Studies in European Integration, State and Society - Böcker

This book is an attempt to reconstruct, in the context of Polish and European history and culture, the picture of Europe and European integration present in Poles’ minds. The reconstruction is based on semantic analyses of linguistic data in the context of Polish and European cultures. Until 2004, the political discourse on Poland’s foreign policy had been focused on the issue of Poland joining the European Union. The accession of Poland to the EU became the reason behind forming public opinions on Europe in general, its history, place in the world and its relations with other continents or civilizations, as well as on the place of Poland in the European civilization and in the European Union. In the discourses, there are two profiles of Europe in the context of integration: Europe as a stronghold and Europe as a community. This is the method which gave rise to the profiles of Europe which are represented by two socially entrenched points of view: a realist (pragmatist) perceives Europe as a stronghold and an idealist (visionary) – as a community.

It is hard to find another two concepts which would be more significant in the European integration discourse than «democracy» and «solidarity» and at the same time more ambiguous in the political practice of integration. Currently European integration discourse is being organized around the concept of democracy. Analyzing European integration discourse the author argues that the situation is quite paradoxical because in order to secure democracy in the EU, European integration discourse must be organized not around the concept of democracy but around the concept of solidarity. The book attempts to show in more details the context of the clash of these fundamental values which serve also as the leading political principles of European integration. Therefore several further concepts and problems have been discussed such as the issue of identity, the concept of citizenship and the problem of nationalism. Since the theoretical framework of the analysis have been built around the idea of discourse the inevitable consequence was to look at some aspects of communication and the links between conceptual and normative development of the European integration.

This collection of articles is the result of the research project «The Polish local society in the process of European integration – a decade of experience», financed by the Polish National Science Centre (NCN). The aim was to investigate the process of integration in the EU of six selected local Polish communities. The same six communities had been studied ten years before, when Poland was preparing for the EU accession. The research was based on qualitative methodology. The results show that the knowledge of the EU in local Poland remains at a very low level. The exception is competence in the field of EU structural funds. These funds are the main factor which determines the positive attitude of Poles towards the EU and the Polish membership in it. At the same time the process of the construction of a European identity in terms of values remains very problematic.

This volume presents the outcomes of qualitative research on the meaning of religion in selected CEE regions. In several case studies, we reveal some features of social perception of religion present in verbalized and institutionalized social experiences and practices. We argue these societies develop their own social model of religion, which seems to be largely based on cultural, religious, and historical schemes dating back to the Habsburg Monarchy. They locate religious identity on a continuum with civic identity. Historical diversity may be endorsed as “traditional pluralism” while equality and tolerance is considered unnecessary. Capturing contradicting images of historical and contemporary pluralism may offer new insight into the puzzle of religion and politics in the CEE region.

This book presents the evolution of Germany’s stance on the reform of the European Union in the years 2002–2016. The objectives of the book are threefold: first, to analyse the positions of the German government and parliamentary opposition on the reform of the European Union’s political system in 2002–2009; second, to describe their stance on the system reform of the Economic and Monetary Union and the Eurozone in 2012–2016; and third, to analyse their positions on the EU immigration crisis in 2015–2016. The study employs a triangulation of a variety of qualitative methods: case-studies, analysis of official documents, literature, speeches and historic items. The result is an in-depth and multidimensional picture of the activities and positions of members of the German government and parliamentary opposition regarding the reform of the EU’s political system.

The book studies how multiple representations of the Other are constructed, Europeanized and used in Poland and Sweden in various heritage related contexts (museums, cities, war cemeteries, commemoration sites etc.) in the second decade of the 21st century. In a more general sense, the authors raise the question of how otherness (in terms of culture, ethnicity, class, gender, etc.) is constructed and leads to its social inclusion, domestication, marginalization or – increasingly common in Scandinavian and Central European peripheries – exclusion.

The authors of the book examine the phenomenon of crisis from the perspective of political and economic science. The texts of the book are focused on four aspects of the crisis: (1) the development problem, (2) the structural problem, (3) the management problem and (4) the problem of the weakening legitimacy of a specific crisis-stricken system. This book offers a proposal for a methodological approach to the evaluation of crisis reality and to research on the ways of overcoming the crisis by state authorities. The four proposed aspects of the analysis are an attempt to view the crisis from various perspectives, which are interrelated and not always clearly separable.

The book offers an interpretive approach to the Europeanization of heritage as found in museums. In order to make the analysis of museum diversity feasible, the research proposed and applied an analytical framework. Some general remarks conclude the work, which aims to map both the timeless and current phenomena of European identity construction.

The current crisis of the international order cannot be referred only to the liberal concept of globalisation. It is also a crisis of a certain model and ideas of order, which – as a result of the financial and migration crisis in Europe – were invalidated by reality and must be reconsidered. The aim of this book is to present how contemporary European states attempt to be active actors, responding to the crisis of the international order, in divergent and sometimes contradictory ways. This phenomenon inevitably leads to the undermining of many existing cooperation mechanisms, but on the other hand, it also reveals the limitations in terms of the state actions.

Ambient intelligence and the profiling activities authorized by modern technologies oblige us to renew our legislation in different directions. Traditionally, data protection law considers only the relationship between data controllers and data subjects positioned as independent entities. However, in the ambient intelligence reality where profiling activities proliferate, enabled by more and more sophisticated software algorithms, their societal impacts have to be taken into consideration by legislative bodies.

