Page 42 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

Poles under German rule (and, for that matter, Yugoslavs under Italian rule) than the other way

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around.

The June 1919 Polish Minority Treaty epitomized Western anxieties about whether Poland

was politically advanced enough to act in a civilized way. While it paid tribute to Poland’s status as a

sovereign democratic state based on universal principles of “liberty and justice,” the very application

of such treaties across eastern Europe constituted what Mark Mazower has called “a badge of the

new states’ secondary and relatively uncivilized status, evidence of their need for tutelage in the

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exercise of their own sovereignty.” In this international context, the civilizing mission of

democracy also came to be closely related to notions of proper conduct toward civilians (and

potential citizens). In the case of Poland, Western observers expressed skepticism about Polish

assertions that their nation constituted a civilized power at the very same moment as paramilitaries,

demobilized soldiers from the three partitioning powers, and local people who harbored grievances

against their neighbors carried out looting, rapes, and anti-Jewish pogroms across the east. Most

infamously, Poles attacked Jews during a deadly pogrom in the formerly Austrian city of Lemberg

(Lwów in Polish, L’viv in Ukrainian) in November 1918, behavior that was quickly condemned in

international circles, not only as unbecoming of a civilized nation but also as a product of pernicious

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Polish imperialism. The British Zionist Lewis Namier even accused the anti-Semite Roman
Dmowski of supporting “Polish imperialism which desires to extend its dominion over non-Polish

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races at the expense of Russia.”

These dynamics forced Polish representatives to contend with all kinds of nesting

civilizational frameworks: Poles were promoted as agents of the civilizing force of democracy, while

21 Pedersen, The Guardians, 18.
22 Mark Mazower, “Paved Intentions: Civilization and Imperialism,” World Affairs 171, no. 2 (2008): 78.
23 Carole Fink, Defending the Rights of Others: The Great Powers, the Jews, and International Minority Protection,
1878-1938 (New York, 2004), 101-130.
24 Namier is cited in Harry Hanak, T.G. Masaryk (1850-1937): Volume 1: Thinker and Politician (Basingstoke, UK,
1990), 96.

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