The Dynamics of the Policies of Ethnic Cleansing in Silesia in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Through studying German, Polish and Czech publications on Silesia, Mr. Kamusella found that most of them, instead of trying to objectively analyse the past, are devoted to proving some essential "Germanness", "Polishness" or "Czechness" of this region. He believes that the terminology and thought-patterns of nationalist ideology are so deeply entrenched in the minds of researchers that they do not consider themselves nationalist. However, he notes that, due to the spread of the results of the latest studies on ethnicity/nationalism (by Gellner, Hobsbawm, Smith, Erikson Buillig, amongst others), German publications on Silesia have become quite objective since the 1980s, and the same process (impeded by under funding) has been taking place in Poland and the Czech Republic since 1989. His own research totals some 500 pages, in English, presented on disc. So what are the traps into which historians have been inclined to fall? There is a tendency for them to treat Silesia as an entity which has existed forever, though Mr. Kamusella points out that it emerged as a region only at the beginning of the 11th century. These same historians speak of Poles, Czechs and Germans in Silesia, though Mr. Kamusella found that before the mid-19th century, identification was with an inhabitant's local area, religion or dynasty. In fact, a German national identity started to be forged in Prussian Silesia only during the Liberation War against Napoleon (1813-1815). It was concretised in 1861 in the form of the first Prussian census, when the language a citizen spoke was equated with his/her nationality. A similar census was carried out in Austrian Silesia only in 1881. The censuses forced the Silesians to choose their nationality despite their multiethnic multicultural identities. It was the active promotion of a German identity in Prussian Silesia, and Vienna's uneasy acceptance of the national identities in Austrian Silesia which stimulated the development of Polish national, Moravian ethnic and Upper Silesian ethnic regional identities in Upper Silesia, and Polish national, Czech national, Moravian ethnic and Silesian ethnic identities in Austrian Silesia. While traditional historians speak of the "nationalist struggle" as though it were a permanent characteristic of Silesia, Mr. Kamusella points out that such a struggle only developed in earnest after 1918. What is more, he shows how it has been conveniently forgotten that, besides the national players, there were also significant ethnic movements of Moravians, Upper Silesians, Silesians and the tutejsi (i.e. those who still chose to identify with their locality). At this point Mr. Kamusella moves into the area of linguistics. While traditionally historians have spoken of the conflicts between the three national languages (German, Polish and Czech), Mr Kamusella reminds us that the standardised forms of these languages, which we choose to dub "national", were developed only in the mid-18th century, after 1869 (when Polish became the official language in Galicia), and after the 1870s (when Czech became the official language in Bohemia). As for standard German, it was only widely promoted in Silesia from the mid 19th century onwards. In fact, the majority of the population of Prussian Upper Silesia and Austrian Silesia were bi- or even multilingual. What is more, the "Polish" and "Czech" Silesians spoke were not the standard languages we know today, but a continuum of West-Slavic dialects in the countryside and a continuum of West-Slavic/German creoles in the urbanised areas. Such was the linguistic confusion that, from time to time, some ethnic/regional and Church activists strove to create a distinctive Upper Silesian/Silesian language on the basis of these dialects/creoles, but their efforts were thwarted by the staunch promotion of standard German, and after 1918, of standard Polish and Czech. Still on the subject of language, Mr. Kamusella draws attention to a problem around the issue of place names and personal names. Polish historians use current Polish versions of the Silesian place names, Czechs use current Polish/Czech versions of the place names, and Germans use the German versions which were in use in Silesia up to 1945. Mr. Kamusella attempted to avoid this, as he sees it, nationalist tendency, by using an appropriate version of a place name for a given period and providing its modern counterpart in parentheses. In the case of modern place names he gives the German version in parentheses. As for the name of historical figures, he strove to use the name entered on the birth certificate of the person involved, and by doing so avoid such confusion as, for instance, surrounds the Austrian Silesian pastor L.J. Sherschnik, who in German became Scherschnick, in Polish, Szersznik, and in Czech, Sersnik. Indeed, the prospective Silesian scholar should, Mr. Kamusella suggests, as well as the three languages directly involved in the area itself, know English and French, since many documents and books on the subject have been published in these languages, and even Latin, when dealing in depth with the period before the mid-19th century. Mr. Kamusella divides the policies of ethnic cleansing into two categories. The first he classifies as soft, meaning that policy is confined to the educational system, army, civil service and the church, and the aim is that everyone learn the language of the dominant group. The second is the group of hard policies, which amount to what is popularly labelled as ethnic cleansing. This category of policy aims at the total assimilation and/or physical liquidation of the non-dominant groups non-congruent with the ideal of homogeneity of a given nation-state. Mr. Kamusella found that soft policies were consciously and systematically employed by Prussia/Germany in Prussian Silesia from the 1860s to 1918, whereas in Austrian Silesia, Vienna quite inconsistently dabbled in them from the 1880s to 1917. In the inter-war period, the emergence of the nation-states of Poland and Czechoslovakia led to full employment of the soft policies and partial employment of the hard ones (curbed by the League of Nations minorities protection system) in Czechoslovakian Silesia, German Upper Silesia and the Polish parts of Upper and Austrian Silesia. In 1939-1945, Berlin started consistently using all the "hard" methods to homogenise Polish and Czechoslovakian Silesia which fell, in their entirety, within the Reich's borders. After World War II Czechoslovakia regained its prewar part of Silesia while Poland was given its prewar section plus almost the whole of the prewar German province. Subsequently, with the active involvement and support of the Soviet Union, Warsaw and Prague expelled the majority of Germans from Silesia in 1945-1948 (there were also instances of the Poles expelling Upper Silesian Czechs/Moravians, and of the Czechs expelling Czech Silesian Poles/pro-Polish Silesians). During the period of communist rule, the same two countries carried out a thorough Polonisation and Czechisation of Silesia, submerging this region into a new, non-historically based administrative division. Democratisation in the wake of the fall of communism, and a gradual retreat from the nationalist ideal of the homogeneous nation-state with a view to possible membership of the European Union, caused the abolition of the "hard" policies and phasing out of the "soft" ones. Consequently, limited revivals of various ethnic/national minorities have been observed in Czech and Polish Silesia, whereas Silesian regionalism has become popular in the westernmost part of Silesia which remained part of Germany. Mr. Kamusella believes it is possible that, with the overcoming of the nation-state discourse in European politics, when the expression of multiethnicity and multilingualism has become the cause of the day in Silesia, regionalism will hold sway in this region, uniting its ethnically/nationally variegated population in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity championed by the European Union.

