Modern Lithuania - was there an alternative to the model of the nation-state?

The present article seeks to explain whether the programme of the Lithuanian national movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century included an alternative to the model of the nation-state, as has often been argued in the Lithuanian literature on the subject. Research reveals that the Lithuanian national movement, like a majority of ethnic nationalisms in Central and Eastern Europe, was oriented towards the model of nation state. Lithuanian right-wing activists maintained that only after the liberation from the infl uence of Poles it would be possible for them to exist as an independent nation, and then as a Lithuanian state. Talks between Polish, Lithuanian, Belarusian, and Jewish democrats over the restitution of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania on democratic principles, which began already in 1905, were still held during the Great War, until the turn of 1916. Proclamations issued at that time for the restitution of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania should not, however, be overestimated, as they were anonymous, and most probably their text was not agreed with any political parties. In addition, they were very general in their terms, which made it possible for each national group to interpret them in various ways. In their later negotiations, the representatives of the Lithuanians and Belarusians discussed the question of confederation of two ethnic territories: of Lithuania and of Belarus, but after the February Revolution in Russia in 1917, they found themselves in deadlock. This means that for Lithuanian intellectuals, even those on the left, their political ideal was a nation-state