Learning for a civil society in Poland : illustrated by the example of local communities

In diesem Beitrag beschäftige ich mich mit drei zentralen Aspekten: Der erste ist eine Darlegung der politischen Rahmenbedingungen für die Gestaltung einer Zivilgesellschaft in Polen, der zweite soll den Lernprozess veranschaulichen, der durch die Förderung von lokalen Bürgergemeinschaften im Rahmen einer Kommunalverwaltungsreform angestoßen wird, und der dritte Aspekt veranschaulicht diese Entwicklung schließlich am Beispiel der Einführung eines „Bürgerbudgets“, das die Partizipation und das zivilgesellschaftliche Engagement der Bürger*innen auf kommunaler Ebene befördert. Ziel des Beitrags ist eine Analyse und Diskussion des komplexen Zusammenspiels der unterschiedlichen Organisationsformen "Bürgergemeinschaft" und "Kommunalverwaltung" sowie der damit verbundenen Lernherausforderungen für die Gestaltung einer Zivilgesellschaft in Polen

Whose Poland is it to be? PiS and the struggle between monism and pluralism

Since 2015, the Law and Justice (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, PiS) governments in Poland have engineered a revolt against the post-1989 'liberal consensus' and a shift towards a regime rooted in executive aggrandisement, populism and nativism. In this article, we contextualise this shift in terms of a persistent ‘metapolitical’ dispute over the legitimacy of political actors and the contestability of certain areas of policy. PiS claims to be reintroducing pluralism to a Polish politics dominated by monistic technocratic liberalism. In response, the party has implemented a series of changes entrenching an even more exclusionist form of monism. Whilst economic policies have empowered social groups that felt excluded from post-1989 reforms, nativist cultural policies and colonisation of the political-institutional infrastructure have militated against the pluralist understanding of politics as structured disagreement. We conclude that Polish politics remains dominated not by disagreements over policy, but by the metapolitical question of who has the right to govern Poland

History trumps government unpopularity: the June 2003 Polish EU accession referendum

This analysis explains why Poles voted overwhelmingly to join the EU and how the 50% turnout requirement was achieved fairly easily. It argues that most Poles appeared to accept the historical significance of the referendum and de-coupled the issue of EU membership from that of confidence in an extremely unpopular government. This occurred because most key political and social actors, including the opposition parties, called for a Yes vote, while, at the same time, a vigorous campaign by pro-EU civic organisations presented a ‘non-political’ face to the campaign. Although the No camp made tactical errors and had difficulties staying focused on its main arguments, lack of both access to the public media and a convincing or attractive alternative made it extremely difficult for them to mount an effective campaign. At the same time, the stability of the opinion polls in the years leading up to the referendum suggested that most Poles had already made their minds up about the issue well in advance. In spite of the low levels of trust in political parties, partisan cues appeared to be a better predictor of referendum voting behaviour than socio-economic and demographic factors