Page 40 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

higher standard of intellectual and moral power can dominate a large country,” Polish elites at Paris

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appealed to ways of thinking that had long resonated with Western imperialists. Not to be outdone,

those associated with Piłsudski’s camp also claimed that the quality of Poles in the lands to the east

of ethnographic Poland trumped the superior quantity of non-Polish populations, based on deeper

assumptions about civilizational readiness. As the historian and federalist Oskar Halecki stated in one

document that he prepared for the Peace Conference, in Ruthenia, “civilization and the social order

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find their principal base in the Polish element.” In short, even if each side proposed a different
vision of how the future Polish state should be organized politically, the basic principle—that a

civilized (Polish) minority could legitimately rule over a backward (largely non-Polish) mass—

spanned the supposed ideological chasm between right and left.

While these Polish elites argued that they were avowedly anti-imperialist and merely wanted

to civilize the people of the eastern borderlands, others believed that Poland’s strategies and

approaches smacked of nothing less than imperialism. Most obviously, Ukrainian nationalist elites,

whose aim it was to create a nation-state of their own in the former borderlands of the Austro-

Hungarian and Russian empires, appealed to the Western powers for support by rejecting the

narrative of Polish-led liberation. It was, they believed, the Ukrainian nation that deserved Wilsonian

self-determination from ascendant Polish imperialists who were behaving in ways reminiscent of the

oppressive and anti-democratic forces that they claimed to oppose. Not only was the Ukrainian

population a national majority here, their pamphlets claimed, but history revealed that it was

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Ukrainians who boasted deep democratic traditions.

15 W. Lutosławski and E. Romer, The Ruthenian Question in Galicia (Paris, 1919), 9. As Steven Seegel put it, the
most important Polish geographer at Paris, Eugeniusz Romer, “mapped ‘Ruthenians’ in a voice-over colonialist style
on Poland’s imagined open frontier, as the Poles themselves had been mapped by Germans and Russians before
1914.” Seegel, Mapping Europe’s Borderlands, 273.
16 “Les Confins Orientaux de la Pologne,” AAN DPnKPwP 153/23. On the similarities between the approaches, see
Werner Benecke, Die Ostgebiete der Zweiten Polnischen Republik: Staatsmacht und öffentliche Ordnung in einer
Minderheitenregion 1918-1939 (Köln, 1999), 22.
17 On appeals to “Wilsonian principles,” see Les Problèmes nationaux de l'Ukraine à la Conférence de Paris:
Interview de M. Sydorenko, Président de la Délégation de la Republique Ukrainienne (Paris, 1919), 7; Carl

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