The limits and merits of internationalism: experts, the state and the international community in Poland in the first half of the twentieth century

Employing the example of two Polish technical experts – the metallurgist Jan Czochralski and the architect-urbanist Szymon Syrkus, who both reached the peak of their careers in the Interwar period – this article sketches a particular space of expertise in the newly developing states of Central Europe after 1918 and in Poland in particular. For experts like Czochralski and Syrkus a new and pronounced state activity helped to create a space of opportunities but was also a source of severe restrictions and demands for loyalty. With the Second World War and then with the establishment of a socialist regime this space vanished and a particular type of expert, relying heavily on the transnational structures still in place in Central Eastern Europe before the war, almost ceased to exist.