Representations

The Discourse of Composite Assemblies in post-Napoleonic Europe

The Belgian and Polish Case, 1815-1848 Polish Academy of Sciences

NCN Opus 23, grant no. 2022/45/B/HS3/00464

The project aims to investigate how parliamentary discourse evolved during periods of revolutionary upheaval and structural discontinuity, with a focus on the Belgian and Polish cases in the post-Napoleonic era. The post-Vienna order, established in 1815, faced fresh challenges from popular unrest and political upheavals that swept across Europe in the 1820s and 1830s. This dynamic is evident in the statements of both those defending the status quo and those advocating radical transformation. For example, in a letter to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs dated September 1, 1830, Klemens von Metternich acknowledged the fragility of the old European order, stating that it was "worn out," while the new one had not yet emerged, leaving "general mayhem" in its wake. Similarly, Joachim Lelewel, a Polish historian and politician, reflected on these events in a public speech delivered in July 1831. Approving of the revolutionary fervor, he declared: “Like sea billows swayed by a strong wind [...] The revolution that broke out in Paris flowed all over Europe and, spawning unrest in Germany, encouraged our youth to call our nation to new challenges, to uprising, and to throwing off the yoke.” Both Metternich and Lelewel highlighted the profound shockwaves that disrupted the monarchical and imperial order established by the Congress of Vienna. These disruptions extended far beyond the realm of the previous generation’s conservative frameworks. It became increasingly clear that political antagonisms could no longer be contained within the existing structures. In various countries, grassroots movements sought bold reforms to representative institutions, surpassing the constraints of top-down, non-binding constitutionalism.In this context, assemblies—especially those situated in imperial flashpoints—became arenas for intense political conflict and, at times, catalysts for profound sociopolitical change.

Patchwork parliaments

Post-imperial field of power in the new Republic of Poland, greater Romania and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes after the First World War

NCN Opus 23, grant no. 2022/45/B/HS6/00352

This project seeks to explore how regional and imperial political traditions and refractions translated into the field of power in the highly heterogenous post-imperial states, emergin g after the First World War: the republic of Poland, the extended kingdom of Romania and the merger Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. Although unitary by design, these three states displayed high cultural and institutional variance. Not only were they inhabited by religious or national ‘minorities’ of various status, but also the titular “nations” were diversified. Distinct populations had been socialized institutionally in many empires, themselves state spaces with multiple legal designs and political settings. Moreover, local national movements had promoted various Polish, Romanian or Serbian identities and visions of statehood. Patchwork parliaments displayed this post-imperial landscape and served as vehicles to integrate it into a unitary states. They did so, by re-presenting the heterogenous populations in chambers embalmed with symbolic representation of the sovereign body politic of the nation. This oscillation was not limited to the chamber itself but affected the entire socio-cultural surrounding, from parliamentary recruitment and careers, to elections and voting the bills, to petitions, parliamentary questions and accountability to the representees. Moreover, parliaments showcased power struggles of various types of elites and regional groupings over the emerging polity and are an excellent prism to investigate processes of state integration by speaking and doing. Against this backdrop, the project aims to understand the dynamic interaction between personal, regional and state-polity parameters in three patchwork parliaments sharing entangled but multiple institutional histories on the shatter zone of empires. It does so by merging new parliamentary studies, historical sociology of imperial form and post-Bourdieuian field analysis. Correspondingly, the project combines (1) pragmatic and conceptual analysis of parliamentary debates, (2) study of political alignments, cleavages, and social embeddedness of parliamentary politics (3) and life course analysis and prosopography of the envoys. By means of such a threefold design the project sheds light on the unification efforts confronting centrifugal forces and their impact on crucial debates forging the new state order against the backdrop of regionally embedded careers of the envoys. In this way it offers a nested, encompassing comparison of three states in the making, which were facing bewildering cultural diversity, social challenges and political choices.

The Revolution That Did Not Happen

Rebellion and Reaction in the Post-Imperial Borderlands 1905-1921: Poland and Finland in Asymmetrical Comparison

NCN Opus 14, grant no. 2017/27/B/HS6/00098

Russian Poland was among the most militant tsarist borderlands during the 1905-1907 Revolution. Harboring long-lasting strikes and breeding bellicose street fighters, Poland witnessed an unprecedented political upheaval manifest in the emergence of mass parties, labor unions and a new public culture. However, only a decade later, when revolutionary movements again loomed large and shook the whole region, Poland remained relatively calm. Forging a new statehood rivaled the earlier popular drive toward social revolution. Despite the Bolsheviks’ march on Warsaw to spread the socialist revolution westwards, the popular mood stuck with national unity. Polish popular classes stood almost unanimously on the side of the Polish nation state, even after it failed to deliver its promise to be a socialist-leaning one. What then were the processes responsible for the withering-away of social-revolutionary tendencies?
This project addresses this conundrum through a broader asymmetrical comparison, thereby shedding light on the dynamic of revolution, reaction and state-building in the late imperial and post-tsarist borderlands. The investigated dynamic in Poland was part and parcel of a broader late-imperial sequence; in different contexts, various responses were given during the revolutionary crises. Thus, the Polish case is best seen with the comparative backdrop of other major tsarist borderlands: Finland, the Baltic area and Southern Caucasian region. For instance, the project has explored the political trajectories in the early-twentieth-century Grand Duchy of Finland and the Kingdom of Poland in the context of the “global parliamentary moment” when the constitutional script of revolution competed with the more daring script of social revolution. Finland and Poland emerged as independent parliamentary states in 1917–1918 but in manifestly different circumstances. The Finnish socialist party had enjoyed a stable foothold in the formally democratic, but practically impotent national parliament since 1906, whereas the Polish socialists boycotted the Russian Duma and envisioned a democratic legislature as a guaranty of Poland with true people’s power. The Finnish socialists later abandoned parliamentarism in favor of an armed revolution in 1918, whereas most of their Polish counterparts used the parliamentary ideal of popular sovereignty to let the scarousel_ba78 out of the revolutionary upsurge. Studying state crafting in Poland after 1918 the project encompassed also extensive research on parliamentary debates in the legislative Sejm. The resulting series of articles tackled forging the new polity in respect to the place of labor, land reform and accommodation of ethnic diversity.

Projects

Projects

The Discourse of Composite Assemblies in post-Napoleonic Europe

Patchwork parliaments

The Revolution That Did Not Happen

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