The European Capital of Culture is one of the European Union’s most important cultural programmes, its significance transcending a narrow understanding of the cultural sphere. The scheme has been one of the foremost mechanisms contributing to the urban revival of European cities and increasingly close integration in many areas of social and cultural activity. The ECOC 2016 competition (2007-2011), entered by 11 Polish cities, took place in an exceptionally favourable context. The ECOC 2016 competition in Poland served as an impetus for many changes to take place in the participant cities. These particularly applied to the sociocultural sphere, encompassing such issues as a city’s identity and social capital. Consequently, it became possible to create new urban narratives which also contributed to changes regarding the cities’ images. In some cases, this could even be described as a real revolution which was able to take place as a result of unprecedented social mobilisation.

This volume represents an inter-disciplinary discussion of some fundamental categories of convergence and divergence, focusing in particular on issues of both social integration and devolution related to ethnos as the space of identity, and demos as the space of polity. The aims of the book are to assess past developments within crucial parts of Central Europe where both conflict and coexistence potentials seem to best represent the actual “unity in diversity” managing dilemma in the continent; to provide an analysis of current approaches to minority protection, language planning, spatial and social cross-border and inter-cultural policies; and to develop an evaluation of the future trends and opportunities for co-operation and re-integration within a local and broader operational context.

This study considers the multidimensional nature of the construction of the active civil society in the post-totalitarian reality of Central and Eastern Europe, covering the period of systemic transformations in the region in 1989 to the EU accession of 2004. The analysis was carried out using a multidisciplinary research perspective which incorporates historical, sociological, and legal insights, as well as those from political science. The volume illustrates the dynamic character of the process of constructing an active civil society process in a broader comparative perspective against the background of post-totalitarian societies, Germany and Italy, which underwent the process of democratic transformation in 1945 and went on to actively forge the European Community in the 1950s.

This book has two research objectives. The main objective is to present the dynamics of the system reform of the Economic and Monetary Union in 2010–2022. The other is to take stock of the reform and to highlight its successes and failures. In this context, the monograph puts forward two research hypotheses. The first hypothesis assumes that the shortcomings in EU primary and secondary law regarding the Economic and Monetary Union and the course of the euro area debt crisis were two main reasons for reforming the EMU, whereby the crisis in question actually forced the European Union and the euro area countries to implement the reform. The second hypothesis is based on the assumption that the implementation of the system reform encountered many difficulties and obstacles arising from the negative attitude of the governments of some euro area Member States to the execution of selected projects, but also from the accumulation of various severe crises that the European Union faced during the reform, in particular the euro area debt crisis, the migration crisis, the pandemic crisis and the geopolitical crisis following Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. The research hypotheses were verified using a triangulation of several qualitative methods: case study, institutional-legal method, comparative method, and critical analysis of sources and literature.

The monograph explores the heritage of Central and Eastern Europe, which is particularly important nowadays in the era of globalization, on the one hand, and nationalism, on the other, and the war on the third hand. It can indicate ways to "face" the challenges Europe is currently facing. The research on the heritage issue aims to foster a greater understanding of the various mechanisms of today’s social and political decision-making. This publication is the result of the work of a team of scholars whose research explores the subject of the heritage and who represent countries and cultures belonging to the region. This is, therefore, research done from within according to the Latin principle: "Nihil novi nisi commune consensu" (Nothing new without the common consent). The publication allows defining terms and shows the distinctive features of the culture and value system characteristic of Central and Eastern Europe. It deals with issues related to the commemoration of the region’s heritage and the issue of what is excluded from the heritage, what is forgotten, and what is overlooked.

The Maastricht Treaty remains a crossroad in the history of European integration. Since its ratification, policy areas at the core of the national sovereignties have been included in the Brussels agenda, the power balance between the European institutions has started to mutate, and the European Union affairs have progressively become a controversial issue in the public debate. The goal of the book is to provide a comprehensive analysis of the politicization of European affairs. The final aim is to assess the institutional and socio-political impact of EU politicization, detecting how the European elites could exploit the saliency gained by European affairs to enhance the legitimacy and effectiveness of the European institutions.

The book consists of four chapters. The first one contains information about the topic which introduce the project’s characteristics, and, at the same time, provide the background for further theoretical and methodological reflection. The second chapter contains a list of research problems and questions, a presentation of the philosophical worldviews (research paradigms) of the project team who guided the planned research and which resulted in the adoption of research strategies compatible with them, and, consequently, procedures and techniques for obtaining source materials and their analysis. In the third chapter, we present a set of terms, ideas, and concepts which inspired the project team as useful tools for describing and analysing the phenomenon under study. The fourth chapter is a kind of ligature that binds together all the previous findings, it is a summary of integrating ideas, concepts, as well as the adopted research procedures and techniques.

Any democratic regime needs an active and performative party system. Political parties act as intermediaries between institutions and society, articulating and representing the people’s interests. Currently, Europarties are largely unknown to the population and are unable to conduct grassroots political activities. Targeted transformations should be implemented to supranationalize European political parties, enhancing the legitimacy of EU institutions and the ability of the Union to represent the interests of its citizens. The mission of the book is to present the challenges (and possible solutions) to supranationalizing EU party politics. To pursue this objective, it introduces the actors interacting within EU party politics, conducting a multidimensional and multilevel analysis of the interdependent relationships between European parties, European groups, European political foundations and national parties.