The policy of the Polish authorities towards national and ethnic minorities after 1989

The aim of this article is to analyse the Polish authorities’ policy towards national and ethnic minorities after 1989, after the collapse of real socialism in Poland. The author gives an overview of the historical and sociopolitical situation of these minorities in Poland. The main point of consideration is the position and functioning of national and ethnic minorities on the basis of law, their political activity in parliamentary and local elections, as well as the attitude of leading Polish political parties towards the issues of national and ethnic minorities. National and ethnic minorities are, by definition, less numerous than the rest of the Polish population, but remain Polish citizens and at the same time are aware of their historical community. The article uses the following methods: descriptive and institutional-legal.

Prawa podstawowe w systemie konstytucyjnym Niemieckiej Republiki Demokratycznej

The German Democratic Republic, as a state of real socialism, guaranteed its citizens, in addition to classical individual fundamental rights, also collective rights. Their use was made conditional, depending on the fulfilment of obligations specified in the Constitution. In the GDR, there were no independent bodies and mechanisms to protect the rights of citizens. Constitutional system of fundamental rights was primarily serving the good of the community and the development of a modern socialist state.

The Anthropocene and ecological awareness in Poland: The post-socialist view

Dynamic and unrestrained socio-economic development is upsetting the balance of nature’s mechanisms, causing a climate stalemate, or even climate destabilisation. After the Second World War a new political system – real socialism – was enforced on Poland. It brought about changes of a social, cultural, economic and environmental nature. Its immanent feature was the application of top-down decisions that did not take into account environmental components. There was also little ecological awareness within Polish society at that time. The transformations of the 1990s resulted not only in the liberalisation of the Polish economy, but also in the permeation of new trends oriented towards pro-environmental activities. The aim of the article is to find an answer to the question: How is ecological awareness currently shaped in the context of Anthropocene in Poland during the transition from a socialist economy to a capitalist economic system?

On the Possibility of Acquisitive Prescription by the State of Real Properties Unlawfully Seized under the Provisions of the 1944 Agrarian Reform Decree

<p>The subject of this paper are those factual states that occurred on the basis of the agrarian reform decree and concerned the unlawful seizure by the State of palace-park complexes. It was only after the collapse of real socialism in 1989 that the owners or their legal successors obtained an annulment of the decision to seize the property. However, this was, and is, only the beginning of the struggle, as the State Treasury or its legal successors are claiming before the common courts the acquisitive prescription of the property being the subject to the recovery claim. The divergence of at least 20 years in jurisprudence as to the date of commencement of the period required for acquisitive prescription (1980–1991) is an undesirable phenomenon, requiring the adoption of a coherent approach of the courts. Consequently, the authors of this text represent the view that the period of validity of both the Agrarian Reform Decree and the subsequent legal acts, with particular emphasis on the period of validity of the Decree of 1945 (Journal of Laws no. 28, item 321) and then Article 9 (16) of the Act of 1958 excluded the course of the acquisitive prescription in favour of the State Treasury of the agricultural and forestry properties unlawfully seized by the State. This period lasted until 31 December 1991, i.e. until the final date when Article 9 (16) was in force.</p>

Shortageflation 3.0. Gospodarka wojenna – państwowy socjalizm – kryzys pandemiczny

The crisis caused by the pandemic has induced governments and central banks to undertake non-orthodox actions aimed at the protection of people’s living standards and the maintenance of production and service activities of enterprises. The policy of the aggressive rise in money supply has resulted in a considerable increase in budget deficits and foreign debts. In this context, it is important to seek an answer to the question how this can accelerate inflationary processes and to formulate proper suggestions addressed to economic policy. In fact, inflation now is higher than the official price indices because it is partly dampened. The rise in the general price level does not reflect fully the actual intensity of inflation. We have to do with a price and resource inflation, called shortageflation. Methodologically, it is interesting to compare this contemporary phenomenon (3.0) with inflation suppression in a war economy (1.0) and in the economies of real socialism (2.0). Such comparisons show some similarities of these processes but also significant differences due to the specific reactions of households and enterprises. The author discusses five channels of liquidating the excessive money resources and indicates the ways most advisable from the point of view of the sustainable development in the post-pandemic future. Especially important is to stimulate the transformation of a part of the inflationary money surplus into the market demand for goods and services which increases the utilization of the existing production potential and leads to investments which create new production capacities as well as the conversion of compulsory savings into voluntary savings.

