The first “Unmodern” Nation: Germany and Poland's imperial exclusion from modernity

Abstract

This article explores how internal exclusion within European empires shaped the development of modern social theory. While critical theory has traditionally examined the colonial foundations of modern social sciences, this study highlights the marginalization of certain regions and groups within Europe itself. Empirically, it focuses on nineteenth-century Germany and its exclusion of Poles and Poland. By examining cultural and academic discourses, particularly Max Weber's theories, in historical context, it shows how the Polish population of the German empire was practically and symbolically excluded as inherently unmodern due to the perceived lack of the capitalist bourgeoisie. This article challenges dominant colonial frameworks by integrating an imperial lens, demonstrating how economic concerns in the geographical and cultural proximity of Empire molded the ideas of modernity with contemporary consequences.

German modernity and its significant other

The second half of the nineteenth century was a key moment in the formation of European modernity in which we live, for good and for bad, until today (Delanty, 2019). It was also when the social sciences crystallized both as a product of modernity and its important legitimization (Steinmetz, 2006). Modernity was based on the exclusion of the non-Western world, particularly the non-European, from participation in this project, as well as its material exploitation and political and cultural subjugation (Bhambra, 2007). Much less attention in critical theory, however, has been paid to the exclusion of countries, regions, and groups immediately adjacent to, or formally part of the key Western European states which could not be considered direct colonies. As far as this internal or geographically proximate exclusion is concerned, most attention has been paid to the discrimination of Jews in Europe. This article highlights another important subject and case of exclusion from modernity: Poles in the German Empire in the second half of the nineteenth century, when Germany took shape as a unified nation-state and an empire with global ambitions.

The discrimination of Poles, understood both as an ethnic group and as citizens entitled to full rights within the German Empire, has a significance well beyond the limits of its place and time, since it shows the mechanism of exclusion and othering of geographically proximate groups. Poles were the largest group whose presence within the borders of Prussia had to be faced by a modernizing and consolidating Germany. The German state took measures to exclude Poles from modernity on the level of concrete policies of political, cultural, and economic discrimination. This paper highlights the role of the humanities and social sciences in these practices by showing how these efforts by the German state were accompanied by intellectual work to exclude Poles symbolically as well.

The scholarly treatment of the concept of modernity underwent a serious evolution in the last four decades (Chakrabarty, 2011). The post-colonial and other modes of critique questioned the normativity and the singularity of modernity associated with the West (Tomba, 2019) and highlighted the Western model's darker sides as a violent project of subjugation of those groups and entities deemed as inferior (Mignolo, 2011). Despite these powerful critiques and the taint associated with claims to modernity or lack thereof, the concept did not lose its normative validity in public discourse and distribution of power. It remains a key concept in historical discussions, especially in German ones. The intensity and longevity of these discussions, starting in the middle of the nineteenth century (Eley et al., 2016), through the Sonderweg approach (Kocka, 2018), to contemporary ones about the coexistence of authoritarianism and economic and social progress (Conze, 2020; Hett et al., 2024; Richter, 2021) testifies to the serious treatment of the concept and its normative baggage, as well as the uncertainty over Germany's status as a modern state and culture. Thus, the exploration of visions of modernity and their exclusionary potential in concrete historical contexts remains an important task. Contours of the often criticized “industrialized modernity,” a capitalist and bourgeois project built on a strong nation-state with imperial and colonial ambitions, cultural and religious cohesion, and bureaucratic rationality (Conrad, 2025, pp. 33, 36) were established exactly at the discussed moment, in the second half of the nineteenth century. The German unification of 1871 is a significant milestone in this evolution. This list of modern traits is by no means complete, but remains useful in following what was exactly meant when historically certain groups were deemed as “unmodern,” backward, or lacking proper culture.

These modern traits were enshrined as universally valid and desired standards for individuals, groups, and states in social science and social theory, most prominently in the form of Max Weber's liberalism. German social theory, and broader intellectual production of that time, was, however, hardly detached from geographical and ethnic context. This article proposes to examine modernity relationally. The German self-assertion of modernity was associated with a conscious act of excluding other groups. As Dipesh Chakrabarty writes, “… if someone is ‘modern,’ then he or she is so with regard to somebody who is not. That ‘somebody’ may come to be seen as ‘backward’ or ‘premodern’ or non-modern or waiting to be made ‘modern’” (Chakrabarty, 2011, p. 663). Next to inhabitants of German overseas colonies excluded in racial sense, Polish-speaking Catholics in the former lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, who came under Prussian rule starting with the First Partition in 1772, were seen by the German intellectuals and statesmen of the late nineteenth century as a paradigmaticly “unmodern” group lacking the bourgeoises and therefore unfit to participate in civilization, culture, and markets. Visions of the normative order were constructed in encounters with Polish-speaking populations of the Empire's eastern borderlands, and their exclusion played an important, but inadequately appreciated, role in the development of European social sciences.

In our text, we put the word “unmodern” in quotation marks because we are not focusing on an objective assessment of the modernity of Poles as a nation at the end of the nineteenth century or today. It can certainly be argued that they were somewhat less modern than the Germans, although the Germans themselves were not sure whether they were fully modern, for example, considering their above-mentioned Sonderweg debate. What is crucial here is that we believe that, at the level of the prevailing Western common-sense, particularly implicit assumptions of the classical social theory, Poles were permanently classified as a nation that was not fully modern, while Germans, despite all their specificities, were considered inherently modern.

This article draws from recent post-colonial retellings of German–Polish relations and German attitudes towards Eastern Europe, but also discusses them, showing their limitations. In particular, this contribution draws attention to the role of the second half of the nineteenth century as the moment of demarcation of the outer boundary between the core of Western modernity and its immediate outer zone, whose status remains ambivalent or liminal (Labuda, 2023; Loefflad, 2023; Patton, 2022). This border still separates Europe's West from its East (as well as South‒East), in need of Western assistance in modernization (Kuus, 2004; Parvulescu, 2019; Todorova, 1997; Zarycki, 2014). Appreciating the imperial, the geographically proximate dimension, enables us, without losing sight of the colonial one, to grasp the roots of European modernity and its exclusionary potential to a fuller extent. In this way, the exploration of the role of the Poles in German and European modernity contributes to the broader project of uncovering the colonial and imperial origins of modern social thought (Steinmetz, 2023). Among other powerful critiques of the hegemony of Western social theory, Dipesh Chakrabarty proposes the “provincialization” of Western thought (Chakrabarty, 2000). However, the case of India discussed by Chakrabarty is that of a classic colony in which distinction and externality from the West were more clear. The case of Poles, on the other hand, is extreme in its geographical proximity to Germany and also involves partial belonging. This could posit Poland as an opposite case to India and allow us to see both countries as two types of paradigmatic significant others for the West.

