Suchergebnisse

The objective of this paper is to analyse the political activity of the local community of the Opolskie Province in the local government elections in 2018 and to identify the characteristic features determining its specificity. The attempt to identify the electoral specificity of the region will consist in presenting a characterization of the region in terms of its size and population as well as its administrative and social aspects. An analysis of the elements inseparably connected with the election process, such as geography, voting turnout, the number of electoral registers and candidates, the types of electoral committees, is equally important. And finally, comments on the election results are significant as well. The local government elections of 2018 were held in a specific atmosphere, largely related to the amendment of the election law. Undoubtedly, the most characteristic aspect for the Opolskie Region is its last position among other provinces with regard to size and population, but it should not be forgotten that it is a borderland region inhabited by a high percentage of the German national minority, which actively shapes the image of not only the local communities at every level, but also the entire Opolskie Region as such.

The European Neighbourhood Policy is the arena of continuous, inherent as it were, tensions among the ambitions of Member States wanting to play the largest role in the shaping of the European Union's relationships with the surrounding world. A characteristic and obvious quality of this phenomenon is the fact that particular Member States' interests in a given region in the neighbourhood of the European Union increases in proportion to its geographical proximity. This creates naturally the phenomenon of a group of Member States interested or specialized in the region of the Mediterranean Sea, the Black Sea or the Eastern policy. Simultaneously there exists a considerable group of Member States which, because of a considerable distance from a particular region, shows little interest and consequently a frequent lack of understanding of issues related to it. The objective of this article is to capture this phenomenon and to try to systemize it through the notion and methodology of the National Specialization Index. ; Europejska Polityka Sąsiedztwa jest areną nieustannych, niejako wpisanych w nią napięć pomiędzy ambicjami państw członkowskich, chcących wywierać, jak największą rolę w kształtowaniu relacji zewnętrznych Unii Europejskiej. Charakterystyczną i wręcz oczywistą cechą tego zjawiska jest fakt, że zainteresowanie państw członkowskich danym regionem w otoczeniu Unii wzrasta proporcjonalnie do jego bliskości geograficznej. Tworzy to w sposób naturalny zjawisko bloków państw członkowskich zainteresowanych i wyspecjalizowanych czy to regionem basenu Morza Śródziemnego, Morza Czarnego, czy też polityki wschodniej. Równolegle istnieje znacząca grupa państw członkowskich, która poprzez swoją znaczną odległość od danego regionu, wykazuje niewielkie zainteresowanie, a więc często i brak zrozumienia dla dotyczących go kwestii. Celem niniejszego artykułu jest uchwycenia tego zjawiska i próba jego systematyzacji poprzez pojęcie i metodologię Wskaźnika Specjalizacji Narodowych.

The idea of European federation keeps recurring in politicians' and intellectuals' discourses on the future of the European Union. The logic of global rivalry of "large territories" favors this in particular, as it somehow forces Europe's states to enter into a tighter integration if they want to realize their politics. The biggest challenge which the Union faces is the problem of leadership, understood both in the context of internal policy and relationally towards the surrounding. The problem, however, is the diversity of the member states and the unrelenting tension between particular concern about a national interest and European universalism. European federation sensu stricto, just because of this diversity has still been a utopian project. The future of the European Union most probably lies in a new intermediate model, as unique as the European Commonwealths used to be in the 1950s.