Patchwork Parliaments. An analytical Framework for Researching Representation in Composite States
You are kindly invited to a seminar at which visiting researcher Wiktor Marzec will present his work on the project ‘Patchwork Parliaments. Post-Imperial Field of Power in The New Republic of Poland, Greater Romania and The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes after the First World War’. The seminar will take place in the conference room of the Institute of Contemporary History on Tuesday, 22 September 2026 at 10.00 am.
Patchwork Parliaments. An analytical Framework for Researching Representation in Composite States
The collapse of continental empires after World War I gave rise to new sovereign states in East-Central Europe that aspired to centralized national unity but practically operated as “empires writ small”. Confronted with immense ethnic, religious, and linguistic diversity, these emerging polities underwent a double transformation where forceful nation-building clashed with rapid democratization. This talk introduces the concept of “patchwork parliaments” as a portable analytical framework to examine how newly established deliberative assemblies negotiated these post-imperial transitions. In the Second Republic of Poland, “Greater” Romania, and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes or Czechoslovakia (but also for instance Georgia or Latvia), these assemblies served as critical laboratories of representation, tasked with integrating highly fragmented post-imperial spaces, uniting regions with divergent legal heritages, “phantom borders,” and distinct traditions of political socialization inherited from different empires. However, these parliaments did not merely represent a pre-existing national body politic. Instead, they actively territorialized and “nationed” the state from above and below.
By reconstructing the genealogical trajectory of these institutions—from wartime interim assemblies, to the first general elections, marked with tactical variations in electoral laws, gerrymandering, co-optations of former imperial deputies, and tiered citizenship, the analysis demonstrates how the elites of “state-building” nations selectively managed difference within the chambers. However, regional varieties of the tributary regions and their varied imperial legacies and political landscapes added to the mix and made unified policies hardly possible, even under the aegis of nationalizing goals. Furthermore, entry of “new men”—including local rural intelligentsia and peasants—provoked a sharp clash with old-regime career politicians over parliamentary experience, ideals, and legitimacy. Ultimately, this talk argues that patchwork parliaments reproduced old imperial cleavages while generating new ones, revealing the complex, non-linear trajectory of interwar East-Central European democratization, and the morphing regime of representation in the region, with mass, professional parties emerging at the debris of imperial aristocratic politics.
