Local Community, Power and European Integration

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Introduction

Shortly before the great EU enlargement in 2004, when ten, mostly Eastern European, former communist countries joined the Union, a team of researchers from the Institute of European Studies, Jagiellonian University in Kraków, carried out a research project to find out if Polish people were prepared for the accession, and what factors were responsible for their attitudes towards the EU and the Polish future membership in it. The project covered six small communities in the southern part of Poland, so this was a research about “local Poland”, with a full awareness that small, local communities in a country like Poland were significantly different from the populations of large, modern cities. The results of this project were published in 2001.

Ten years later, the same team of researchers applied for a grant to the Polish National Science Centre¹ in order to carry out a new research project in the same six local communities. The idea was to find out how those local communities developed in the new, European reality: if they were able to use new opportunities provided by European institutions and developed a kind of European identity. This volume presents the results of this new project.

The research was carried out in the years 2012–2015. As in the case of the first project ten years before, the qualitative methodology was used based on in-depth interviews and observation. The results show that the knowledge concerning the EU topics and affairs is still at a very low level, in spite of the fact that a decade has passed since the accession. The exception is expertise and experience in obtaining and exploiting EU funds, which have gained crucial importance, and perhaps the sense of Polish, or rather local societies’, belonging to the EU. At the same time a process of construction of European identity in terms of values, or for that matter in any sense other than redistribution of European money, remains highly problematic. The chapters presented in this volume discuss various aspects of Europeanisation of local communities in Poland, with a special reference to the importance of European funds, development and mobilisation of civil society at the local level, uncovering the historical and cultural heritage, changes in social and cultural identity in relation to significant others, and some elements of local ← 7 | 8 → government. The Authors hope that this volume will make a modest contribution to our understanding of social consequences of the EU enlargement, and will help to identify and understand factors responsible for a success or failure of European integration processes and of the chances for development of identity on the European level.

1 The project no. 2011/03/B/HS6/01163, titled “The Polish local society in the process of European integration – a decade of experience.”

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Paweł Kubicki

Institute of European Studies, Jagiellonian University of Kraków

Social memory in local Poland after accession to the European Union

Abstract: This chapter deals with the issue of reconstruction of social memory in local Polish communities after the accession to the EU in 2004. The main hypothesis is that the process of reconstruction of social memory stimulates a parallel process of building a civil society in local communities. Previous research suggested that Polish local communities were still dominated by values typical for closed societies. Nowadays, it seems that we may observe opening of “local Poland” thanks to a change of social memory.