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have wrongly been seen as distinct in the east European case—empires and nation-states. If trying to

answer the question of whether the Second Republic was either an empire or a nation-state makes

little sense, not least because it relies on static ahistorical definitions of these terms, more revealing is

an exploration of what was at stake when people talked about the nature of their internal civilizing

mission. While civilizational rhetoric was used to justify the mandates system and colonialism across

huge swaths of the globe, it was just as present in analogous projects within the borders of putative

nation-states on the continent, states that were defined (at least initially) by equality between citizens.

As Polish history becomes increasingly global, historians might focus their efforts on the interactions

between the expansion of Polish demographic, economic, and political power around the world and

developments within the Polish state’s formal borders in ways that build on Gary Wilder’s model of

34
interwar France as an “imperial nation-state.” Indeed, it was Poland’s own middling position as a
nominally post-imperial nation-state in a world of empires that makes it such a rich case study for

those scholars who are interested in parsing out what makes empires “empires” and nation-states

“nation-states”—and who gets to decide which is which at any given historical moment.

While the global framework is central, I have also endeavored to trace the ways in which a

range of concepts—including democracy, civilization, modernity, and the nation—were refracted

locally. Most importantly, the book has shown that the category of the Pole, far from being the stable

and flattened entity that discussions of Polish-Ukrainian or Polish-Jewish relations would suggest,

was itself created by a range of second-tier actors in the competitive spaces of the borderlands. The

myriad stories with which this book has engaged reveal how internal debates over who had the right

to call themselves a Pole reflected persistent anxieties about the equation of Polishness and

civilizational superiority, the very equation upon which the whole civilizing mission was premised.

Mirroring broader imperial anxieties across the world, Poles took part in a series of nesting civilizing

34 Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State.

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