"Let all the flowers bloom”: the concepts of toleranction, its dilemmas, Lithuanian example

The purpose of this paper is to analyze and interpret tolerance practices in historical and contemporary Lithuania, drawing more consistently on the concepts and conceptions of tolerance and insights from current theoretical debates on tolerance. Moreover, we intend to actualize the re-flections on the variants of tolerance in the old Lithuania and especially in the Lithuanian democracy and partly in Lithuanian historiography of the beginning of the 21st century. It is crucial to under-stand the status of tolerance in present-day Lithuania, how it works in late modernity, with special reference to the situation of ethnic minorities.The article notes that the biggest problem we face today is that tolerance is not enough to overcome our moral problems. In particular, pervasive tolerance as a joyful acceptance of differences and open-ness to everything is not enough. In the author’s opinion, citizenship of juristic state, like tolerance, is not a sufficient basis for generality. We have to talk about true integration of society, without identi-fying it in rhetoric with assimilation or merely „minority integration”, as is still the case in Lithuanian public space and often in the works of historians. It means being more aware that you are part of the same world, of a particular community with common affinities, a common history