Authors

Elzbieta Kwiecinska¹;  ¹ University of Warsaw, Poland

Discussion

The concept of the civilizing mission has been generally associated with a justification of Western colonialism. My research considers a cultural transfer of the concept of the civilizing mission from the colonial politics of Western empires to another geographical area, namely in East-Central Europe: both as an intellectual idea and as a tool for legitimizing political power. In my presentation, I will show how the famous sociologist Max Weber justified the politics of ‘internal colonization’ against Polish population as the German civilizing mission in his opening lecture ‘Nation-state and the Economic Policy’ in Freiburg in 1895 at the Society for Social Policy (Verein für Sozialpolitik). Weber considered the ‘barbarity’ of Poles by turning the German stereotype of Polnische Wirtschaft (Polish mismanagement) into a cultural theory of capitalism in which Protestantism equalized with ‘culture’ and Catholicism with ‘barbarity’. Furthermore, I will show how the idea of capitalistic backwardness of Poles was received by themselves. First, I describe an opposition from Roman Dmowski (1864-1939), an integral nationalist and right-wing politician who claimed that Polish weakness can be turned into its strength. Second, I consider how the stereotype of Polish mismanagement was internalized by Poles themselves who supported ‘self-civilizing’ attempts. My case will be Stanisław Szczepanowski (1846-1900), a liberal economist and politician in Habsburg Galicia who supported establishing there liberal economy and industry and transferred his work experience from the India’s Office into local activity.