Stasys Šalkauskis and the politics of Lithuanian national identity during the post-imperial transition, 1916–1919

The paper focuses on Stasys Šalkauskis (1886–1941) to examine the rhetorical strategies national activists used to legitimize the Lithuanian national movement’s claims in the eyes of Western audiences during the post-imperial transition from 1916 to 1919. It argues that the war and imperial collapse that followed provide a crucial yet overlooked context for the writing of Šalkauskis’s On the Boundary of Two Worlds (1919), a philosophical treatise that proposed an interpretation of Lithuanian national identity. Šalkauskis reacted against various national and geopolitical projects, primarily the Polish national movement and German projections for the region’s future, which contradicted the aims of the Lithuanian national movement. His philosophical vision, despite its emphasis on “cultural synthesis,” can be interpreted as a rejection of foreign domination over Lithuanian political life. The book was published in the spring of 1919, and the Lithuanian government used it as part of a larger propaganda campaign to support its claim to national self-determination during the Paris Peace Conference. Šalkauskis presented the Lithuanians as a “democratic” nation whose state could play an important role in establishing a lasting European peace, which implied that the aims of the Lithuanian national movement aligned with Woodrow Wilson’s vision of the post-war order.