britain, did not have formal

Carpathian Rus. See Stanislav Holubec, ““We bring order, discipline, and culture to this land of former oriental
chaos and disorder”: Czech Perceptions of Sub-Carpathian Rus and Its Modernization in the 1920s,” in Mastery and
Lost Illusions: Space and Time in the Modernization of Eastern and Central Europe, edited by Włodzimierz
Borodziej, Stanislav Holubec, and Joachim von Puttkamer (Jena, 2014): 223-250.
44 For an attempt to work through the meanings of Polish colonialism, see Jan Sowa, Fantomowe ciało króla.
Peryferyjne zmagania z nowoczesną formą (Kraków, 2011). For polemics beyond the academy, particularly over
statements by Jan Sowa and Daniel Beauvois, see, for example, Jacek Kowalski, “Kresy jako „krwawa kolonia”
czyli postkolonialny śmietnik historii i kant rewersu Maryni,” Polonia Christiana, accessed online:
http://www.pch24.pl/kresy-jako-krwawa-kolonia-,36878,i.html#_ftn1; in response to Robert Jurszo, “Kresy
Wschodnie - idylliczna Arkadia czy krwawa kolonia?,” WP Opinie, accessed online: https://opinie.wp.pl/kresy-
wschodnie-idylliczna-arkadia-czy-krwawa-kolonia-6126042254284929a?ticaid=1151ee
45 Andrzej Nowak argues that the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth should not be called an empire. See Nowak,
“From Empire Builder to Empire Breaker, or There and Back Again: History and Memory of Poland’s Role in
Eastern European Politics,” Ab Imperio (2004), no 1: 255–89. On the myth of the Commonwealth, see, among
others, Sowa, Fantomowe ciało króla.
46 The quotation is from Claudia Snochowska-Gonzalez, “Post-colonial Poland—On an Unavoidable Misuse,” East
European Politics and Societies and Cultures 26, no. 4 (2012): 720. On post-colonial Poland, see Ewa M.
Thompson, “Whose Discourse? Telling the Story in Post-Communist Poland,” The Other Shore: Slavic and East
European Cultures Abroad, Past and Present 1 (2010): 1–15; Clare Cavanagh, “Postcolonial Poland,” Common
Knowledge 10, vol. 1 (2004): 82-92. A good overview of this question is Tomasz Zarycki, “Debating Soviet
Imperialism in Contemporary Poland: On the Polish uses of the Post-Colonial Theory and the Contexts,” in Empire
De/Centered New Spatial Histories of Russia and the Soviet Union, eds. Sanna Turoma and Maxim Waldstein
Kupovykh (New York, 2013), 191-215.

26