Suchergebnisse

In the invitation to the 'Europe-Poland-Dialogue' conference the organisers ask: Are we witnessing the end of a certain development stage and opening of the way to subsequent stages of dialogue advancement, its functioning and development in social realities? In this paper, the attempt to answer this question entails a description of three problems addressed by the sections below. The first section presents the differences between social and civic dialogue against the background of discussions taking place in the European Union and in Poland. The second section focuses on the evaluation of the condition of Polish civic dialogue past 1989. The third section considers social dialogue in Poland from the comparative perspective of political participation and political culture indicators of the Democracy Index. The paper ends with final remarks.

The author analyses the selected aspects of capitalism in the countries of Central Europe. The author presents the various theoretical concepts that refer to the issue in question involving the concept coined by L. King and I. Szelenyi, which holds that the systemic changes in the countries of this region are specifically characterised by the perspective of 'from without' capitalism. They believe that the specificity of the capitalist system lies in the fact that in the key times of the post-communist changes of the political system, the issue of the absence of an important class of private owners was not addressed. In the West private proprietors were the ones that constituted the main driving force of an open-market economy. The article presents the advantages and drawbacks of an economic model formed by the dominant share of foreign capital, with an emphasis placed on the consequences of the issue in question on the limitations of the subjectivity of economic policy of a state as well as the development chances of local businesses. It manifests the fears that the model created in Poland (and in other countries of the region) after the year 1989 sets the role model for local enterprises of corporate subcontractors of mainly traditional or niche products and services.

The article describes the issue of deinstitutionalisation policy in the area of social assistance in the European Union (EU). It presents the genesis, context and evolution of this policy. Based on the analysis of materials available on the official websites of the European Commission (EC), it addresses the issues involved in the assumptions of the deinstitutionalisation policy, its main stakeholders, the place it occupies in EU priorities, implementation instruments and ways of setting the boundaries of deinstitutionalisation in the area of social assistance. It discusses terminological issues, including sociological interpretations of the concept of deinstitutionalisation and the resulting connotations with Erving Goffman's concept of total institution. It analyses the most important documents related to addressing these issues at the EU level and their implementation. It also contains selected important elements involved in monitoring and evaluating deinstitutionalisation processes in Member States before the coronavirus pandemic, considered from the perspective of common indicators for children, children with disabilities, adults with disabilities, adults with mental health problems and seniors. It presents the main barriers, trends and challenges of deinstitutionalisation processes in the EU.

After two decades of successful economic growth, stability and "democratic consolidation" all countries in the Visegrad alliance face crises and uncertainties, most of which reflect the upheavals in Europe. Their unity is threatened by flareups of populism, widening internal divisions and disagreements, as well as increasingly divergent paths of development. Will the V4 – indeed, the entire EU – survive in the face of the growing centrifugal pressures, both internal and external? The book addresses this general question by analysing crises tendencies within each of the V4 countries and by placing these analyses in the broader V4, European, and global context.