In this text, we also propose a comparison between the exclusion of Poles from German identity, and above all from the German version of modernity, with the exclusion of Jews during the same period. We believe that, despite all the differences that can be pointed out and the conflicts between these groups, this comparison will be useful for understanding the specific role of Poles as a significant foreign element in German modernity. A number of reasons seem to indicate that this comparison is justified, first and foremost, by the fact that in the material we have collected and in the discussions we refer to below, Poles and Jews often appear simultaneously in the discourses of liberal German intellectuals at the turn of the century. Of importance are the actual policies of the German state in the last decades of the nineteenth century, in which, as Sebastian Conrad argues, “Poles and Jews were treated as one group for administrative purposes” (Conrad, 2010, p. 180). Moreover, Conrad points that “the overlap between anti-Jewish and anti-Polish measures made sense from the administration's perspective because the two migrant groups were often identical. What it also shows, however, is the complex process in which the radicalization of anti-Semitism and the racialization of anti-Polish sentiments informed each other” (Conrad, 2010, pp. 180–181). To be sure, in most discourses of that time, the roles of Poles and Jews are defined in different ways: while Poles appear as inherently non-modern, unable to adapt to modernity due to their innate backwardness, Jews often appear as hyper-modern. The intellectuals of that period, whom we discuss, thus seem to use Poles and Jews to define the key boundaries of the emerging modern German nation at its opposite ends: Poles become the main point of reference for delimitation of the boundary separating Germans from the non-modern, while Jews become a reference for the boundary with the pathological distortions of modernity. It can, of course, be noted here that the two groups are different in nature, although both are stateless nations at the time, and they overlap to some extent, in particular as migrants from the East are concerned. This is because the process of Jewish emancipation that was taking place at the time and in particular in the Russian part of Poland had as a major effect the assimilation of a major part of the Jewish middle and upper classes into Polish culture (Eisenbach, 1991). A the same time, most of the Jews who became Prussian subjects after the partitions of Poland did not align themselves with the Polish nation. Instead, they opted to adopt the Germanophone Prussian culture, centred in Berlin and Breslau. In any case, this paper does not aspire to reconstruct the complex relations between Poles and Jews in Eastern Europe; rather, it will focus on their functions as points of reference in German intellectual debates and how they were used to define German modernity.

The practical exclusion from German modernity

After the failed revolution of 1848, German unification was carried out by the Kingdom of Prussia through a combination of warfare, customs unions, diplomatic maneuvering, and Otto von Bismarck's skillful exploitation of nationalist sentiment, resulting in the creation in 1871 of a federal empire that preserved significant autonomy for its constituent states. The new German Empire developed sophisticated state institutions, including a democratically elected Reichstag (though with limited powers), a unified legal code, standardized currency, centralized army and infrastructure, and modern bureaucracies that helped transform Germany into Europe's leading industrial and scientific power. The ascent of Prussia as the leader of Imperial Germany coincided with the fall of its neighbour, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which since 1795 had not existed as a sovereign state, with its territories divided among the three empires: German, Russian, and Habsburg.

The most important area of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth controlled by Prussia was Greater Poland or Posnania. After the Congress of Vienna in 1815, Prussia was internationally obligated to provide the Polish population of the area with relative linguistic, cultural, and political autonomy in the Grand Duchy of Poznań (Großherzogtum Posen). Around that time, roughly two-thirds of residents were Polish-speaking and Roman Catholic, about one-third were Germans, predominantly Protestant, who were concentrated in towns and the western and northern parts of the Duchy. Jewish communities made up approximately 6% of the population (Topolski, 1969, p. 880). In 1848, the Duchy was transformed into the Province of Poznań (Provinz Posen), and after 1871, incorporated as part of the newly established German Empire. After a period of sympathy for the Polish claims to territorial and national self-determination among German national liberals, the 1848 debates over the “Polish Question” in the Frankfurt Assembly resulted in more repressive domestic policies inspired by the open embrace of German “national egoism,”, due to the Poles’ inability to form a modern state and potential threats to German residents of the area from Polish rule. This rejection of Polish self-determination set the course for forced Germanization of the area and coincided with imperial and colonial modernity seen as a national liberal project (Kohn, 1960; Loeffler, 2020; Vick, 2011; von dem Bussche, 1986; Winkler, 2023).

Although other ethnic and linguistic minorities were present in Imperial Germany's borderland, most prominently the French in the West, and the Danish in the North, Poles were by far the biggest minority which identified with a non-German language and nationality according to the Prussian census, and later the ones of the German Reich between 1871 and 1918 (Panayi, 2014). And if German nationalism and visions of modernity were formed in competition against the Great Powers in an aspirational sense (Kocka, 2018), Poles were the main significant other that constituted the negative example of modernity and civilization (Conrad, 2010; Nipperdey, 1996, pp. 272, 557). The process of externalization of Poles from modernity was multidimensional. This section focuses on the reasons why Poles, and not any other ethic group within the Empire were subjected to this operation and focuses on the practical aspects of the exclusion.

First and foremost, because of the tradition of earlier Orientalist portrayals of Eastern Europe dating back to the Enlightenment (Wolff, 1994), in which German authors played a prominent role (Liulevicius, 2009). The other factor was the aforementioned correlation, although not complete, between Polishness and Roman Catholicism, and Germanness and Protestantism in Posnania, not witnessed either in Alsace-Lorraine nor in Schleswig-Holstein. This religious-national correlation was a Posnanian particularity, but not the rule in the German-Polish borderlands (Bjork, 2008; Blanke, 2001). In the imperial-wide campaign of Kulturkampf, the activity of the Catholic Church was put under administrative supervision and was set by the German policymakers and intellectuals as the enemy of the state. Historian Manuel Borutta traces “the symbolic exclusion of Catholicism from the hegemonial version of national culture” (Borutta, 2003, p. 227) to the moment of reunification. In a place where the religios and ethnic otherness converged, this exclusion played out in a more violent way than in other parts of Germany. Richard Blanke argues that the issues relating to Poles in Posnania were one of the main reasons for the Kulturkampf to begin with, and suggests that “… Bismarck had the Poles particularly in mind from the very start of a campaign aimed ostensibly at the Catholic Church” (Blanke, 1983, p. 255).

