Page 35 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

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development in order to be trusted with the great experiment of democracy. At the very moment
when Poland navigated the putative transition from empire to nation-state, then, Polish elites sought

to make a case for the state’s right to rule non-Polish populations in ways that both drew on the

language of anti-imperial democracy and echoed imperial justifications that were used far beyond the

borders of Europe. Taking these tensions over what it meant to be “civilized” as a starting point, this

chapter begins by tracing how Polish politicians, experts, and activists of various political stripes

presented their nation’s historical and civilizational claims to Volhynia on the world stage. For these

men, the non-Polish populations of the east were defined less by their “rights” as national minorities

(despite the importance of the language of democracy) and more by their place underneath the Poles

in a broader set of global civilizational hierarchies.

Questions about Poland’s ability to import civilization (and about what civilization even

meant at the end of the First World War) became even more complicated within the borderlands

themselves, where diplomatic and military battles continued to rage well after November 1918.

Indeed, if much ink has been spilled over the competitions between the states and proto-states that

emerged in the borderlands at this fractious postwar moment, fewer studies have considered the ways

in which groups that claimed to represent the new Polish state sought to shape their own vision of

political power as they came into contact with a diverse, war-weary, and often hostile local

population. In order to explore how a certain set of Poles attempted to translate global ideas into

specific localities—and what happened in their local interactions—the main part of the chapter

follows the work of a single organization, the Borderland Guard (Straż Kresowa; hereafter, the

Guard), whose activists arrived in Volhynia on the coattails of the Polish army, keen to spread a

mission of Polish-led democratization.

3 Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial
Nationalism (Oxford, 2007).

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