Thesis (doctoral)--Universität Greifswald, 1911. / "Die Dissertation erscheint in den Baltischen Studien Neue Folge XV." Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

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L’objectif de notre thèse de doctorat est d’analyser les commissions d’historiens dans les processus de rapprochement en Pologne. Deux cas d’étude sont privilégiés : la commission polono-allemande sur les manuels scolaires et le groupe polono-russe sur les questions difficiles. Ce travail se base sur deux sources principales : une série d’entretiens et des recherches dans les archives. A ce corpuss’ajoutent des sources complémentaires : observations participantes et analyse de discours politiques, de sondages et de la presse.Les points de vue de part et d’autre divergent, voire s’opposent. Les historiens cherchent alors, selon Ricoeur, un récit qui peut favoriser le rapprochement. Ce dialogue sur l’histoire correspond tout à fait à ce qui est demandé aux commissions d’historiens. Dès lors, pourquoi ces commissions ont-elles été créées ? Comment fonctionnent-elles et pourquoi continuent-elles de fonctionner ? Nous formons les hypothèses que, premièrement, ces commissions ont été créées dans un objectif de rapprochement, voire de réconciliation. Deuxièmement, leur fonctionnement — et sa prolongation— dépend de trois variables : le contexte, les mandats, les acteurs.Notre thèse s’articule en cinq points. Les trois premières parties portent sur chacune des trois variables évoquées : contexte, mandats, acteurs. La quatrième partie porte sur les sphères d’influence de ces commissions et les débats qu’elles engendrent : politique et religion, débats publics, débats scientifiques. La dernière partie se concentre sur les projets de ces commissions :l’ouvrage commun ou les centres de dialogue du côté polono-russe, le manuel commun d’histoire du côté polono-allemand. / The objective of my PhD thesis is to analyse historical commissions in the processes of rapprochement in Poland. Two cases studies are selected: the Polish-German school book commission and the Polish-Russian group for difficult matters. This work relies on two main sources:a series of interviews and research conducted in the archives. Other sources are complementary to this main corpus: participatory observations, analysis of political discourses, opinion polls and themedia.From one part to another, the points of view differ, or even oppose themselves. Historians then lookfor, according to Ricoeur, a narrative which could favour rapprochement. This dialogue on history matches exactly with what is asked for the historical commissions. Then, why are these commissions created ? how do they work and why do they continue to function ? The first hypothesis assumes that these commissions are created in an objective of rapprochement, or even reconciliation. The second one assumes that their functioning – and its continuation – depends on three variables:context, mandates, actors. My thesis is structured on five points. The first three parts concern each of the three variables cited:context, mandates, actors. The fourth part relates to the spheres of influence of the commissions and the debates they induce: politics and religion, public debate, scientific debate. The last partfocuses on the projects of the commissions: the common book or the centres for dialogue on the Polish-Russian side, the common historical schoolbook on the Polish-German one.

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This ethnographic dissertation research project examines HIV prevention programs in Warsaw, Poland to explore the concurrent processes of democratization and privatization as Poland begins European Union accession. As inherently political public health interventions, HIV prevention programs provoke discussions of risk and responsibility, and visions of the moral social order. Therefore, they can be used to understand the ways in which politically and socially marginalized populations invoke claims to citizenship status through attention to health issues. From an epidemiological perspective, HIV/AIDS arrived in Poland relatively late (1985) and never reached the anticipated epidemic levels. In the 1980s, drawing attention to the potential threat of AIDS served as a forum through which the perceived failures of the socialist government could be publicly addressed. In the 1990s calls for improved access to AIDS information suggested that to be democratic meant to have open and easy access to scientific information, and debate surrounding the establishment of AIDS care facilities suggested that to be European was to be tolerant. However, issues of information and tolerance were problematic in reference to homosexuality. Prior to the advent of AIDS in Poland, socialist gender and sexual ideologies converged with Catholic notions of proper morality to marginalize and pathologize homosexuality. Nascent gay organizations saw the potential of HIV prevention as a way to justify the value of such organizations for the greater good of society. The possibility of controlling and participating in the task of HIV prevention presented an alternative to statesponsored surveillance under the guise of HIV prevention and encouraged public dialogue about the issues gays face in their daily lives. Whereas the national HIV prevention agenda focuses on risks as equally distributed across Polish society, a central component of the HIV prevention programs within Polish gay rights and drug abuse prevention organizations is harm reduction. As practiced by Polish gay organizations, a harm reduction philosophy draws attention to heterogeneity within gays and challenges the construction of them as a coherent risk group. These programs deemphasize sexuality in favor of a wider constellation of factors that contribute to finding oneself in situations that can lead to risky behavior.

