W poszukiwaniu optymalnej formy państwa u progu niepodległości . Królestwo Finlandii i Królestwo Litwy z 1918 r.

Abstract

First World War is defi ned as the clash of two ideologies – monarchical, which embodiment was the Austro-Hungarian Empire and republican symbolized by the United States of America. Austria emerged from World War as a small country, barely shadow of its former power, also – a republic. United States advanced to the rank of a world power, and maintained this position throughout the twentieth century. The consequence of the war was to be the end of “ancieme regime” based on monarchies and the advent of the democratic republic and universal suff rage known as „Pax Americana”. The main challenge that faced the builders of the postwar order was not royalism, but irredentism, as an aftermath of the disintegration of the great monarchies, which in Central Europe were the only factors of multi-national cohesion. A natural consequence of their fall was intensifi ed development of nationalist ideas of strengthened by self-determination of peoples. For nations which did not have their own state, the primary issue was the decision about the form of a future political system. The choice of the Republican form of government perfectly fi t in the idea for the new order based on democratic ideals. It turned out that this choice was not the only one possible. The idea of monarchy proved so attractive, that young nation-states appealed to that. This paper aims to present two examples of constitutional experiments, which used the idea of monarchy to implement the postulate of self-determination of nations – Finland (Kingdom of Finland) and Lithuania (Kingdom of Lithuania). Both proved to be ephemeral, which are in the literature generally ignored or treated as marginal. The task which the author has set himself is to attempt to answer the question about the reasons for choosing the monarchical form of the emerging political systems, and evaluate this choice.