On 16-17 April 2015, Professor Richard BUTTERWICK-PAWLIKOWSKI, Chairholder of the EP Geremek Chair of European Civilization at the Natolin (Warsaw) campus of the College of Europe, participated in a conference organized by the Centre for Polish-Russian Dialogue and Understanding on the theme of "For our land, not yours: political thought and the nation-making process in the Eastern and Central European region".
The conference was held in the Primate’s Palace in Warsaw and brought together leading historians and political scientists from Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and the United Kingdom. The papers delivered and discussed at the conference (in Polish and Russian) covered a period from the Middle Ages to the first half of the twentieth century.
Professor BUTTERWICK-PAWLIKOWSKI’s own paper was titled "Koncepcja narodu w polskim dyskursie końca XVIII wieku" [The concept of the nation in Polish discourse at the end of the eighteenth century]. He conducted a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the discourse of the "nation" in the Polish Constitution of 3 May 1791 and related statutes to show how the "Polish nation" was expanded from an exclusively political concept reserved for citizen-nobles to a far more flexible one which could encompass the entire population of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.