Page 34 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

CHAPTER ONE:
DEMOCRACY AS CIVILIZING MISSION

In November 1918, in the imperial graveyard that formed the middle of the European continent,

church bells rang out. The pealing of bells signaled an event that had seemed highly unlikely just a

few years earlier—a sovereign Polish state had emerged on the map of Europe. During the war, the

Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and German empires had all competed for Polish loyalty, offering

increased autonomy within their imperial frameworks. As the empires themselves collapsed,

however, independent statehood looked to be the increasingly likely outcome, with Woodrow Wilson

1
famously proposing the creation of a Polish state in areas with “indisputably Polish populations.”

The American President was quite clear about what kind of state this would be. According to

Wilsonian ideals, not only did democracy and nationalism go hand-in-hand (since national groups

had battled for self-determination from the chains of empire), but the model of the democratic nation-

state provided the answer to a very specific postwar problem: considering the potential for aggressive

nationalism in eastern Europe, how could huge numbers of people reside peacefully within states

whose titular nation was different from their own? Poland’s Minority Treaty, the first to emerge from

the Paris Peace Conference in June 1919, obligated the new state to uphold the rights of its “racial,

2
religious, or linguistic minorities.”
If Poland’s ostensible commitment to democracy seemed to correspond with its rejection of

empire, however, the so-called Wilsonian moment was one at which global sovereignty continued to

be premised on a hierarchical idea that nations had to reach certain levels of civilizational

1 President Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points (January 8, 1918), accessed online:
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/wilson14.asp
2 “Minorities Treaty between the Principal Allied and Associated Powers (the British Empire, France, Italy, Japan
and the United States) and Poland, signed at Versailles, 28 June 1919,” accessed online: http://ungarisches-
institut.de/dokumente/pdf/19190628-3.pdf

34