Suchergebnisse

This article seeks to paint a more nuanced picture of the role plaid by socialist internationalism in East Germany and Czechoslovakia regarding the employment of foreign labour, focusing on Poles. The long-term cooperation with Warsaw provides a suitable perspective on how to interpret particular periods and milestones of the schemes as a whole. The article partly dissociates from contemporary writing on the subject, which perceives socialist internationalism either as an instrument of propaganda, masking ruthless exploitation, or as a genuine value that inspired and permeated foreign labour recruitment. Based on documents from archives of all three countries in focus, it is argued that the schemes were clearly driven by the economic needs from the very beginning. Except for limited-scale cooperation with countries of the Global South, socialist internationalism came largely to the fore during the 1970s as a substitutional objective, when the economic goals of the foreign labour recruitment proved unreachable, and policymakers were at pains to reshape the meaning of the schemes (running already in full gear). However, with growing and unmanageable economic difficulties, the idealist rhetoric of internationalism plaid an ever more important role in framing the labour force cooperation until the end of communist regimes.

From the 1960s to 1989, thousands of female Polish workers were sent to Czechoslovak enterprises. I analyze how the Polish women used their stay in the CSSR during the peak period of labor force cooperation to escape the dual burden of production and reproduction. My argument is that the advantageous position enjoyed by skilled male workers in state-socialist regimes could also partly apply to the otherwise vulnerable and marginalized unskilled female and migrant work force. Mutually countervailing policies of the two "cooperating" states, which in fact competed for the same workers, forced Czechoslovakia to relax control over the Poles and allowed the workers to choose relatively freely whether to stay in the host country or return. I conclude that these favorable conditions endowed the female Polish workers with agency and empowered them to flee from their determined roles in paternalist state-socialist society.

Yoav Peled's book brings again into international academia an almost forgotten concept of ethnic democracy. After a theoretical introduction reviewing the concept, Peled examines if ethnic democracy could be found in three cases: Northern Ireland (co-authored by Natalie Kosoi), interwar Poland, and Israel. He uses the case studies also "to offer a critical reexamination of the conditions for the consolidation and stability of ethnic democracy" (p. 1).

The level of tolerance toward various minorities, as well as to women in general, and the social variables that influence it, is precisely what Ewa A. Golebiowska studies in her current book. As variables, she focuses on education, age, religiosity, area of residence, gender, political interest, ideological self-identification, psychological inclination toward authoritarianism, interpersonal trust, post-materialist individual values, economic perception, satisfaction with Polish democracy, and inter-group contact. According to her research, the prototype of a tolerant person in Poland is a young, childless, educated, and non-religious urban male, and who, moreover, is generally satisfied with his life and the level of democracy in Poland.