Name: The Concept of the “Civilizing mission” as a Cultural Transfer in the 19th-Century (E. Kwiecińska)
Start: 2025-01-23T13:00:00+01:00
Location: Spitalgasse 2, 1090 Wien, Austria

$The Concept of the \u201cCivilizing mission\u201d as a Cultural Transfer in the 19th-Century (E. Kwieci\u0144ska)$

Lecture format: on site
Room: 2R-EG-07 (lecture hall of the Institute for Eastern European History).
Street address: Spitalgasse 2, Campus of the University of Vienna, Hof 3.
The concept of the civilizing mission has been generally associated with a justification of Western colonialism. The main premise of the civilizing mission lies in the conviction that improving the world depends on including as many non-Europeans as possible in the achievements of the so-called superior “Western civilization.” The aim of this seminar and Kwiecińska's future book will be to show how the concept of the civilizing mission – once used in the colonial politics of Western empires – was transferred in various ways to another geographical area, namely in East-Central Europe: both as an intellectual idea and as a tool for legitimizing political power. In order to reject Eastern “backwardness” and identify themselves instead as Western, members of the German, Polish and Ukrainian intelligentsia constructed their own personal “Easts” to make themselves Western: in their Eastern neighbors (Germans constructed the “East” in Poles, Poles in Ukrainians, while Ukrainians and Poles saw this in Russia) or in the peoples of the same ethnic origin (Poles targeted Polish peasants, the Ukrainians did this to peasants of Ukrainian origin). In other words, these nations became both agents and subjects of the civilizing mission.
In this seminar, Elżbieta will demonstrate how the Habsburg/Austrian civilizing mission that legitimized new Habsburg rule in Galicia at the end of the 18th-century was transferred and appropriated by Galician Polish ruling elites after 1867 as Polish civilizing mission. Polish elites in Galicia (mostly of gentry origin) justified their dominant position by a higher level of the “civilization” towards peoples despite of their ethnic origin: Poles, Ukrainians and Jews. The mimicry of the Habsburg “civilizing mission” included also language policy (Poland replaced German as a lingua franca), administration and schools. The concept of the Polish civilizing mission was also used by Polish national activists against Ukrainian national movement who demanded equal rights in governing Galicia.
Elżbieta Kwiecińska holds a PhD in history from the European University Institute in Florence. She is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Slavic Studies at the Polish Academy of Sciences and a mentor for Ukrainian students at-risk at the Invisible University for Ukraine, Central European University.
The event will be recorded and uploaded to RECET's YouTube channel – https://www.youtube.com/@recetvienna.
More Information: https://www.recet.at/event-news/events/detail/the-concept-of-the-civilizing-mission