Page 43 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

simultaneously being marked off as less civilized than western Europeans and therefore subjected to

a kind of imperial supervisory system themselves. In the eyes of the fledgling state’s critics, Polish

underdevelopment and political inexperience made it a tin-pot imperialistic nation, one that grabbed

land illegitimately without importing the accompanying benefits of uplift long associated with the

British and French civilizing missions around the world. Since imperialism lay in the eye of the

beholder, Polish elites framed things rather differently.

In the immediate postwar moment, the issue of whether a country was behaving

imperialistically—and therefore undemocratically—came down to a single question: were

populations conquered by violence against their will (in which case, it was imperialism) or did they

agree to be ruled by an obviously more qualified civilizer (in which case, it was part of a natural and

time-honored European civilizing mission that could presumably operate within, as well as beyond,

the borders of nation-states)? The centrality of the notion of consent can be seen in the content of a

conversation between the British Prime Minister David Lloyd George and his Polish counterpart, the

federalist and world-famous pianist Ignacy Paderewski. The Welshman, who unlike representatives

of the French government was critical of the concept of a territorially expansive Poland, later recalled

that he expressed his “despair” to Paderewski that a “small nation” like Poland was “more

25
imperialist…than either England and France [sic], than certainly the United States.” When
Paderewski objected to the use of the term, Lloyd George clarified that imperialism meant “the

26
annexation of people against their will.” And yet, since many Poles, including Paderewski, believed

that the nation’s historic role in the east had been characterized by peaceful expansion and popular

consent—and that Poles had been imperial victims rather than imperialistic oppressors in the kresy—

they deemed Polish imperialism to be nothing less than an oxymoron. As one member of the Polish

25 David Lloyd George, The Truth About the Peace Treaties: Volume II (London, 1938), 998.
26 Ibid., 999.

43