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The new Polish state which emerged after the First World War adopted a highly democratic constitution based upon that or the Third French Republic. The powers of the President and the Cabinet were indeed even weaker than those allowed by the French Constitution. Although the Senate could hold up legislation and demand that proposed laws be passed in the Sejm by an 11/20 majority, in practice political power was concentrated in the Lower House, elected by universal suffrage with proportional representation. This constitution, adopted in March 1921, worked badly from the start. One hundred and thirty years of partition had created very different political traditions among those who had lived under either Austrian, Prussian or Russian rule. In addition, the political experience of the Polish clubs in the ueichsrat, the Reichstag and the Duma had been that of sectional groups whose sole concern had been to obtain the redress of minority grievances, a training singularly unfitted for members of a national legislature such as the Sejm, a body responsible for the effective control of the country's government. Widespread poverty and ignorance encouraged politicians to indulge in demagogy, and the prevalence of corruption in public life tended more and more to be ascribed to the nature of parliamentary government, which became increasingly discredited. The long years of foreign rule, during which Polish national survival had been the pre-eminent goal in politics, obscured the new state's obligations towards her own national minorities, who made up altogether one third of her population. Moreover Poland's perilous international position, her newly won independence threatened by both Germany and Russia, lent calls for a stronger government greater force. Parliament was further discredited by the failure of the politicians to deal successfully with the exceedingly difficult economic problems which confronted the new state. Finally, the persistence in the post-war period of the now largely anachronistic conflict between the National Democrats, under Roman Dmowski and the supporters of Jozef Piłsudski, the charismatic leader of the Polish legions in the First World War and Supreme Commander in the victorious war with the Soviet Union, was a continual source of instability. Thus it was not surprising that the progressive breakdown of the parliamentary system, conflicts over the position of the Piłsudski-ites in the Army, and the recurrence of severe economic difficulties led to a coup in May 1926 which brought Piisudski to power after three days of fighting. Piłsudski had no well-defined political ideas. He was principally interested in foreign policy and Array affairs, and showed little interest in the day-to-day running of the Government. He did not, therefore, to the surprise of some of his adherents, establish a dictatorship after his coup. Instead he maintained the 1921 Constitution, introducing a number of modifications. Of these the most important were the provision that the Government's budget proposals be enacted automatically if the legislature failed to approve a budget in the specified time, and that which deprived Parliament of the right to effect its own dissolution, a right now granted to the President acting with the approval of the Cabinet. Piłsudski attempted to co-operate with Parliament through the accomodating Kazimierz Bartel, a former radical politician who was Prime Minister from May to September 1926 and again from June 1928 to April 1929 (between October 1926 and June 1926 he was Vice Premier). The system of government pursued in this period was a sort of guided democracy 1 which allowed Parliament a limited role in criticizing the activities of the Government, but reserved the formulation and implementation of policy as the exclusive province of the Cabinet. The Cabinet was only formally responsible to the Sejm, and in fact could not be forced to resign by a vote of no-confidence. Under Polish conditions there was much to be said for this semi-autocratic system. It allowed a fair degree of personal and political freedom; parties, apart from Communist organizations, were not banned, few people were arrested, and the press was relatively free. At the same time, it provided a strong Government with continuity of policy, a vital need if any consistent plan was to be pursued concerning the national minorities, economic problems or foreign policy. Yet this 'Piłsudski-ite system' was to prove scarcely more successful than the 1921 Constitution. Although Piłsudeki had come to power with the support of the parties of the Left (the Polish Socialist Party and the two radical peasant groups, the Peasant Party and the Liberation), he came into increasing conflict with then, particularly after the elections of March 1928. This conflict culminated in the formation of an alliance of six parties of the Centre and Left, the so-called Centrolew which demanded the replacement of the Piłsudski system 9 by a return to full democracy. Nevertheless, in the elections of November 1930, after arresting a large number of Opposition politicians and by using considerable administrative pressure to influence the voting, Piłsudski won a decisive victory over his opponents. The arrests, the Government's electoral victory, and the trial and conviction of the leading Opposition politicians in October 1931 saw the virtual abandonment by the Sanacja as the Government called itself, of the residual parliamentarianism which had persisted after the coup. Although the press continued to enjoy relative freedom, and most political parties were allowed to exist openly, the Government became far more autocratic, though still not authoritarian. This development became much more marked, and the clash between the liberal and authoritarian elements within the Sanacja more evident, after Piłsudski's death in May 1935 had exposed the ideological hollowness of hie 'system'. This thesis is an attempt to describe the failure of two constitutional experiments: that of the democratic constitution of March 1921, and that of the semi-autocratic system introduced after the coup of May 1926. It takes as its starting-point the elections of November 1922, the first to be held under the new constitution. The detailed narrative continues to the end of 1930, when the Government's victory in the elections and the arrest of the leading Centrolew politicians saw the culmination of the move to a more autocratic system. The problem of Poland's political evolution during this period has been relatively neglected, both in Poland and in the West. In Poland, a fair amount of work has been done on the radical political parties, both Communist and non-Communist. However, very little has been published on either the Piłsudskiites in this period, or the National Democrats, although there are signs that something may soon be done to bridge this gap. In America, a valuable book has recently been published on Piłsudski's coup, but since it concentrates its attention upon the events of the coup itself and on its military aspects, its treatment of the political background and of subsequent political developments in somewhat sketchy. Apart from this book, almost nothing of serious academic worth has been written in the West on Polish internal politics between the Wars, although a number of useful works on foreign policy have appeared. This thesis is based primarily on Government documents in tne Archiwum Akt Nowych in Warsaw, on papers dealing with the Polish Socialist Party in the Archiwum Zakładu Historii Partii. on the minutes of the debates in the Sejm and Senate, on memoirs and on contemporary newspapers.