Furthermore, because of the division of the Polish lands between the Habsburg, German, and Russian Empires, the “Polish question” was simultaneously a domestic and an international problem. Depending on the period, Polish elites demanded at least autonomy, if not sovereign, self-determined independence. If the French and Danes under German rule supported the return of the annexed regions to their already existing states, the Polish territorial self-determination would have upended the European balance of power. Since 1848, there has been a consensus among German political elites to resist any Polish self-determination projects, and this resistance was legitimized with arguments relating to the unmodern nature of Polish political and government traditions (Kucharczyk, 2020).

And finally, and most crucially, German and Polish nationalisms, understood as caring about the existence, safety, and welfare of nations across earlier social divisions (Connelly, 2024), emerged in a symbolic and material conflict against each other (Blanke, 1981). If the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century phase of forming the German identity developed in relation to France, as John Connelly argues (Connelly, 2024), the phase after 1848, and especially 1871, was constructed with Slavs, especially Poles, in mind, seen simultaneously as inferior and as an existential threat (Liulevicius, 2009, pp. 103–104). The political decisions in Berlin and the German bureaucracy on site in Posnania played a major role in this evolution. Unifying Posnania with Prussian practices, such as compulsory elementary education, and limited but existing avenues for self-ogranization, as historian Richard Blanke writes, “helped create the most important conditions for the spread of national consciousness from the gentry to the rest of Prussian-Polish society” (Blanke, 1981, p. 6). However, these policies of inclusion into citizenship with respect for local identities were fluid and generally tended towards exclusion. After 1873, with minor exceptions for religious instruction, the Polish language was banned from school education. During the 1880s and 1890s, the German leadership under Bismarck and later Leo von Caprivi implemented aggressive policies in Prussia's eastern provinces against Polish majorities. In 1886, Prussia allocated 100 million marks to establish the Settlement Commission aimed at “strengthening the German presence” in West Prussia and Poznań (Eddie, 2009; Trzeciakowski, 1990). This commission purchased Polish-owned estates and redistributed them as smaller farms to German settlers.

The Prussian authorities believed that “hard” infrastructure (roads, railways, public utilities) would support their project of Germanization, understood as a multidimensional process of assimilation to a unified state identity (Judson, 2011). The city of Poznań saw the construction of many prestige public construction projects, testifying to the German nature of the city. At the same time, the region was overlooked for major investments, for example, the establishment of a university, since the authorities were not sure about the population's loyalty to the state and to its seemingly self-evident modern culture. It was, in fact, the Poles who lobbied in the German and Prussian parliament for this kind of “hard,” infrastructural modernization. The development was carried out in an exclusionary manner and subordinated to the plans to change the ethnic makeup of areas where Poles held majorities. The 1886 law on settlement provided funds for German settlers, while hindering the full exercise of the property rights of Poles who faced bureaucratic harassment. Since it openly supported “German settlement,” a clause in violation of self-professed principles of the rule of law, the law had a double effect: “… the emergence of modern settlements equipped with public utilities and the turning of the Polish population into second-class citizens” (Tarnowska, 2019, p. 358).

Poles in Posnania, especially the land-owning gentry and the emerging bourgeoisie (doctors, lawyers), constituted economic competition to the Germans. This was made possible thanks to their economic resources and civic self-organization within the limits allowed by the Prussian administration, practiced under the programme of “organic work” of economic, intellectual and social advancement without outright rebellion. As the Poznań philanthropist Count Edward Raczyński argued, “If we become better, more educated, and richer than the Germans, then we will be the masters in Poznań” (Meyer, 1979, p. 47). Polish resistance and disobedience in Greater Poland, be it armed (1830, 1848) or civil, including economic, represented a key challenge to the emergence of a unified modern German state, since it questioned its universal pretensions and the exclusive right of Germans to represent modernity. Historian Lech Trzeciakowski writes of “self-modernization” in Poznań under German rule, against or at least parallel to the modernizing practices of the German administration (Trzeciakowski, 1999, p. 66).

The politics of ethnic resettlement and the assimilation of Posnania and other majority Polish territories failed. The elites were not conformed to working for the Empire. The ever-present “Polish question,” the continuous actions for national self-determination, and unwillingness to practice loyalty to the Empire on the side of the Polish elites, questioned the assumption of the natural attraction of German culture for all the inhabitants of the German state. The lower classes, including the peasants, were not made into loyal subjects on the promise of safety and material modernization. The repressive treatment of the Polish language and the Roman Catholic faith, the markers of otherness shared by diverse populations in the German-controlled area, made coalescing under the national solidarity possible. Because of these defeats, the strategy was to externalize those elements of Polishness that were perceived as difficult to integrate as unmodern and later as an existential and biological threat to the German nation (Conrad, 2010, p. 177).

Next to linguistic repression, denial of property, and overlooking “hard” modernization, Rogers Brubaker's study on the formation of German citizenship is particularly instructive for another measure of exclusion (Brubaker, 1992). The right of blood as the basis for citizenship, Brubaker argues, signaled a failure to universalize Germanness according to the French example, which adopted birth citizenship. While Prussian Poles generally had German citizenship, between 1883 and 1885, Bismarck's administration forcibly removed 32,000 Poles who lacked Prussian citizenship and who migrated for work from Russia and Austria-Hungary (Fitzpatrick, 2015). Further Polish immigration to inner Germany or migration of Poles from other Empires was seen as a threat to national cohesion. Legal regulations allowing the deportation of non-Germans were adopted and permanently impacted the definition of German citizenship (Conrad, 2010, p. 148). Exclusion from citizenship and possible deportation is an externalization, both physical and symbolic. Therefore, its history is worth tracing not only for the sake of filling in the blind spots or restoring “epistemic justice” towards marginalized groups. What the Polish case illuminates is the intertwining of symbolic and economic dimensions of the exclusion under discussion. Immigrant workers from neighboring countries, seen as a cheap labor force, were a key for Western powers’ industries and agriculture in parallel to the labor and other resources drawn from the colonies. This paradox, in which the influx of migrants is again a key problem, but at the same time a necessity, seems particularly relevant.

