Two-fold Position of the State Council Presidium in the 1918 Temporary Constitution of Lithuania

Abstract

Documentary evidence shows that Lithuanian State Council, when considering the grounds for organizing the state management and the first temporary constitutional act of the independent Lithuania of 1918 was influenced by its own unimplemented decision of 11 July 1918 envisaging constitutional monarchy and the personality of a king. The results of this consideration reflected an attempt of the Council to balance between its own recent decisions regarding monarchy and the increasing republican mood. Without taking into consideration the constitutional experience of other states, it made a compromissory and an experimental decision not to institute a new, even though temporary, monarchy, but to vest the executive power to the current Council Presidium without mixing it with another institution under the same name, i.e. the Council which was vested with legislative power.