Birth, Survival and Growth of Small and Medium Sized Enterprises in Poland: 1990-1994

This research is based on a unique and extensive database which tracks the employment, payroll and sales of individual Polish firms for the period 1990 to 1995. This allowed the authors to calculate the birth, survival and growth rates for different categories of enterprises (state-owned, cooperative, private, foreign-owned and privatised after 1990) and regions. These data match data collected in the United States, making it possible to compare the Polish situation with that of the state of Michigan. Analysis of the data and lessons from the Poland-Michigan comparisons provide a solid basis for the formulation of new policy recommendations for Poland. Allowing for certain important differences, Poland would still seem to need a higher rate of births of new companies. New small private companies and companies with foreign capital can be seen as the main source of job creation and economic revitalisation. To strengthen positive trends in the economy, Poland should create a model of institutional support for both potential entrepreneurs and foreign investors.

The Effects of Privatization of State-Owned Enterprises in Poland and East Germany

The main goal of this project was to propose appropriate methods of analysing the effects of the privatisation of state-owned enterprises, methods which were then tested on a limited sample of 16 Polish and 8 German enterprises privatised in 1992. A considerable amount of information was collected relating to the six-year period 1989-1994 relating to most aspects of the companies' activities. The effects of privatisation were taken to be those changes within the enterprises which were the result of privatisation, in such areas as production, the productivity of labour and fixed assets, investments and innovations, employment and wages, economic incentives (especially for top managers), financing (internal and external sources), bad debts and economic effects (financial analysis). A second important goal was to identify the main factors which represent methodological obstacles in surveys of the effects of privatisation during a period of fundamental transformation of the entire economic system. The list of enterprises for the research was compiled in such a way as to allow for the differentiation of ownership structures of privatised firms and to permit (at least to a certain extent) the empirical verification of some hypotheses regarding the privatisation process. The enterprises selected were divided into the following three groups representing (as far as possible) various types of ownership structures or types of control: (1) enterprises control by strategic investors (domestic or foreign), (2) enterprises controlled by employees (employee-owned companies), (3) enterprises controlled by managers. Formal methods such as econometric models with varying parameters were used to separate pure privatisation effects from other factors which influence various aspects of an enterprise's working, including policies on the productivity of labour and capital, average wages, the remuneration of top managers, etc. While the group admits that their findings and conclusions cannot be treated as representative of all privatised enterprises in Poland and Germany, they found considerable convergence with their findings and those of other surveys conducted on a wider scale. The main hypotheses that were confirmed included that privatisation (especially in companies controlled by large investors and managers) leads to a significant increase in the effectiveness of these production process, growing pay differentials between different employee groups (e.g. between executives and rank-and-file employees) and between different jobs and positions within particular professional groups. They also confirmed the growing importance in incentives to top executives of incentives linked with the company's economic effects (particularly profit-related incentives), long-term incentives and the capital market.