Post-colonial versus post-imperial theory

Works inspired by the post-colonial theory provided important critical perspectives on German attitudes towards the European East and the asymmetrical German-Polish relations in particular. Recent research highlights the exploitative economic policies, the colonial and racialized discourses about Poles and Poland, and establishes personal, intellectual, and logistical links between these policies and discourses in Eastern Europe with German violence in the non-European world (Healy, 2014; Kopp, 2009, 2011, 2012; Mick, 2014; Nelson, 2024; Surynt, 2008; Ureña Valerio, 2019). Crucial to the perspective of this article, post-colonial reflection sees colonial expansions as a factor behind the development of modern knowledge, in particular sociological (Go, 2016).

Although based on practical and symbolic exclusion, the Polish-German relations do not quite fit the colonial model, and as a result, they highlight some of the limitations of post-colonial theory. Even if colonial mechanisms were at play during most violent and destructive German–Polish encounters, like during the Second World War, there is also no shortage of such interactions that, although asymmetrical, do not have a colonial dimension, since they presupposed the recognition by German actors, according to the benchmarks of the time, of the considerable degree of autonomy of Poles and their European status as a historical nation or heirs to an established state. Thus, for example, as historians Jesse Kauffman and Mark Kettler show, rather than applying a colonial lens, Germans during the First World War held competing views of Poland and Poles (Kauffman, 2015; Kettler, 2019). While some parts of the German elite viewed Poland as a potential colony and drew radical plans of ethnic cleansing and population resettelment (Conrad, 2010, p. 176), others simultaneously recognized it as a developed Western-style nation-state which, even if it was considered a junior partner, constituted an important part of the European balance. Poles and their demands remained throughout the 19th and 20th centuries both an important external reference point and an internal actor with considerable agency within the consolidating German empire (Conrad, 2010).

Despite all the repressive policies, Prussian Poles had German citizenship, their internal presence had both an important economic and political dimension, as well as a cultural one. Polish peasants and farmers were an important economic force, as were craftsmen (Jaworski, 1986), Polish deputies sat in Prussian and German parliaments, and without their votes, some governments would not have been formed (e.g., Leo von Caprivi's cabinet, 1890–1894), Polish intellectuals spoke in key German debates (e.g., legal scholar and sociologist Leon Petrażycki in legal reform debates). Not only was Polish culture not easily assimilated to the German mainstream, but in some cases, as Max Weber complained, among others, it was the Germans who Polonized and identified with the postulates of the Polish movement within Germany, especially during the first half of the nineteenth century, and this was particularly true of German Catholics in places where they constituted a minority (Weber, 2007, p. 5).

The importance of the “Polish Question” for Imperial Germany demonstrates the distinction between the colonial dimension of the genesis of modernity, most salient in the case of imperial policies in the non-European world, and its imperial dimension related to settlements in their geographical proximity. These two dimensions are similar and interrelated, also in the German case, yet not identical (Zimmerman, 2011). Colonial criticism focuses on the separation between the metropolis and colony, but often overlooks the aspects of their relationship that were not based on oppression, whereas an imperial perspective emphasizes how diverse geographical and political components constituted an empire, similarly to how regions form a nation-state. This distinction becomes particularly relevant when examining power dynamics in East-Central Europe, such as between Poland and Germany, where their historical entanglements suggest that adding a post-imperial perspective could yield valuable insights beyond the traditional post-colonial paradigm.

The cases of symbolic exclusion of Poland from the standpoint of German modernity could be interpreted from this imperial perspective, and go beyond the history of Polish–German relations and criticism of their asymmetry in the post-colonial paradigm. Recently, Felix Ackermann and Agnieszka Pufelska encouraged a new look at the colonial and imperial implications of the German rule over Poland before the First World War (Ackermann & Pufelska, 2021). Sebastian Conrad's work expertly highlights the differences between the colonial and the imperial and integrates the story of Poles in the German Empire within the global context (Conrad, 2010). Another critique of the German historiography's perspective on the distinction between colonial and imperial frameworks has been offered by Philipp Ther (Ther, 2004). Ther understands imperialism as an analytical tool and highlights that empires are made up of many components, which can be divided by nation, region, or religion. While particular components are dominant, all of them have their roles in the formation of the empire's identity and political dynamics. Analyzing solely the dominant groups in the empires, whether national, religious, or economic, does not provide an accurate understanding of their nature. Ther argues that the Poles, Czechs, and Austrians were significant actors in the German empire, whose role is rarely recognized, and is marginalized in historiography. The externalization of these national components from German history had an important political justification, since post-war Germany understandably avoided any suspicion of imperialist ambitions, while most Czechs and Austrians, just like Poles, did not want to see their nations as historical parts of Germany. The position advocated in this article, however, involves a purely intellectual, academic project of inclusion into German history and its road to modernity. The introduction of such optics, which will unequivocally de-emphasize the implications for contemporary politics, can be extremely useful, and its significance extends significantly beyond the political-cultural area of Germany.

Our argument, therefore, rests largely on the assumption that two dimensions can be distinguished in the mechanism of excluding Poles from Western modernity. They can be divided into internal and external. This is because Poles are a relatively large nation which, on the one hand, constituted the most numerous national minority in Germany, while at the same time, an even larger part of them constituted a national entity external to Germany. In this respect, despite all the differences, Poles were similar to Jews, for, on the one hand, Jews were an internal German minority, but also a nation, the majority of which, like the Poles, lived in the Russian Empire at the time. As we argue, it is important to separate these two dimensions of the perception of Poles and Jews in Germany. Externally, Poles living east of Germany, like Jews from Russia, are subject to a fairly well-described orientalization and become significant outsiders to Germany (Kałczewiak, 2021). However, the roles of Poles and Jews living in the modernizing German Empire are significantly different. In both cases, they are striking instances of what is considered by intellectuals of the period we discuss as a “pathological” adaptation to German modernity, which, at the same time, exposes its weakness. On the one hand, German Jews became a symbol of hyper-individualism incompatible with German modernity, while on the other, Poles became symbols of stubborn pre-modernity based on nationalism reinforced by their Catholicism. This division in the German imagination of the roles of Poles and Jews into “internal” and “external” does not, of course, mean that both nations cannot be perceived as a whole. We also do not deny that the perceptions of “internal” and “external” Poles and Jews influenced each other, especially when it came to migrants from Russia. Both nations, especially in the nineteenth century, can also be described as trans-imperial, and it is worth remembering that they were involved in intensive migration at that time, both trans-European and to the United States. In our text, however, we focus not on their actual histories and their complexity, but primarily on how they became key points of reference for defining the emerging German modernity and on the fact that this role was different from that assigned to their compatriots living in Russia and, more broadly, in Eastern Europe.

