Vorstellungen politischer Ordnung in Litauen: Entwicklungen und Diskussionen seit dem nationalen Erwachen (im frühen 19. Jh.)

ENThis study, which examines the relationship between everyday ideas of political order and the established democratic order in Lithuania, has been designed to further the understanding of the current crisis of democracy in Eastern Europe. The examination’s starting point is the eruption of the modem Lithuanian nation into existence during the late 19th century. This was a community brought to life via a narrative and fed on the existential musings of young peasant men, who climbed the social ladder through education, only to be met with rejection from the higher rungs due to their mother tongue and low birth. They responded to this rejection with a vision of a community, in which they embedded an idealized construction of the Lithuanian past and in which they would have appropriate standing. Their imagined community, in contrast to the society of the time, was not differentiated by class and social status, but rather shaped on the basis of a unifying language and national consciousness. The national narrative conceived at that time constitutes, to this day, the sacred core of Lithuanian society, illuminating it from within. The myth, on which the nation is founded, is characterized by, amongst other things, the following elements: the birth of the nation from a construed past, the idea that the nation’s spirit and language form the foundation of its continued existence, the anchoring of national morality in aesthetics, the vision of unifying the nation in a national consciousness, and finally by the striving for national liberty, free from foreign influence, in order to assert a national authenticity, which is equated in the myth with the return of a golden age for the Lithuanian nation.These elements have proven to be momentous for the concept of the nation as a political community: by detaching the national existence and its morality from experienced reality, both came under the influence of unrealistic dreams, which were hardly compatible with the everyday lived experience. In this respect the nation, which was depicted as a static community, stood in constant conflict with the ever-changing world. Whilst the fathers of the nation and the national liberation movement strove for national unity in the struggle against political and cultural suppression and for national liberation itself, they drew strength from the difference between the idealized and the experienced World. Such a strength came close to an apocalyptic activism in order to secure national existence in and through self-determination. As national self-determination was reached, the contra-present feature of the nation turned out to be a burden, as the concept of the nation as a spiritually and morally never-changing unit impeded political development and motivated the nationalist forces to regularly attempt to fit the social reality to the national dreams, thus suppressing aspects of human life. The concept of the nation as an internally homogeneous unit hampered the formation and legitimation of societal structures necessary for a stable political order. The detachment of morality from everyday experience and the ideational combination of morality with authentic existence hindered the political differentiation of society, as deviating attitudes were seen as an expression of a-national tendencies. This nation, a myth which had borne its fruit, found its political expression in the authoritarian rule of Smetona in the inter-war years.In this political order Smetona assumed, as "people's leader" (tautos vadas), the role of the medieval grand dukes, that of a sole head for the Lithuanian Nation, a nation still in itself mostly homogeneous. Here in the political authoritarianism of interwar Lithuania, for the first and for now only time, a political order derived directly from the national myth was to be found. In limiting the function of political power to the political and spiritual head of the nation, Smetona, the nation could continue to be thought of from within as well as without as an intrinsically undifferentiated unit. Before a Lithuanian version of a Christian democracy could be formed through clashes with the authoritarian order, the nation lost its independence to the Soviet Union. This loss of sovereignty was followed by 50 years of dependency to totalitarian regimes. Both the Soviet empire and National Socialist Germany focused on the destruction of the existing social fabric and on the preservation of their power, which they achieved by the preferential treatment of specific members of society over others. In the case of National Socialist rule, the destruction of society resulted in the almost complete murder of the Lithuanian Jewry, who in many instances were shot by Lithuanians on German orders. In the case of the Soviet empire, the destruction of society included most notably the deportation of the mainstays of interwar Lithuania - regardless of their national affiliation, the displacement of large parts of the Polish minority from the territory of the Soviet Union, the corrosion of social structures through the collectivization of villages, industrialization and urbanization, and by the repressive endeavor to gain control over all spheres of human existence.