Central Europe in the Process of European Integration. A Comparative Study of the Strategies of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia towards the Deepening and Widening of the European Union

Membership of the European Union U is usually seen as a strategic goal of the associated states of central and eastern Europe. At the beginning of the 1990s central European countries, where the economic and political transformation was relatively advanced, received preferential treatment from the European Community, which was starting to evolve a policy of differentiation. Podraza studied the strategies of four central European countries towards changes under way in the European Union, analysing several aspects for each case: (1) the process of political transformation (2) decision-making structures in the field of foreign policy and European integration (3) integration strategies: (a) main foreign policy priorities (b) application for membership of the European Union (c) the Commission option on each country (d) accession partnership, including a National Programme for the Adoption of the Acquis (NPAA) (e) regular Commission reports (f) accession negotiations

A Comparative Study on Higher Education Acts in Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Russia

The original aim of this project was to describe and analyse the higher education acts in force in five Central and Eastern European countries at present, trying to understand the dependence of higher education on the historical traditions, national peculiarities and all-European tendencies. The description and comparison of the main aspects of higher education was supplemented by a study of the possibilities of transferring experience in the field between the five countries and possible solutions to implementing foreign structural and functional models. Questions covered included the role of the state in the management of higher education, the structures of the higher education systems and the organisation of institutions, academic autonomy and the classifications of academic teaching staff, the main trends in the recent development of research, academic degrees, the accreditation of higher education institutions, and the financing of higher education. Popov found that it was almost impossible to understand the dependence of higher education on historical traditions and national peculiarities purely through a study of the relevant legislation. Education traditions in these countries have twice been broken, once with the start of communism (1917 in Russia and 1944-45 in Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland and Romania) and for a second time at the beginning of the 1990s. The most recent higher education acts in all five countries studied have abandoned many of their historical and national traditions, following instead all-European trends as determined by Western Europe, and the project included a study of the dependence on these trends. There were also difficulties in comparing some aspects of higher education as it depended on how far a given aspect has different or common features in the different countries and to what extent the application is comparable. While many possible areas for transferring experience between the five countries were identified, Popov concentrated on those where he felt that there was a real practical possibility of application in view of national academic differences. He concluded by defining some of the challenges facing each country in the field of higher education and by making some predictions as to the developments in the different countries.

Social Representations of Politics

Cezary Trutkowski (Poland). Social representations of Politics. Mr. Trutkowski is an assistant in the Institute for Social Research of the University of Warsaw and worked on this research from August 1997 to July 1999. Research into social representations requires the use of various methods to show the phenomenon from different angles. In contrast with the contemporary trend towards the measurement of attitudes in opinion surveys, Trutkowski examined social representations of politics in order to study the problem of political participation. He thus aimed to study a problem which he sees as social in nature from a really sociological perspective. His research revealed a very distinctive difference between the social representations of politics shared by politicians and by the general public. The former consider politics in general as struggle for power which can be used to pursue their own vision of social order. They perceive political activity as a kind of homage to be paid to the greater idea that they pursue. At the same time, politicians admitted that politics is very often treated by political actors as a means of gaining personal profit, becoming purely a fight for the power to rule. According to voters, politicians should be treated as employees on a contract, the duration of which depends on their performance. Politics is therefore not a homage to an idea but a service to citizens. They did however admit that this is wishful thinking in Poland today. A content analysis of electoral campaigns confirmed the dark side of the representation of politics: politicians spend the campaign making promises and presenting visions on television, and quarrelling and fighting in everyday activities that were reported by the press. Trutkowski sees his research as a contribution to the foundations of a new approach to studying mass phenomena. By reviving some forgotten ideas of Durkheim and the Chicago School and incorporating the theory of social representations with a new methodological programme, he believes that it is possible to build a more social social psychology and sociology.