On 16 October 2017, Professor Richard BUTTERWICK-PAWLIKOWSKI, Chairholder of the European Civilization Chair at the Natolin campus of the College of Europe, delivered a lecture at the History Institute of the University of Innsbruck entitled: "How Josephinist was Catholic Enlightenment in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth". He explored the ways in which similar Enlightenment tendencies could affect the Catholic Church in conditions of absolutism (in the Habsburg Monarchy) and republicanism (in the Commonwealth). The following day he gave a talk to students and staff of the University of Innsbruck about the College of Europe and the European University Institute.
Between 11 and 14 October 2017, Professor BUTTERWICK-PAWLIKOWSKI participated in the third quinquennial Congress of International Researchers of Polish History at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow. He contributed a paper entitled "Discourses of Tolerance and Intolerance at the Four Years’ Sejm (1788-1792)" and was a panelist in the concluding discussion on why such a large state in the middle of Europe fell at the end of the eighteenth century. He emphasized that the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was deliberately destroyed by its neighbours – Russia, Prussia and Austria – because it was fast recovering from a period of crisis and had shown its enormous potential. This is, he argued, a question which can and should be researched using the methods of the historian of diplomacy and politics.