The duality of the role of Poles and Jews in defining German modernity that we have pointed out seems to go beyond previous attempts to problematize the position and symbolic roles of Western Europe's eastern and southern borderlands. It can, of course, be related to Milica Bakić-Hayden's “nesting Orientalisms,” as the relationship between Poles and Jews within Germany and beyond its eastern border can be seen as two “fractal” incarnations of a broader meta-Orientalism (Bakić-Hayden, 1995). The position of both nations can also be related to the concepts of “inter-imperiality” (Doyle, 2014) and the “creolization of the modern” (Parvulescu & Boatcă, 2022), since, as we have pointed out, both Poles and Jews in the nineteenth century could be considered trans-imperial groups in Central Europe. However, our analysis goes further and problematizes the different roles that parts of such nations may play in individual empires. This is in particular depending on the advancement of these empires in the process of modernization and their proximity to the Western core. Thus, we can note in this context that the symbolic roles of Poles and Jews were very different for the development of the modern Russian identity, although this question falls outside the scope of our paper. In any case, parts of trans-imperial nations that find themselves in an empire closer to national consolidation based on ideas of modernity, in our case, Germany, turn out to be able to influence the formation of the ideals of this modernity much more strongly and differently from parts outside of its borders. The result is their inherent exclusion from emerging definitions of modernity, which in the case of Poles took on a paradigmatic character, that is, as we argue, defined the status of Poles as inherently an “unmodern” nation. Although this influenced the overall perception of Poles as a nation, its roots were deeper and more internal for Germany than is usually assumed in most studies on orientalizing the Eastern and Central European nations. We suggest that this separation of the internal dimension of the processes of modernity formation may be the basis for distinguishing, in a broader reflection on empires, their “post-imperial” dimension, which, as we show, functions differently from the external dimension, which can be more broadly defined as “post-colonial.”

The symbolic exclusion from modernity

The subsequent analysis of cases of prominent German authors and their relation to Poland argues that one way to show the role of Poland for Germany, but also for modern social theory more broadly, is to juxtapose it with the role of the Jews, which has been discussed much more systematically (Geller, 2011; Goldberg, 2017). Seeing the imperial German anti-Polish and anti-Jewish policies in parallel was very rare (Neubach, 1967). For, as this argument goes, Poles, along with the Jews, can be considered as key historical significant others for Germans, in particular in the second part of the nineteenth century. In our discussion, we focus on Gustav Freytag, Heinrich von Treitschke, and Max Weber, who were prominent intellectuals of the period we are interested in, representing three different spheres of the cultural field: literary work and literary theory, historiography, and sociology. As we will demonstrate, they are today the subject of close critical study because their writings, even if the cases of Freytag and von Treitschke are now partly forgotten, offer valuable insights into a pivotal moment in the formation of German modernity. What they have in common is their position in the broader meta-field of power at the time, in its liberal-conservative sector, and the fact that their works focus significantly on the role of Poles and Jews as significant negative others for the German identity that was being redefined at the time. It seems that this parallel focus on Poles and Jews during this period was not accidental or unique to the three intellectuals discussed here. We argue that it is worth showing them in the broader context of the processes we reconstruct in our text, which allows us to see that the role of Poles in this period, although largely forgotten today, was paradigmatic, and understanding it makes it possible for us to delve into the roots of not only German, but also Western modernity more broadly.

The first case is the novelist, playwright, journalist, literary theorist, and literary critic Gustav Freytag (1816–1895). His most significant works include the cultural history Pictures from the German Past (1859–1867) as well as the 1885 novel Soll und Haben (published in English as Debit and Credit two years later), which was one of the most widely read novels of the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. Kopp (2009) points out that Freytag's book belonged to the broader category of novels about the German eastern borderlands (the so-called Ostmarkenromane). The novel was directed towards the German middle class as the soundest element in the nation and contrasted its virtues with the negative images of Poles and Jews. On the one hand, the Jewish merchant was presented as a villain and a threat to Germany. On the other hand, the German colonists appeared as superior in comparison to the “wild,” “inferior,” and “uncivilized” Poles, including noblemen. Poles lacked modern culture, Freytag showed, were unable to create civilization, and they would only become proper human beings through German rule and colonization. There is a great deal of Orientalist imagery in Freytag's novel, as some have already noted (Achinger, 2017). In this context, Izabela Surynt writes about Freytag's peculiar “nationalization of landscape” (Surynt, 2008).

While this Orientalist element of the German perception of Poland seems fairly well documented and recognized, not only in the circle of researchers interested in post-colonial theory (Orłowski, 1996; Surynt, 2004; Szarota, 1996), it is important to note that Freytag's vision is rooted in the assumption of the moral and economic superiority of Protestant ethics, and of the German bourgeoisie, over other classes and ethnicities. What emerges from his novel is a clear opposition between, on the one hand, the German middle class, the Protestant bourgeoisie, building both civilization based on capital accumulation, and constituting the nucleus of German modernity, and the mostly Catholic Poles and non-Christian Jews, who did not fit into such a defined community building material and spiritual modernity. Crucially, the Poles appeared from the beginning to be a nation without a bourgeoisie, which was their main weakness. The Jews, on the other hand, were dominated by what one might call a parasitic bourgeoisie. The image of Poles as a nation without a bourgeoisie seems crucial from our point of view, and it seems to be a constant and little-noticed aspect of the vision of Poles from the period in question to the present day. Poles appear primarily as a peasant nation. If their elites are recognized, they are primarily landed-aristocratic elites, and with time, also intelligentsia. These two groups were at times romanticized and admired among the German liberal elites, for example during the November 1830 uprising against Russia or in 1848, but were considered significantly different than rational intellectuals in state service, or economically mobile middle classes. Thus, one can speak of an image of Poles consisting of peasants and nobility. The latter were unproductive, and in this sense similar to the Jews, whose work, according to Freytag, was not based on a sense of a morally defined social role, but stimulated by selfishness and conducive to moral fragmentation. At the same time, the Polish nobility was a rebellious, not entirely rational element of the social structure, best exemplified by its participation in the Greater Poland uprising of 1848 against the Prussian state. Although some read the image of the Poles in Freytag's novel as an external enemy outside the Prussian borders (Achinger, 2017), they can also be seen, however, as a largely internal element, in the role of which Jews were seen first of all. However, the entire spectrum of Jews runs through the novel, from the fully assimilated Jews of Berlin to the completely unassimilated Eastern Jews who circulated across the border and engaged in small trade. Remarkably, Freytag suggested that the essence of Jewish identity had roots in the shtetls of Poland. Thus, one can speak here of a parallel Orientalism towards Jews and Poles focused on the economy. The main contrast, Achinger argues, is between beneficial German modernity and unproductive Polish pre-modernity or un-modernity. It is further supplemented by a split in the image of modernity itself between a regulated German one and a dangerous, chaotic Jewish one (Achinger, 2023).

