The Nobility in the Lithuanian national project in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century: the approach of the Catholic clergy

ENIn the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, much like certain other leaders of Central and East European national groups, Lithuanian intelligentsia deliberated on whether the nobility should be involved in the process of forming the modern nation. This was not an easy task, as often most of the nobility considered their mother tongue to be a language other than what the "peasant" national ideologues desired (German in Bohemia, Latvia and Estonia, and Polish in Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania). Thus, when trying to resolve the question of the nobility's involvement in the modern nation, and for other reasons, the ideologues of national movements had to modify their definitions of nationality: the criterion of ethnic origins was "recalled," and economic and social conflicts between the nobility and the peasantry were not specially incited in the public discourse. In other words, these disagreements were "transformed" into adversity between two national, though not two different social, groups. [Extract, p. 99]