Abstract

The article discusses, on the one hand, three stages of developing views about race and superiority of European civilization reflected in the second half of the 19th century in aggressive social-Darwinism of positivists, and on the other it confronts racial generalizations with nation-centered thinking, which played an extremely important role in identity discourse of the Poles. On the example of China and the Siberian-Chinese borderland, it can be noticed that perception of geography and the ethnic diversity in the world through the prism of great historiosophical and racial constructions is manifested in quite widespread adaptation of orientalizing language of the hegemon speaking about backwardness, lack of maturity for modernization and definite supremacy of Europe, while resistance to the oppression of the partitioners, and more broadly to the colonial policy of the European powers allows in Poland, contemptuously called Halb-Asien, like in the case of Indians and Boers, creating a kind of auto-colonial identification with the seemingly “exotic” nation.