The team led by Piotr Kuligowski investigates the discourses of Polish and Belgian parliamentarism in the post-Napoleonic period (i.e., after 1815). During this time, both the Netherlands and significant parts of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth acted as buffer spaces in imperial Europe. The year 1830 marked a turning point when an independent state emerged in Belgium, while the constitutional monarchy known as the Kingdom of Poland ceased to exist. From that year until the Spring of Nations, the project aims to highlight significant divergences that emerged in both regions, despite similar initial parameters regarding institutional order and inherited political traditions.

The group led by Wiktor Marzec aims to understand the dynamic interaction between personal, regional and state elements in legislative assemblies in three states composed of parts originating in various empires after 1918. Interwar Poland, Romania and Yugoslavia emerged in a new form out of the bygone empires. As a result, they displayed high cultural and institutional variance. They were inhabited by religious or national ‘minorities,’ and people previously living in various empires used to different legal realities. But their governments rejected the idea of federation and imposed unitary state designs instead. Various social groups met and debated the emerging polity in legislative assemblies of these reconstructed states. The project studies parliamentary debates, biographies of the MPs and institutional embeddings of parliamentary politics to tackle how such patchwork parliaments staged as national assemblies, mediated the diversities and tensions resulting from imposing nationalizing state structures on such heterogenous lands.