15-16th of June 2026, Warsaw

Second Conference on Parliamentary Junctures in Continental Europe.

Organizers: Wiktor Marzec, Naum Trajanovski, Bartosz Dziewanowski-Stefańczyk, Piotr Kuligowski

The years 1905-1908 brought about shockwaves that challenged the imperial order in Central and Eastern Europe. Among possible solutions to the new political dislocation were the formation of representative bodies for entire imperial realms and the extension of suffrage for elections to existing parliaments. The former path was followed by the Russian and Ottoman Empires, which undertook experiments with political representation by forming new imperial parliaments, while the Austrian Reichsrat pursued the latter and became elected by universal male suffrage. The outbreak of the First World War once again shook polities in the region, and the course of military action gradually triggered challenging claims to national representation. In the fall of the year 1918, there was much optimism in Central and Eastern Europe, despite the minor apocalypse of the First World War and ongoing conflicts that caused war to linger over the region for at least three more years.

After the First World War, European continental empires (Russian, Habsburg, Ottoman and to a lesser extent German) were replaced by smaller state units. Initially, the process spawned a number of spontaneously created semi-statehoods with their own interim assemblies. The post-Versailles order redesigned this political mosaic. A number of new states emerged through burgeoning projects of national self-assertion, democracy and social reform.

The former empires, characterized by high levels of ethnic, linguistic and religious diversity, had possessed hybrid state designs. In contrast, the new states were much more compact and aspired to the unitary sovereignty of a centralized nation-state. But, in fact, they were rather “empires writ small,” which tried to nationalize minorities rather than manage their diversity, and to reduce the state’s ethnic heterogeneity by assimilation, expulsion or other limitations placed on the influence of the “non-titular” groups. Their constituent regions had mostly modernized under different imperial states. Moreover, the former empires had themselves been marred by multiple legal regimes and combined political designs. The earlier core “nation-states” (such as Romania and Serbia) had themselves been composite states marked by high internal diversity even prior to their expansion. In these circumstances, the elites of the “titular” groups often tried to establish non-representative, ethnic democracies.

The birth of Eastern European states brought about a double transformation when forceful nation-building coincided with far-reaching democratization. The revolutionary shockwaves from 1905-1908 and the collapse of imperial sovereignties occurring in 1917-1918 spurred on local forms of representation, which raised bold claims of social change and had to come to grips with social unrest. Some of these representative bodies were intended to protect regionalist interest, boost federalist designs or foster workers’ self-management. Others were formed primarily to prevent “anarchy” and transfer power back to the re-consolidated state as soon as possible. All of them ultimately dissolved into the new unitary states. Nonetheless, these new or reconstructed states emerged in the age of the pan-European downfall of monarchies, parliamentarization, extension of welfare provisions and land redistribution. All these peculiarities came together in emerging deliberative assemblies where various types of elites and regional actors tried to find their place within the new state, making them highly contested patchwork parliaments. They were, however, often embalmed with the status of national assemblies, playing a crucial role in symbolically unifying new or reconstituted states and indeed facilitated negotiation as imperfect but actually existing legislatives up to the later authoritarian take-overs.

The aim of the proposed workshop is an analytically focused but regionally diversified discussion of the shifting nexus of territory and representation that accompanied the transformation in Central and Eastern Europe. We invite speakers to reflect on the following topics (a non-exclusive list):

Design of imperial parliaments
Forms and functions of interim representative assemblies from 1917-1920
Post-Versailles parliaments, their “patchwork” nature and legal and ethnocultural diversity
Alternative forms of sovereignty and their representative practices (workers’ councils, peasant “republics”)
Violence and parliaments (large-scale street riots addressing parliaments)
Regionalism, autonomy, federalism, i.e. alternative visions of the territory/sovereignty nexus
Imperial legacies in parliaments
Parliamentary debates and cultures
Biographies of parliamentary elites
Social differentiation within the assemblies
Interactions between representative bodies (state-to-state) and between parliaments and international institutions (League of Nations, ILO, IPU, agents of economic re-integration, etc.)

Submission deadline: January 15th, 2026

Please send the title, abstract (up to 300 words), and a short CV (1-2 pages) to parljunctures@mail.com

Selection results: early February 2026

Practicalities: The language of the conference will be English. The conference organizer will provide accommodation to all participants. If necessary, travel expenses may be covered up to 300 EUR (please indicate in your submission if you need support; if possible, please use your own institutional resources). Selected papers may be published in the form of a special issue of a field-specific journal (in English). Participants are expected to circulate drafts of their papers at least two weeks before the workshop.

Organizing Institutions:

The Robert Zajonc Institute For Social Studies, University of Warsaw

German Historical Institute, Warsaw

Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw