Lawmaking in a Post-Composite State? The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

Similarities in the trajectories of Irish and Polish history are really visible only after the final dismemberment of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1795.1 Indeed, the closest parallel offered in Polish history to the role of the Irish parliament within the composite British monarchy of the eighteenth century is provided by the role of the parliament (sejm) of the ‘Congress’ kingdom of Poland ruled over by the Russian emperor between 1815 and 1830.2 Although for most of the eighteenth century the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was part of the Russian sphere of influence,3 there is a clear difference between the geopolitical dependence of one polity on another, and any kind of institutional union between the two. Like their Hungarian counterparts, but with more justification, Polish political writers of the later eighteenth century compared their constitution not with Ireland’s, but with that of Great Britain (which, again like the Hungarians, they called ‘England’).4 Nonetheless, the Commonwealth does seem at first glance to have possessed some of the characteristics of a ‘composite state’, largely owing to the complexity of its medieval origins. Even though in this case appearances are — it is argued — seriously deceptive, the persistence in the increasingly unitary Commonwealth of local loyalties and local estates (sejmiki), alongside the ‘national’ sejm, offers an opportunity to explore the relationship of centre and periphery in the development of representative institutions in what was a highly distinctive polity.