Vilnius Conference

The Vilnius Conference or Vilnius National Conference (Lithuanian: Vilniaus konferencija) met between September 18, 1917 and September 22, 1917, and began the process of establishing a Lithuanian state based on ethnic identity and language that would be independent of the Russian Empire, Poland, and the German Empire. It elected a twenty-member Council of Lithuania that was entrusted with the mission of declaring and re-establishing an independent Lithuania. The Conference, hoping to express the will of the Lithuanian people, gave legal authority to the Council and its decisions. While the Conference laid the basic guiding principles of Lithuanian independence, it deferred any matters of political structure of the future Lithuania to the Constituent Assembly, which would later be elected in a democratic manner.

Lithuania existed as an independent state from the beginning of the 13th century until 1569, when it entered into a union with Poland, forming the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Commonwealth ceased to exist after the Partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the late 18th century. Most of the Lithuanian territory was incorporated into the Russian Empire. A Lithuanian independence movement arose during the 19th century, based on concepts of national self-determination that were formalized in Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points speech in January 1918.

During the course of World War I, the German Army invaded Russia and soon entered the territory which comprised Lithuania. In 1915, the Germans assumed control and organized a military administration known as Ober Ost (short for der Oberbefehlshaber der gesamten deutschen Streitkräfte im Osten: "supreme command of all German forces in the East"). At first the Germans simply exploited Lithuania for the benefit of their war effort. As the war progressed, it became evident that the two front war that Germany was engaged in would necessitate a compromise peace with the Russian Empire. This necessitated a re-thinking of strategies concerning the occupied territories in the east. An openly pursued goal of annexation gave way to a more guarded policy after Germany perceived that a public relations backlash might occur: the Central Powers realized that the Allies could use such territorial expansion in their propaganda. Lengthy debates between German military leaders (who favored open annexation) and the civilian administration (which leaned towards a more subtle strategy) resulted in a resolution, passed by the Reichstag on July 19, 1917, called the Resolution of Peace. It declared that the military administration governing occupied territories would grant some semblance of autonomy to their populations. The plan was to form a network of formally independent states that would in fact be completely dependent on Germany, the so-called Mitteleuropa.

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