Also, worth mentioning in the context of Freytag is his intellectual partner Heinrich von Treitschke (1834–1896), a well-known German historian, political writer, and politician, member of the Reichstag from the National Liberal Party, best known for his five-volume German History in the Nineteenth Century (published between 1879 and 1894). Stoetzler and Achinger have analyzed Treitschke's opus, pointing to his anti-Jewish and anti-Slavic racism, which they related to the stereotypes Freytag expressed so vividly. Both authors saw it as grounded in the wider thinking, which can be seen as characteristic of German National Liberalism as both Freytag and von Treitschke belonged to the same political current (Stoetzler & Achinger, 2013). Similarly to Freytag, Treitschke, next to more widespread beliefs in cultural and civilizational inferiority, viewed Polish nation as fundamentally incomplete, consisting only of nobles and peasants. He argued that Poles lacked the crucial middle class (Bürgerstand): the social layer he considered essential for building civilization, enabling progress, and transforming an unorganized peasant population into a proper state structure. As Abraham (1991) shows, among many intellectuals of this period who were influenced by von Treitschke was Max Weber, who is another case in our discussion. The German policies and relationship with Poland and the Poles were discussed among prominent German intellectuals, only to mention the importance of Karl Marx and Marxists led by Rosa Luxemburg. The cases of national liberals, like Freytag, von Treitschke, and Weber, provide, however, an important insight into the self-styled centrist position beyond internationalism and critique of German imperialism and its most vocal proponents. A very similar image of Poles as a key significant other for Germany, along with the Jews, is present in Max Weber's writings although his visions take the form of scientific models rather than literary images. Although operating in completely different spheres, literature on the one hand, and sociological theory on the other, Freytag and Weber, around the same time, achieved the status of classics in their respective fields, ideologically situated in the liberal sector in the German field of power at the time (Green & Levis Sullam, 2020).

The role of Poland and wider Central and Eastern Europe in Max Weber's (1864–1920) social theory has already been discussed in the literature (Abraham, 1991; Boatcă, 2013; Bucholc, 2014; Konno, 2004; Krasnodębski, 1998). This article highlights the highly politicized and emotional interpretations of German-Polish relations and the Polish threat to Germany, which were largely based on quite rigorous empirical analysis of statistical data. Max Weber was not only a key German sociologist, but also became a classic of global social theory and a key theorist of modernity. The contextual and historical roots of his highly generalizing theses, although discussed and criticized, are until today often left unexamined and treated as a detached social-scientific prescription of what modernity means. Thus, it can be said that the importance of Poles for Weber in his writings testifies to the role the Polish-German relations in the development of global social sciences.

The context of the already mentioned 1880s and 1890s repressive policies towards Poles in Germany, especially the actions of the Settlement Commission, significantly influenced Max Weber's academic work. His 1895 inaugural address at the University of Freiburg, which examined Polish seasonal workers, reflected both negative attitudes towards this ethnic group based on the assumed cultural and civilizational inferiority, as well as Weber's emerging ideas about objectivity in social science. One has to recognize that the Freiburg address has been considered by most Weberians as an early position from which he departed in his mature work (Zimmerman, 2006). At the same time, Weber's writings on the Polish question did not receive attention as relevant to discussions of modernity until recently, however, as we believe, they give important insights into the complex process of emergence of his vison of modernity from which Poles as significant others of the German modernity became implicitly excluded just as most other Eastern Europeans. Thus, these two elements: prejudice against those deemed inferior and scientific objectivity, although seemingly contradictory, functioned side by side as the program of liberal German modernity. The cultural and civilizational superiority of “Germanness” was taken for granted, and Poles were perceived by Weber first of all as a cheap and mobile labor force as well as farmers willing to cultivate less fertile land. Weber observed with disappointment that Germans were unwilling to settle in Poznań to change the ethnic makeup of the region, instead moving west or overseas. The key mechanism of this process, which, to Weber's frustration, did not allow Germanization of the region, was the labor market asymmetries, which, by the way, produce the migratory flows that did not change considerably from the mid-nineteenth century until today (Kępińska & Stark, 2013).

Observing the growing Polish majorities and economic successes Weber observed that “the free play of the forces of selection does not always work out, as the optimists among us think, in favour of the nationality which is more highly developed or more gifted economically” (Weber, 2007) Since Poles, outside of modernity, could not be allowed to compete with Germans as equals, Weber proposed, the state must intervene on their behalf.

Abraham (1991) emphasized Weber's anti-pluralistic and assimilationist attitude in his writings on the Polish workers. Abraham suggests that the same attitude was replicated in his treatment of German Catholics as well as in his later treatment of Jews, and was, as such, not an accident, but central to understanding Weber's thought and the intellectual climate among German national liberals of the time. As Abraham argues, Weber tried to develop a political program for German liberals that would be a compromise between the interests of several factions of the elite (in particular, the bourgeoisie, the Junkers, farmers, and workers) and a compromise between the important contradictions of modernity. He appreciated the Junkers’ attachment to the land and patriotism, but criticized them for bringing migrants from the East, particularly Poles, to work on their farms, thus hindering the cultural unification of Germany (i.e., the Germanization of minorities). His thinking on pragmatic solutions steered toward closing Germany's eastern border to migrants and, at the same time, resettling Poles in western Germany, where they should be more easily assimilated. He was also an advocate of expropriating land owned by Polish landowners. Under the influence of Weber's Freiburg address of 1895, Abraham argues, German policy towards Poles changed. It moved away from Bismarck's model of conflict between Polish and German nobility, towards a framework of an ethno-nationalist struggle for hegemony in which deprivation of Poles of their rights became a legitimate tool, and resettling of ethnic Germans to places like Poznań was supposed to permanently change ethnic relations and create German majorities. Thus, Weber was at the same time one of the key ideologues of the new German liberalism, which combined many universalist ideas with the bourgeoisie as their carrier, but also of new nationalism, which argued for the necessity of unification of the country around German culture considered superior to Polish and others. Having such a strong, sophisticated national culture (Kultur) was considered by Weber as a condition of modernity, and implicitly, such a culture can only be produced by a consolidated bourgeoisie having its nation-state. As for the Poles, he did not recognize that they could have such a complete culture and did not recognize the existence of a Polish bourgeoisie.

