Who’s the sovereign? Legitimating constitutional authoritarianism in interwar Poland

Abstract This article is focused on uncovering how authoritarian legal scholars in interwar Poland dealt with the issue of the ‘sovereign’. In most democratic constitutions, the ‘people’ are said to be sovereign. In a monarchy, the monarch is the sovereign. However, in an authoritarian system, the source of power can be much more vague. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Polish legal scholars and politicians began designing a constitution that would solidify power gained after a 1926 coup d’etat. The ultimate result was a constitution ratified in April 1935 using strong-arm tactics. I argue that the 1935 constitution’s main authors used a unique combination of neo-monarchism and ‘social solidarism’ to justify a legal revolution. The first replaced democratic sovereignty with monarchism, embodied in a president who metaphysically represented the Polish nation. The other justified a socio-political system based on the principle that unity of the whole was more important than individual freedom. Thus they arrived at an authoritarianism that was both legal and ‘legitimate’. At the end of the article, I show the legacies of this thinking in the post-World War II communist era. Stalinist legal scholars in Poland used precisely the same language from the 1930s to justify the introduction of a new constitution in 1952.