HISTORY is a realm of cruel ironies.Not long after the idea of republicanism reached full maturity in the First Polish Republic, there was a collapse, and our homeland disappeared from the world map.The Government Act of May 3, 1791, was ratified in a "dying moment that has restored us to ourselves," as we read in the Preamble to the Constitution. In the turbulent time of the partitions, our ancestors faced the question of their identity. The answer they gave has remained relevant for 230 years. In the 21st century, it still defines who we are.We are neither the East of the West nor the West of the East. Poland lies at the heart of Europe. We don't belong to either the imaginary Eastern Europe of the French philosophers or to the Mitteleuropa of the German ministers. We have our own identity that has been evolving for over a thousand years. The authors of the Constitution of May 3 — our own founding fathers — knew this when they combined the original political thought of the Enlightenment with traditions firmly rooted in our political culture for several hundred years.
Island of freedomDemocracy is a system of free people, and its history in Poland dates back to the 15th century. As England had its Magna Carta (1215) and the Habeas Corpus Act (1679), Poland had the Neminem captivabimus law (1433). These acts granted freedoms that were unheard of anywhere else at the time. Poland is not a "young democracy" but one of the oldest democracies in modern Europe — it is an older sister, not a daughter, of other European democracies. The First Polish Republic revived the republican traditions born in ancient Rome. On May 3, 1791, Poland became the cradle of constitutionalism in continental Europe. At the end of the 18th century, it was an island of freedom surrounded by a sea of absolutism. The rough waves of this ideology culminated in the 20th-century totalitarianisms that took a bloody toll. But our political culture has always been estranged from both totalitarianism and absolutism.If the Polish nation was born at our baptism, it became one in the modern sense on May 3, 1791. The Constitution adopted on that day is not only a legal act and a historical document but also proof of our identity — an identity based on three foundations: law, freedom and Christianity. It is to these values that we wish to subordinate our collective life today and tomorrow.The Constitution of May 3 not only provided the basis for the later act of independence but also for the Solidarity movement. A Pole is, above all, a free human being. Even when our ancestors lost their outer liberty, their inner freedom remained. This was true under the Partitions and later when the ominous shadow of the Iron Curtain fell on our homeland. A sense of our identity as Poles, and therefore also as Europeans, meant that the concept of homo sovieticus has always been alien to the overwhelming majority of Polish people.
Continue reading with one of these options:
Ad-free access
P 80 per month
(billed annually at P 960)
- Unlimited ad-free access to website articles
- Limited offer: Subscribe today and get digital edition access for free (accessible with up to 3 devices)