Page 8 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

put it, former colonies and territories of the defeated powers “which are inhabited by peoples not yet

able to stand by themselves, under the strenuous conditions of the modern world,” should be placed

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under the civilizational guidance of the League. Broadly agreeing on what constituted the
“benefactions of the civilization of the twentieth century,” Europeans in both the established nation-

states in the western part of the continent and the new so-called successor states of the east believed

that some people had the political right—or the paternalistic obligation—to rule over others.

This book tells a new story about the global intersections between backwardness, civilization,

and claims to sovereignty that takes us beyond the most obvious centers of European civilizational

discourse and the far-flung colonial spaces in which civilizing missions were typically acted out. At

its core, it explores Poland’s liminal position on prevailing global hierarchies as the First World War

ushered in a new system of sovereignty in eastern Europe that retained prewar assumptions about an

intra-European civilizational gradient. Just as French philosophes in the eighteenth century had

designated “Eastern Europe” as a backward place—what Larry Wolff called “a paradox of

simultaneous inclusion and exclusion, Europe but not Europe”—so interwar observers from France,

Britain, and the United States continued to doubt that Poland was a full-fledged member of the club

of civilized nations. Far from being at the bottom of a global civilizational table, however, the Polish

Second Republic, along with other successor states such as Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, was

largely seen as a country in the middle—lagging behind, to be sure, but also on its way toward

modernity. If Polish elites were acutely aware of, and sometimes balked at, a hierarchy between

nations in which they did not always fare well, they simultaneously engaged in a series of nesting

civilizing missions within their own borders, replicating global ideas at national and local levels.

The case of interwar Poland was made more complicated by the state’s striking national

heterogeneity, a subject that has long dominated the historiography. In a country made up of areas

7 Cited in Eric D. Weitz, “From the Vienna to the Paris System: International Politics and the Entangled Histories of
Human Rights, Forced Deportations, and Civilizing Missions,” American Historical Review 113, no. 5 (2008): 1340.

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