PLC / Poland-Lithuania

>invading Russia and occupying Moscow
So? They were eventually chased out just like the french and the germans

>the germans
What.

If nothing else, they were pretty fucking
A E S T H E T I C

it was quite literally the United States of the time period. The founding fathers of the US studied its history to learn from its mistakes and successes when forming the republic and read many Polish and Lithuanian tracts on politics. Its influence on the US is very much overlooked, and that's a sad thing.

People tend to shit on its form of government but in reality it was a perfectly functional country with a great degree of individual liberty for the time period which had the misfortune befall it to border Russia and Prussia. Fun fact: one of the factors which pushed Catherine the Great to support partition was the flow of serfs in Russia escaping to the Commonwealth.

>Its influence on the US is very much overlooked
>One of Thomas Jefferson's closest friends was a Polish noble who was a brilliant military engineer and decent politician
>Was the guy who made West Point pretty close to impregnable during the Revolutionary war
>Never lost a battle against the Russians
>Literally the only reason his name is remembered is because a bridge was named after him in NY
The fact that Kościuszko isn't considered a hero in America is a damn shame

He is, I usually sit next to his statue in Boston Common.

There's a county in my state named after him. The County Seat is named Warsaw. Full of Poles.

>Polish
>Lithuanian
>Commonwealth

Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth is a great example why democracy is a failure

What were the main issues with the political system? The liberum veto? Foreign influences? Too little power with the king?
What would be some circumstances where that political system could succeed?

>What were the main issues with the political system?
Russia and Prussia

>The liberum veto?
this was mostly a meme, it was pretty much gone from the Sejm by the time the partitions occurred for many decades. The nobles had already found a way to convene Sejms in which it could not be used and that had become the standard for legislative sessions by the 1790s.

>Foreign influences?
this is the only real reason why decline and partition occurred. The PLC was pretty much a Russian satellite state from 1717 to its demise and it could do very little to reform itself without the Russian armies which were literally stationed IN the country marching in and putting a stop to it.

>What would be some circumstances where that political system could succeed?
literally just not being next to Russia and Prussia and having natural borders. That's pretty much it.

The fundamental problem that made its survival and reform untenable was the lack of military parity with neighbours once massive conscript armies became possible and were implemented by each of said neighbours. The Commonwealth never instituted conscription and its military remained volunteer/professional. After all, whatever you might hear about the oppression of commoners in the Commonwealth, it's the partitioning powers who had border patrols tasked with stopping their subjects from fleeing to the Commonwealth (to avoid conscription), not the other way around.

The taxation rate was also much lower than in neighbouring countries so they couldn't really fund a massive army anyway.

You could say the Polish-Lithuanian state was too liberal and decentralised, or simply not tyrannical enough to survive in the increasingly centralised and absolutist Europe of the 18th century.

Nobles were too strong, preventing economic progress and keeping the central state weak. Frankly, the union was a mistake, the Poles added nothing to Lithuanian achievements and merely fucked things up.

>the Poles added nothing to Lithuanian achievements and merely fucked things up
weren't the Lithuanian nobles trying to polonise though? I thought Poland was the more influential and important of the two.

It was. That's just revisionist propaganda of butthurt Samogitians.