"WHEN THE Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth was dismembered by the Habsburg Empire, Prussia and Russia in 1795, it was in part because its parliament, the Sejm, had spent most of a century getting very little done. A 17th-century rule known as liberum veto allowed any individual delegate to end a parliamentary session and scuttle all the bills it had passed with a simple cry of "Nie pozwalam!" (I do not allow it). It was not a recipe for progress.
Politicians elsewhere took note of Poland's example. When John C. Calhoun, a senator from South Carolina, was pushing the case for his home state to have the freedom to nullify federal laws that might grant African-Americans rights, he held up Poland's liberum veto as an example to follow. Few others took the same lesson. When in 1787 Alexander Hamilton wrote that the need for supermajorities in America's Articles of Confederation put Congress in the position of a "Polish diet, where a single VOTE has been sufficient to put a stop to all their movements," he was not commending the situation. "Polish parliament" is still used in Dutch, German and Norwegian to refer to an anarchic or pointless gathering.
Though the Sejm was an extreme case, supermajority requirements do make legislative change harder. Their proponents claim this can protect vulnerable minorities against the tyranny of the majority, but history suggests it generally serves to empower well-represented minorities against the wishes of majorities that are in no way tyrannical. Most democracies see a need to tilt the scales against change only in special cases, prime among them constitutional amendments. In various bicameral legislatures, including those of America, Germany and India, such changes require a two-thirds majority in both houses. Some countries impose further barriers to constitutional change, requiring a majority in a popular referendum (Japan) or ratification by three-quarters of the states (America). In Italy an amendment which has failed to win by the required margin in parliament can be put to the people instead. This happened to reforms championed by then prime minister Matteo Renzi in 2016. He lost the referendum and resigned." [1]
Thus, due to the first important supermajority requirement in the history of Lithuania, we lost Lithuanian statehood for a long time. We did not learn. Now and again, in order to preserve the citizenship of Lithuania and at the same time our statehood, with the nation scattering around the world, in order to survive this difficult time, we must gather a supermajority of voters. Most of us have already voted for dual citizenship for Lithuanians in NATO countries. Demand for a supermajority leads to a disaster - the will of our majority is being ignored, a decision is not being made, the nation is being divided, the state is being weakened again. In the end, we will lose our statehood for the second time. This time may be the last, because there will be no one to regain statehood. Ukrainians and Russians, who will make up the majority in Lithuania at the time, will not really care about our statehood. Who needs it if we Lithuanians do not care about Lithuanian statehood.
1. "Less than overwhelming; The use of supermajorities elsewhere." The Economist, 13 Mar. 2021, p. 22(US).
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