Page 62 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

National Democrats, used the same terminology indicated a shared sense that Volhynia’s Ruthenians

could not be considered members of a fully developed Ukrainian nation.

None of these dynamics operated in isolation from broader global conversations about how

the postwar world would be organized into sovereign states. In the immediate aftermath of the First

World War, as new post-imperial borders emerged across eastern Europe and as colonial and semi-

colonial peoples around the world sought independence, Western leaders deemed nations—and

nations alone—worthy of a democratic state of their own. Based on their assumption that

civilizational development, national consciousness, and the right to a sovereign state all went along

with one another, functionaries who oversaw the League of Nations’ mandate system “created” some

“nationalities,” while simultaneously framing populations in Africa and the Pacific as “minors,

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defined more by incapacity than by nationality.” In the Polish case, the phrase “Poland is a mother
who loves all her children,” which became common in appeals to local people, echoed both deeper

paternalistic Polish traditions that saw the Slavic populations of the kresy as civilizationally and

nationally underdeveloped and metaphors that were used by liberal Western imperialists to refer to

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“their” colonial populations.

At the same time, however, the attitude of Guard activists toward the not-yet-national

Ruthenians remained distinct from those of Europeans in far-off colonial territories. For one, many

Polish elites, including members of the Guard, saw these people as easily assimilable in ways that

differed dramatically from, say, the ways in which French republican officials struggled to

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conceptualize black Africans as “French.” Ruthenians did not look or behave in ways that were
seen to be fundamentally different to Poles, but simply occupied a lower rung on the intra-European

79 Pedersen, The Guardians, 72.
80 “Obywatele!” (Borderland Guard in Równe, August 1919), DARO 30/1/2/38. On the use of vocabulary evoking
children in the context of British India, see Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire (Chicago, 1999), 31-32.
81 Alice Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa 1895-1930
(Stanford, CA, 1998).

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