In November 1918, the Second Polish Republic emerged from the wartime implosion of the Habsburg, Russian, and German empires. As they celebrated this historic moment, even in the midst of ongoing border wars, Poles seemed to reject not only the particular empires that had oppressed them but the very concept of empire itself. The new Poland was to be a democracy, a state based both on the principle of national self-determination and on the idea that even the 30 percent of its citizens who identified as non-Polish would have their rights codified in a new liberal constitution. Poles could claim, therefore, that their state embodied a prescription most famously attributed to the American president Woodrow Wilson: empires no longer had any place on the European continent.

Many historians subsequently agreed with this characterization of the Second Republic as an anti-imperial nation-state, labeling it, among other things, a “decolonial state” or an “Other of Empire.” Yet some scholars have returned to another argument that was also made during the interwar period: that the eastern European successor states, including Poland, functioned not so much as anti-empires but as aspiring empires that oppressed the multiethnic minority populations living within their borders. David Reynolds argues, for example, that these states were “not so much nation-states as mini empires,” while Istvan Deak labels them “miniature multinational empires.” For Pieter Judson, the fact that representatives of the post-Habsburg states had a vested interest in denigrating empire and promoting the links between democracy and national self-determination should not blind us to the continuities in practice across the apparent break of the First World War. Each of these states, Judson tells us, acted like “a small empire,” in that it tried to grab and integrate territories where the population did not belong to the ruling national group.

Reflections on whether the Second Polish Republic functioned as an empire speak to a broader set of questions about the comparative frameworks in which Polish history should be understood. Indeed, debates over Poland's relationship with empire extend far beyond studies of the Second Republic.