Liberalizmas, demokratija ir Lietuvos idėja XIX a. pabaigoje – XX a. pradžioje

LTReikšminiai žodžiai: Antilenkiškumas; Antisemitizmas; Demokratija; Liberalizamas; Liberalizmas; Lietuvių demokratų partija (LDP); 20 amžius; Lietuvos idėja; Moderni lietuvių tauta; Nacionalizmas; Tauta; Ant-Semitism; Anti-Polish; Democracy; Idea of Lithuania; Liberalism; Lithuanian Democratic Party; Lithuanian XX c. history; Modern Lithuanian nation; Nation; Nationalism.

ENThe article discusses how much and in what way it is possible to speak about liberalism in Lithuania at the turn of the twentieth century. On the basis of one of the latest works about the situation of liberalism in Poland during the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century and on the assertion of Maciej Janowski that so-called Polish liberalism existed at the turn of the century, it ascertains whether a Lithuanian version of liberalism existed at the same time. On the basis of an analysis of the literature and sources, it has been established that Lithuanian liberalism existed in Lithuania in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as one of the types of Central Eastern European liberalism. Its contact with liberal nationalism was definitely closer than was its Polish counterpart. Lithuanian liberalism had no such tradition of liberal thought, as Polish liberalism bad, having been formed and appeared when classical liberalism all around Europe had survived a crisis when this latter had already entered a stage of synthesis with nationalism. Thus the Lithuanian liberals at the beginning of the twentieth century created a party called not liberal but democrat, which is also a feature characteristic to Central Eastern European liberalism. All around Europe as well as in this region, an erosion of the liberal name had occurred while the liberals themselves were already liberated from their own scepticism in respect to democracy. All around Europe the political factions connected with the liberal tradition were being given new names: progressives, democrats, radicals, and reformers. Nationality for Lithuanian liberals was not a condition or effect-manifestation of modernisation. Modernisation was considered a principle condition for the development of a nation. This is an essential difference between Lithuanian and Polish liberalism.The article explains the previous expressions of anti-Semitism and anti-Polish sentiment in the Lithuanian liberal press as one of the signs of anti-liberalism, which, with the strengthening of a type of intolerant nationalism, was characteristic of Europe and especially Central Eastern Europe in the last decade of the nineteenth century. It is stated that Lithuanian liberalism, like that in the other regions of Central Eastern Europe, under conditions of captivity and the rapid establishment of the ideologies of socialism and nationalism, had no prospective of strengthening as a political current and created no culture of political liberalism. The idea of national freedom entered at the turn of the century into the ideological attitudes of Lithuania's liberals and fated the creation after 1905 of a political faction with a nationalistic deviation (national democrats). Due to an orientation towards a joint national-social conception of democracy, manifestations of a socialistic tendency in the 1906-1915 Lithuanian liberal programme and a political faction promoting ideas of popular socialism both emerged. [From the publication]