“Each one brings with his faith and thought – even in chains – thrones to the highs and down” – on the European significance of the Polish republican heritage

Abstract

Constitutional history may be done on national or on comparative scale. If approached comparatively, it requires an external look to a historical legal system. This look, though, is the more accurate the more one considers the legal cultural spirit. As a German legal historian, it is decisive to distance myself from any Hegelian Volksgeist-thinking. Rather, my interest in the Polish republican tradition forging the national memory in the years of statelessness and imposed authoritarianism is guided by a Burckhardtian way. As he read the Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) in terms of the rise of the individual, there seems to be a Polish legal culture in terms of a republican stimulus of “non-domination”. If this paper argues that Polish republicanism has a share in Poland’s vital and leading role in the fall of communism from 1989 onwards, it is not so naïve to assume a direct line from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, when nobility was acquiring real power at the expense of royal prerogatives, to the twentieth century. It is more like a visit to Monet’s Bassin aux nymphéas in the Parisian Musée Marmottan: Blossoms are placed on the canvas in thick strokes, merging colours into another. The water lilies are only recognizable, if you stand ba ck from the painting and admire the wholepicture. It is in this way that Polish Republicanism matters, not only forPoland, but also for Europe.