Kapuściński non-fiction jako biografia polityczna. Lewicowość Kapuścińskiego w kontekście paraliżu dyskursu o PRL-u

Kapuściński non-fiction as a political biography. The leftism of Kapuściński in the context of the discourse on Polish People’s Republic In the article, the author is surveying the scientific discourse on political threads embraced in the Kapuściński non-fiction biography written by Artur Domosławski. This discourse spectacularly reveals the wider problem with the discourse on the Polish People’s Republic. There will be indicated how presuppositions concerning Ryszard’s Kapuściński leftism (valorized the leftism positively or negatively) position the interpretation of the book Kapuściński non-fiction. Various typologies of the discourse on PRL will be enumerated and the problem of whether the biography written by Artur Domosławski eludes the classical narration on real socialism will be discussed.

Kryzys gospodarczy w latach 1979-1982 zwiastunem upadku PRL

Purpose – The article points to the important role of the economic crisis of 1979-1982 in the process of the collapse of the political and economic system imposed on Poland after 1944. Research method – The paper written on the basis of the economic history method, makes an extensive use of the available literature on the subject, the published documents of state authorities, archives, statistics and legal acts. Results – The Author proves that the end of the seventies, which is generally considered the best period in the economy of the People’s Republic of Poland, brought about a crisis and a recession lasting four years. Their causes lay in the erroneous economic policy of the Edward Gierek’s team and in the deformations of the economy management system stemming from older times. The crisis of 1979-1982 showed that the centrally planned economy system in Poland had exhausted its possibilities and even external capital injections were not able to compensate for the low efficiency and the wastafulness in “the real socialism”. Originality /value – The article is a contribution to the still lively, often fueled by contradictory arguments, discussion on the fall of the Polish People’s Republic.

The Invisible Hand of History: Governmentality, the Providential Machine, and Historical Materialism

The article is devoted to one aspect of the genealogy of Soviet governmentality. Michel Foucault, who elaborated the original theory of different types of governmentality, rejected the idea that socialism could arrive at its own practices of management. From his point of view, real socialism ties into the already existing police and liberal versions of governmentality. The “police-administrative” aspect of politics in socialist countries is well known, but its liberal component is only beginning to be systematically studied. In the theoretical canon, a revolutionary project nevertheless comes close to a liberal one: the Marxist criticism of bourgeois political economy shared the same epistemes with it. Some interpreters assume that this commonality also extends to concepts of history, that both Marxism and liberalism see economic rationality as a driving force in the historical process. Economic governmentality can be interpreted not only as a peculiar, historically determined disposition of power but also as a principle —both ontological and epistemological — that governs history itself. That interpretation was disputed by the most prominent Marxist philosophers. In particular, Walter Benjamin and Louis Althusser criticized social-democratic “economism” and “progressism” as they rehabilitated the key concepts of sovereign policy. “Intervention,” “state of exception,” “the exception becoming the rule” — all these concepts refer not to regulation by policing practices but precisely to the model of sovereign decision. Any such revival of sovereignty in liberation politics is certainly problematic, especially when both sovereignty and governmentality belong to the same “providential machine” of theological “oikonomia” as recent studies by Giorgio Agamben have made clear. The article points out the paradoxes in suspension of the “laws of history” by the sovereign using the example of the debate among Soviet historians (which was studied in depth by Andrey Yurganov) about the true nature of the Russian late medieval state. In conclusion, the author analyzes Antonio Negri’s concept of constituent power as a force that can suspend the operation of the providential machine.