Dedicated to the centenary of the Constitution of the State of Lithuania

The 1922 Constitution of the State of Lithuania

The interwar period for the young state of Lithuania that declared its independence on 16 February 1918 was a time of trials and upheavals. And particularly eventful was the year 1922, when Lithuania adopted its Law on Land Reform, opened the University of Lithuania and introduced its first national currency, the litas. The adoption of the Constitution of Lithuania, which became a viable marker of the country’s statehood, was also among its historic achievements.

The creation of constitutional acts in the interwar period was a challenging process, since as many as six versions of the Constitution were adopted during that period. And yet, like the obverse and reverse of a Lithuanian litas coin, each Constitution represented a different level of maturity and varying success. The first fundamental laws of the Provisional Constitution of the State of Lithuania, adopted by the Council of State on 2 November 1918, were modest in form and content - they consisted of a Preamble and six chapters (29 articles in total), yet they offered hope for sustaining the process of building the state. However, the threats to the state’s existence and the need to reconcile the mechanism of power quickly led to a new order for changes in the constitutional letter. On 4 April 1919, the Lithuanian Council of the State adopted the Fundamental Laws of the Provisional Constitution of the State of Lithuania, consisting of a Preamble and eight chapters, and retaining almost two-thirds of the provisions of the previous version. Perhaps the most important change in the revised version of the constitutional act was the establishment of the president as a one-person state authority. It is debatable whether the 1918 and 1919 Fundamental Laws were different to any significant extent; rather they were only two versions of the same Provisional Constitution of the State of Lithuania.

The Constituent Seimas (the Parliament), which commenced its activities on 15 May 1920, could hardly operate within the confines of the Fundamental Laws of 1919, which led to violation of a considerable number of the Fundament Laws’ provisions and therefore, without much hesitation, the Seimas adopted the last Provisional Constitution on 2 June 1920. This document was not dissimilar in content and form to the previous constitutional acts, consisted of seven chapters and a total of 18 articles. That version of the Constitution completed the cycle of provisional constitutions of varying quality offering the country a fragile constitutional framework.

Even before the Constituent Seimas met, public discussions had begun regarding a permanent constitution that would establish a democratic parliamentary republic with broad parliamentary powers. The actual work of drafting the Constitution began with the establishment, by the will of the Constituent Seimas, of the Constitutional Commission which worked on this great endeavour for more than a year and a half. In February 1922, the Constitutional Commission submitted a draft Constitution to the Presidium of the Constituent Seimas (at the same time the Commission itself continued working though taking into account the suggestions and comments received). Following lengthy debates (and not without some harsh rhetoric), the Constituent Seimas decided to adopt the new Constitution on 1 August 1922 (with 59 votes in favour and the People’s Farmers and Social Democrats abstaining). It was published in the government gazette Vyriausybės Žinios on 6 August 1922. Not many of the 2 million citizens knew the provisions of the new piece of legislation, but it still became the basic law of the land for at least the next six years.