Nation as a constitutional concept

Abstract

In the study entitled “Nation as a constitutional concept” there are presented the ways of adapting the term “nation” for the legal positioning of people as a collective in the Polish constitutional acts, beginning with the first Polish Constitution of 1791, to the Republic of Poland’s amended Constitution of 1997. There are analyzed the reasons of substituting the term “nation” in favour of other expressions in the constitutional act of 1935 and the reasons of the excessive use of the national rhetoric in the legal standards in the 1952 Constitution of People’s Republic of Poland. Including the traditional meaning of the term “nation” for Poles and transformations of United Europe’s countries character, in the article there are analyzed the relations between the term “nation”, understood as citizens overall, and the definition of “society” and “civil society” including the citizens, residents of the state, independently of the citizen status.