Page 41 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

This concept of Poland’s post-imperial imperialism became more complicated from the

perspective of the Entente’s leaders and experts, men who were simultaneously the architects of the

political map of the new eastern Europe and the advocates for imperial or pseudo-imperial systems of

rule in non-white areas across the globe. Their various views about Polish behavior reflected this

ambivalence. In his official history of the Paris Peace Conference, the Cambridge historian Harold

Temperley stated that he had looked sympathetically toward Polish claims to land that stretched

beyond the nation’s ethnographic borders to the east. Evoking the classic language of European

imperialism, he argued that Poles should not be accused of “blind folly and criminal ambition” by

taking the “intermediate peoples” of the east “under their protection” and introducing “such order

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and institutions as were suitable for their needs.” But while Temperley’s evaluation rested on the
idea that Poles were the ambassadors of European values in the east, others drew on deeper

assumptions about east European backwardness in order to argue that Poles were themselves not

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quite ready for the great civilizing mission of democracy. Jan Smuts, a prominent South African
negotiator in Paris, proposed that the successor states themselves be placed under a mandate system

like that which was to be implemented in parts of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, since they were

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“mostly untrained politically” and “either incapable or deficient in the power of self-government.”

In a similar vein, George Louis Beer, a key member of Wilson’s hundred-man delegation to the Paris

Peace Conference, drew on what Susan Pedersen has called “nineteenth-century ideas about the

relative value of different European peoples and civilizations,” claiming that he would rather see

Leuthner, “The End of the Idea of a Polish Empire,” in Ukraine’s Claim to Freedom: an appeal for justice on behalf
of the thirty-five millions (New York, 1915), 41-52. For a Ukrainian perspective that contrasted democracy and self-
determination with Polish imperialism, see Shelukhim, Ukraine, Poland and Russia.
18 H. W. V. Temperley, A History of the Peace Conference of Paris, Volume 4 (London, 1924), 276-277.
19 See Ignacy Paderewski’s speech to the Polish parliament in May 1919 in Sprawozdanie stenograficzne z 40
posiedzenia Sejmu Ustawodawczego z dnia 22 maja 1919 roku, 23.
20 Judson, The Habsburg Empire, 444.

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