Planting Parliaments in Eurasia, 1850–1950

Abstract

Parliaments are often seen as Western European and North American institutions and their establishment in other parts of the world as a derivative and mostly defective process. This book challenges such Eurocentric visions by retracing the evolution of modern institutions of collective decision-making in Eurasia. Breaching the divide between different area studies, the book provides nine case studies covering the area between the eastern edge of Asia and Eastern Europe, including the former Russian, Ottoman, Qing, and Japanese Empires as well as their successor states. In particular, it explores the appeals to concepts of parliamentarism, deliberative decision-making, and constitutionalism; historical practices related to parliamentarism; and political mythologies across Eurasia. It focuses on the historical and "reestablished" institutions of decision-making, which consciously hark back to indigenous traditions and adapt them to the changing circumstances in imperial and postimperial contexts. Thereby, the book explains how representative institutions were needed for the establishment of modernized empires or postimperial states but at the same time offered a connection to the past.

Parliament and Revolution: Poland, Finland, and the End of Empire in the Early Twentieth Century

“…21 The Duma was not a genuine legislative assembly and satisfied neither the constitutional visionaries nor the population at large. 22 However, it did serve to improve imperial rule by mediating interest from various social and ethnic groups no longer effectively governable by the sovereign monarch. 23 Its internal organization was similarly heterogenous, with most members building political blocks around their ethnicities.…”