Weber, just like Freytag, appreciated the bourgeoisie in relation to the aristocracy and landed gentry. Protestantism, from his perspective, was a bourgeois religion, a key actor and condition for modernity. For Weber, the inferiority of Poles and Jews was implicitly defined by the de facto absence, or at least weakness, of the Polish and Jewish bourgeoisie. In other words, Weber did not recognize the existence of either Jewish or Polish fully fledged modern capitalists. Thus, while he saw the morally responsible bourgeoisie as the bearers of Germanness, Polishness was for him composed mainly of petty peasants, largely independent of the market trends, more resistant to economic crises, which rendered them difficult to be economically eradicated by German capital. Weber made similar comments on the noncapitalist Polish workers who did not integrate into the wage labor system (Bucholc, 2017). At the same time, Weber worried that in eastern Germany, the ecclesiastical bond was stronger than the national bond, and therefore, the Polish-Catholic element was able to absorb German Catholics.

Max Weber's approach and scholarship evolved since the Freiburg Address in 1895. Weber ceased to dwell on his anti-Polish and anti-Catholic sentiments, since the particular grievances of the German national liberals which he represented became normalized and enshrined as modernity's foil in the social sciences. The clearest example is the treatment of Catholicism in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905). As Manuel Borutta writes, to the earlier exclusion of Catholicism in culture and political discourse in Germany, Max Weber added the exclusion from “… the social-scientific construction of Western modernity” (Borutta, 2010, p. 117). The politically motivated, vitriolic exclusion based on the Polish-German conflict in eastern Prussia and the more detached academic one were complementary. The Protestant Ethic avoided discussion of Germany's domestic affairs of the time, but Poles nonetheless served as examples of Catholicism's lack of dynamism and Eastern Prussia as a place in which “difference in religion coincides with one of nationality, and thus of cultural development” (Weber, 2001, p. 3). Only an emancipation from the native culture and integration into other societies, argued Weber, could break the “traditional laziness” of Poles (Weber, 2001, p. 136).

The protection of bourgeois liberal modernity required violent means that ultimately contradicted both the universalism and the specific religious salvation upon which it was originally founded. This line of thought was developed by Manuela Boatcă in her detailed analysis of Weber's approach to racial issues (Boatcă, 2013). As she concludes, Weber's approach rests on the rejection of biological racism and the plea for a cultural and economic explanation of racial inequalities that Weber espoused in his debate with Alfred Ploetz (1860–1940). Weber used the example of the United States and argued that race relations cannot be explained in terms of inborn racial qualities, but solely through cultural and economic factors, which, on the one hand, seems to be an approach that is significantly less biological than classical racism, but still recognizes racial inequalities as natural, even if Weber understood them as culturally produced. Even in this non-biological view of race, Poles were considered inferior, this time based on their deficient culture which precluded them from entering modernity controlled by the Protestant bourgeoisie. As we argue, this kind of argumentation emerged exactly because the representatives of Polish majorities under German rule, including land-owning peasants or gentry, held power indifferent to market mechanisms, or wanted to participate in the economic and cultural modernity in competition with German cultural norms, imperial institutions that discriminated against them. Weber's interactions with African Americans, who included W. E. B. Du Bois, enabled him to expand his anti-Polish sentiments into a broader political economy of race and free labor (Boatcă, 2013). Weber posited that if farms owned by African Americans continued to flourish, they could, alongside a significant influx of Eastern Europeans, form a rural demographic resistant to assimilation into the historically entrenched culture of the United States, particularly the “Anglo-Saxon spirit.” Thus, Weber began to construct a general theory of race and labor that could also apply to the American context. The “West,” as defined by Weber, including its rational economic, political, scientific, and cultural dimensions, whether in Germany or the United States, was particularly threatened by Polish influence and other migrants from Central and Eastern Europe.

This critical look at Weber's modern understanding of race seems extremely important in the context of contemporary debates about racism as a hard-to-transcend problem in many parts of the world. It is significant that just as the Poles were a key point of reference for Weber's consideration of racial difference, so they remain, along with other Central European nations, to this day. This is demonstrated, in particular, in recent works pointing to the strength of the cultural exclusion of Central and Eastern Europeans from culturally and politically understood “whiteness” (Böröcz & Sarkar, 2017; Kalmar, 2022; Panagiotidis & Petersen, 2024). Weber made his specifically anti-Polish racism the basis of his cultural theory, as Boatcă and Zimmerman suggest, the perception of Poland and Poles by German intellectuals is worth looking at, not only to criticize their bias, but to understand the nature of modern Western racism. It can also be argued that Weber's discussion of Poland is an important part of the history of the debate on German and Western modernity. One perspective in which deconstructions of German social theory can be developed is by reconstructing its positionality, both historical and contemporary. Manuela Boatcă rightly points out that both Weber's analysis of Polish workers and race more broadly, including in the United States, was informed by his own geopolitical and historical location in the turn-of-the-century Germany as well as by his upper-middle-class position. Moreover, Weber himself admitted that he created his theoretical vision from a “Standpoint of Germanism,” which can be related to the broader reflection that most of the Western theory is written, as we could say, “from the standpoint of Westness.”

The (non)existence of the Polish bourgeoisie

An important context for our argument is the realization that in the second half of the nineteenth century, a wealthy bourgeoisie began to emerge on Polish lands, one which could be seen as an equivalent of the Western bourgeoisie. It was politically and economically weaker than most Western ones (in particular, the German, French, or British), but it had capital resources sufficient not only to conduct large investment projects but also to transform the society of the Polish lands, including influencing politics and culture (Koryś, 2018). The very end of the nineteenth century saw the consolidation of this elite, which was concentrated in the Russian-ruled cities of Warsaw and Łódź, the most important centers of capital accumulation in the Polish lands. A key condition for this accumulation was the existence of a customs border that protected industry in the Russian Empire while giving access to that country's large market. The Polish lands under Russian control were at the same time the westernmost part of the empire, and enjoyed a particular location rent (Kochanowicz, 2006). In the German and Austrian parts of the Polish lands, such a robust bourgeoisie did not emerge due to the lack of conditions for capital accumulation in these still mostly agricultural regions, as well as countermeasures by imperial capitals, so the Polish elite there was dominated by the traditional landed gentry.