INTRODUCTION Since the expansion of the EU, several hundred thousand people from Eastern European countries have migrated to the UK, the majority of whom are Polish. Although no studies examining utilisation of mental health services by Polish workers in the UK could be found, research suggests that their knowledge of how to access health services is low, while rates of emergency psychiatric treatment are relatively high. The broader migrant literature suggests that migrants can perceive a cultural mismatch between themselves and services, find it difficult to access services due to logistical barriers, and often prefer to seek help from other sources. The current study sought to explore Polish migrants' responses to distress, with a focus on views about accessing psychological services. METHODS A cultural psychology framework using Charmaz's social constructionist method of grounded theory was adopted in the design of the research. Field work was conducted within the Polish community, and semi-structured interviews took place with Polish community members and key informants. Utilising data from a range of sources allowed for triangulation of the data, and credibility was further enhanced by member checking. Data were analysed using guidelines outlined by Charmaz supported by NVivo software. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION Participants' responses to distress were congruent with their sense of identity and the norms of the social groups with which they identified. Polish cultural values emphasising family closeness, traditional gender roles and discomfort with difference influenced participants' help-seeking strategies. The majority of participants preferred to seek help from a close inner circle of family and friends, at least in the first instance. Participants from working class rural backgrounds appeared to adhere more strongly to traditional values and often saw psychological services as irrelevant to them, whereas seeing a therapist was viewed as fashionable for those from urban, middle-class social groups. Disappointment with Scottish primary care services led to reluctance to approach the NHS for help with emotional difficulties, while those who were satisfied with their treatment were open to this possibility. Private services were preferred in Poland, which could result in preferences for seeking help from private Polish therapists in Scotland. This may also allow problems to be contained within the broader Polish community in line with Polish cultural values. CONCLUSIONS Clinical psychology services in Scotland may not be well-placed to meet the needs of Polish migrant workers. NHS services should attempt to be more responsive to the needs of migrant groups in order that they are not discouraged from seeking help if required. Furthermore, it may be helpful to find ways of working with other organisations which migrants feel more comfortable approaching.

This study is concerned with the relationship between the accumulation of Poland's massive hard-currency debt, from 1970 to 1983, and changes in American economic and political policy toward Poland. Prior to and during the 1970s, a tacit American policy of promoting economic and political ties with Poland can be discerned. But the domestic problems Poland exacerbated by mismanaging its debt to the West and the consequent declaration of martial law in 1981 led to the current discriminatory American policies of economic sanctions against Poland. As a result of this policy shift long-standing American political goals in Poland have been compromised.