Kazimierz Moczarski (1907–1975) was a journalist, soldier, and political prisoner. His life exemplifies a Central European biography under Nazism and Comunism. The addictive and moving Civility in ...Uncivil Times reveals the story of a man who defended law and democracy all his life. Moczarski fought for it in the authoritarian Poland of the 1930s. During the Second World War, he partook in the resistance movement. After the war, he spent eleven years in a Stalinist prison, including nine months in one cell with the Nazi Jürgen Stroop, who commanded the brutal pacification of the Warsaw Ghetto. The communists imprisoned Moczarski’s wife. After release, he rebuilt the broken marriage, rejoined social life, and wrote a work about meeting Stroop. Translated into many languages, Conversations with the Executioner is a thorough study of totalitarianism.
In the nineteenth century, state policy towards prostitution was primarily shaped by an assessment of its role in spreading venereal diseases. In this book, the author traces normative and ...organisational efforts of the authorities of the Kingdom of Poland, which sought to maintain control over prostitution and the health of women who offered paid sexual services. The author uses data collected by the police and medical authorities supervising legal and illegal prostitution to provide a demographic and sociological picture of the big-city and small-town market of sexual commerce. It was only in the early twentieth century when prostitution became an important subject of the Polish public debate, a process which is described in the book against the backdrop of the major issues and fears of the epoch.
The legal situation of whistleblowers has become an object of keen public interest in recent years. As practice shows, people who reveal irregularities in the workplace are exposed to the negative ...consequences of their actions. This book proposes a model of legal protection of such people, which could be applied in the Polish legal order. This model has been designed on the basis of an analysis of the literature, jurisprudence and selected legal acts existing in the world in the field of whistleblowers‘ protection.
Analysing the political relations between the Kingdom of Poland and the hasidic movement, this book examines plans formulated by the government and by groups close to government circles regarding ...hasidim, and describes how a hasidic body politic developed in response. Marcin Wodzinski demonstrates that the rise of hasidism was an important factor in shaping the Jewish policy of both central and provincial authorities and shows how the creation of socio-political conditions that were advantageous to the hasidic movement accelerated its growth. While concentrating on the dynamic that developed in the Kingdom of Poland, the discussion is informed by a consideration of the relationship between the state and the hasidic movement from its inception in the Polish - Lithuanian Commonwealth. The novelty of this study lies in the fact that, whereas most analyses of political culture concentrate on states and societies with well-established electoral systems of representation, Wodzinski focuses on the under-researched area of political relations between a non-democratic state and a low-status community lacking authorized representation. Applying concepts more often associated with cultural history, his analysis draws a distinction between the terms of reference of high-level political debate and the actual implementation of policy middle- and low-level officials. Similarly, in analysing hasidic responses he differentiates between high-level hasidic representations in the state and the grassroots politics of the community. This combination enables a broad contextualization of the whole subject, integrating the social and cultural history of Polish Jewry with that of Polish society in general.
What happens when a region accustomed to violent shifts in borders is subjected to a new, peaceful partitioning? Has the European Union spent the last decade creating a new Iron Curtain at its ...fringes?Building Fortress Europe: The Polish-Ukrainian Frontierexamines these questions from the perspective of the EU's new eastern external boundary. Since the Schengen Agreement in 1985, European states have worked together to create a territory free of internal borders and with heavily policed external boundaries. In 2004 those boundaries shifted east as the EU expanded to include eight postsocialist countries-including Poland but excluding neighboring Ukraine. Through an analysis of their shared frontier,Building Fortress Europeprovides an ethnographic examination of the human, social, and political consequences of developing a specialized, targeted, and legally advanced border regime in the enlarged EU. Based on fieldwork conducted with border guards, officials, and migrants shuttling between Poland and Ukraine as well as extensive archival research,Building Fortress Europeshows how people in the two countries are adjusting to living on opposite sides of a new divide. Anthropologist Karolina S. Follis argues that the policing of economic migrants and asylum seekers is caught between the contradictory imperatives of the European Union's border security, economic needs of member states, and their declared commitment to human rights. The ethnography explores the lives of migrants, and their patterns of mobility, as framed by these contradictions. It suggests that only a political effort to address these tensions will lead to the creation of fairer and more humane border policies.
U pogledu odnosa između promjena u strukturi inovativne tržišne proizvodnje i strukture izdataka za inovacije, učinkovitost stvaranja izravnog fizičkog proizvodnog kapitala i društvenog kapitala u ...poljskoj industriji ima presudnu ulogu. Budući da je stopa (tempo) rasta inovativne tržišne proizvodnje i stopa (tempa) rasta fizičkog kapitala određena okruženjem određenog poduzeća i nisu ovisna o poduzećima, jedina varijabla koja objašnjava stopu rasta inovacija je stopa (tempo) rasta (u vrijednosti) rashoda za ljudski kapital u poljskoj industriji u 2005–2013. Rezultati ankete pokazuju da je stopa (tempo) rasta u ljudskom kapitalu najintenzivnije ostvarena u poljskoj industriji u razdoblju 2010–2013, dok je u razdoblju 2006–2009. ova stopa (tempo) oblikovana u ograničenom opsegu. Kako nije postojao ujednačen protok ljudskog kapitala, ukupna vrijednost inovacija stvorenih u poljskoj industriji u analiziranim godinama bila je ograničena.
As a writer, critic, and philosopher, StanisÊaw Brzozowski (1878–1911) left a lasting imprint on Polish culture. He absorbed virtually all topical intellectual trends of his time, adapting them for ...the needs of what he saw as his primary mission: the modernization of Polish culture. The essays of the volume reassess and contextualize Brzozowski's writings from a distinctly transnational vantage point. They shed light on often surprising and hitherto underrated affinities between Brzozowski and intellectual figures and movements in Eastern and Western Europe. Furthermore, they explore the presence of his ideas in twentieth-century century literary criticism and theory.
The role of Western NGOs in the transition of postcommunist nations to democracy has been well documented. In this study, Paulina Pospieszna follows a different trajectory, examining the role of a ...former aid recipient (Poland), newly democratic itself, and its efforts to aid democratic transitions in the neighboring states of Belarus and Ukraine.Belarus is widely regarded as the most authoritarian state in the region, while Ukraine is witnessing a slow, if often troubled, democratic consolidation. Each state presents a different set of challenges to outside agencies. As Pospieszna shows, Poland is uniquely positioned to offer effective counsel on the transition to democracy. With similarities of language and culture, and a shared history, combined with strong civic activism and success within the European Union, Poland's regional policies have successfully combined its need for security and a motivation to spread democracy as primary concerns. Pospieszna details the founding, internal workings, goals, and methods of Poland's aid programs. She then compares the relative degrees of success of each in Belarus and Ukraine and documents the work yet to be done.As her theoretical basis, Pospieszna analyzes current thinking on the methods and effectiveness of NGOs in transitions to democracy, particularly U.S.- and European-led aid efforts. She then views the applicability of these methods to the case of Poland and its aid recipients. Overwhelmingly, Pospieszna finds the greatest success in developmental programs targeting civil society-workers, intellectuals, teachers, students, and other NGO actors.Through extensive interviews with government administrators and NGO workers in Poland and the United States, coupled with archival research, Pospieszna assembles an original perspective on the mitigation of the 'postcommunist divide'. Her work will serve as a model for students and scholars of states in transition, and it provides an overview of both successful and unsuccessful strategies employed by NGOs in democracy assistance.
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