Page 39 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

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democracy that was based on calls for a social and political revolution. Moreover, different
interpretations of what democracy should look like in practice depended upon diverse readings of the

immediate political situation—aware of the danger of a powerful presidency under his foe Piłsudski,

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for instance, Dmowski championed the cause of strong parliamentary democracy. But in spite of
this lack of a singular interpretation, the term “democracy” gained rhetorical importance at the end of

the war, as Polish elites looked to position themselves within the club of civilized countries on the

global stage. The argument put forward by both groups was this: Poles constituted a civilized nation

that was equipped to bestow democracy on the politically immature peoples of the eastern

borderlands and therefore had the right to include non-ethnically Polish areas within the borders of

the new state.

In putting forward such claims, those on the right and the left alike straddled the two parts of

the Wilsonian moment, evoking Poland’s democratic push against empire as a concept while

simultaneously drawing on hierarchical assumptions that non-Polish populations were unprepared for

democratic self-rule. Referring to the broader region of Ruthenia, of which Volhynia was a part, the

National Democrat Joachim Bartoszewicz, who headed the commission for the eastern borderlands in

Paris, stated that the Polish “civilizing mission” had continued during the years of Russian imperial

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rule, with the Polish minority remaining “the factor of progress and culture.” By using phrases like
mission civilisatrice, and thus alluding to the French empire’s moral and material uplift of colonial

populations, or by proclaiming to British readers in reference to the region of eastern Galicia to

Volhynia’s south that it was “scarcely necessary to explain […] how even a small minority of a

12 On the Endecja and democracy, see Porter, When Nationalism Began to Hate, particularly 265-307. On the
evocation of the processes of democratization against Russian autocracy, see, for instance, the publication that came
out of the Polish Socialist Party’s 10 Convention. Dziesiąty Zjazd P.P.S.: program, taktyka, organizacja (Kraków,
th
1908).
13 Piotr Wróbel, “Parliamentary Democracy in Interwar Poland,” in The Origins of Modern Polish Democracy,
edited by M.B.B. Biskupski, James S. Pula, and Piotr J. Wróbel (Athens, OH, 2009), 113.
14 “Mémoire sur les Frontières Nord et Sud-Est de la Pologne Restaurée,” AAN KNP 317/16.

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