Meanwhile, the Polish bourgeoisie in Russian Poland, a significant part of which was of Jewish, but also German origin, produced their version of liberalism, which could be seen as liberal Polish nationalism (Jaszczuk, 1999). This bourgeoisie lost large parts of its resources and influence after 1918, and finally, was deprived of all of them in 1945. Before 1914, however, it was a key economic actor, as well as an important political actor working largely in concert with other liberal groups in the Russian Empire. German intellectuals, if they perceived Poles as social actors, it was primarily as peasants, as well as representatives of other factions of the lower classes, especially those migrating in search of better jobs to the German mainland or further West. If they noticed representatives of the elite, they usually appeared to them as the archaic noble elite. The self-organizing, entrepreneurial base of Poznań, which attempted to build Polish institutions in the economic, social, academic, and cultural areas, was downplayed or seen as a threat. Since for most imperial policymakers, Poles constituted a domestic “question” to be resolved through economic or physical coercion, no effort was made to grasp the complicated, trans-imperial nature of the Polish political, cultural, and economic projects, including their elite. More broadly, it can be said that the Polish economic elites are not seen as a significant actor to this day by Western social theory. At the same time, it is not even appreciated in Poland itself, which can also be seen as an effect of the hegemony of Western theory, which causes Poles to view their history largely through Western eyes (Bucholc, 2014).

The view of the Polish elite by the German Empire invites a more general thesis about the perception of the elites of individual nations. Within certain limits, the nature of elites, as well as the entire social layers, is a matter of empirical identification. Thus, some countries have produced an educated middle class, working class, or bourgeoisie, while there are others where such layers or classes are almost non-existent. However, the recognition of the existence of specific social classes or layers is also inherently relational and political, an extremely ambivalent issue, and dependent on multidimensional determinants. As already mentioned, the notable German debate around the Sonderweg approach was centered on the question of how much of its social stratification, and more broadly its social history, was modern and how it diverged from the “standard” Western industrial path represented above all by Great Britain and the United States (Kocka, 1999). The question of the existence and political and cultural influence of the native bourgeoisie was considered crucial in these disputes. Recognition of its subjectivity is, on the one hand, a matter of internal games within the elites of a given society, on the other hand, international perception. This problem particularly concerns the bourgeoisie in Russia, both historically and currently. As Christof Dejung, David Motadel, and Jürgen Osterhammel note, to this day the literature does not recognize the existence of a fully-fledged bourgeoisie in the Russian Empire, and the aforementioned authors do not even mention that there were other national bourgeoisies within this Empire, such as, for example, the Georgian, Armenian, and finally Polish (Dejung et al., 2019).

Conclusions

This text calls for a more systematic effort to reconceptualize the place of dependent, geographically proximate imperial entities in the development of European modernity, especially their significance for the emergence of modern social theory. At the same time, it calls for distinguishing their roles from those of external actors, even if they formally belong to the same national or ethnic group.

It does so by highlighting the crucial and underappreciated role of Poland in German cultural and academic conceptualizations, as well as their roots in particular issues, like the “Polish Question,” places, like the eastern borderlands of the German Empire in Poznań, and times—the crucial second half of the nineteenth century.

Poles were the largest ethnic group on the eastern frontier of what was constituted as the West, with which Germany, a large modernizing country with global imperial ambitions, was unable to deal based on systematic integration and assimilation. Thus, Poles became present in German state policies, cultural and scientific production, and national identity as a prototypical, and therefore not unique, but distinct “unmodern” nation lacking bourgeoisie and unfit to participate in culture and markets. Of crucial relevance here seems to be the relative proximity of the Poles, especially in comparison to victims of colonial expansions beyond Europe, both geographically and relatively culturally (including their shared Catholic faith with some Germans). In the late nineteenth century, Poles were not visitors from afar and their separation from the yet-to-be-defined German nation was an arbitrary cut-off line. The fate of other groups like Silesians or Kashubians, who today reside mostly on the Polish territory but were part of the German society testify to this arbitrariness. However, while these small ethnic groups did not pose a major political problem, even if they at times resisted the Prussian assimilation, the “Polish problem” became an important aspect in the process of shaping the definition of German modernity. Its “solution” consisted in particular in excluding Poles by identifying them as a nation incompatible with Germanness due to their pre-modernity. Thus, Poles became a prototype for the category of a paradigmatically “unmodern” nation. This perception of Poles was applied to the entire nation, but originally stemmed mainly from the need to define the role of Poles living under the Germn rule and those emigrating there from Russia.

This “unmodern” nation was originally a dependent part of the imperial structure but not a colony. Poland was the first entity of this type, and the process of its exclusion from modernity was part of the development of Western social theory. Significantly, Poland to a large extent remains as such to this day, which can also be explained largely, though not exclusively, by its multidimensional weakness and dependence on the West (Böröcz & Sarkar, 2017; Schmidtke, 2009). However, as we argue, it is important to distinguish these dimensions of the position of countries like Poland from their deep-seated perception as “unmodern.”

Such work could be carried out in the footsteps of studies about the role of Jews in similar contexts, which seem justified by the fact that in many of the key discourses, including those of the authors analyzed in this article, Jews and Poles were discussed in parallel, even if viewed quite differently (Stoetzler, 2007). The roles of Poles and Jews were transnational and trans-imperial and had a clear impact on the German self-understanding. Poles, just like Jews, were seen as free-riders of modernity; however, immanently “unmodern” in many dimensions. The Pole and the Jew thus represent two types of internal threats to modernity that seem to be largely still present in both public discourses and theoretical literature. One can also consider the similarities and differences between the modern roots of anti-Semitism and the orientalization of Poles and other Slavic peoples in Western European contexts (Green, 2020; Stoetzler, 2008; Stoetzler & Achinger, 2013).

In critiquing Max Weber's thought, we are partly using his mode of analysis, which, as is often forgotten today, and can be perfectly seen in his study of the “Polish question,” had a very clear economic dimension. The case of Poland is important for us, as it was for Weber, first of all, because it is the key place where, in the late nineteenth century, the boundary between what remains modern to this day and what still appears as not quite modern was forged. It is possible, then, to look at Poland as a liminal or inter-imperial space, the processes where the key negotiations between the modern West and its exterior came into focus (Müller & Torp, 2009).