ABSTRACT
At first sight, Poland is not a country that possesses any discernible federal tradition. However, that belief would not be entirely correct. Of course modern Poland is not a federal state, but as is made clear below, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth (1569–1795) possessed what would now be termed as prototypical federal arrangements. Furthermore, the Second Polish Republic (1918–39), toyed with territorial and cultural autonomy in an effort to promote closer identification on the part of minority populations with the Polish state, only to all but abandon them from 1930, in the wake of growing armed resistance to Polish rule, particularly among the Ukrainian population. However, modern Poland experienced devolution prior to accession to the EU in 2004 and the reconfiguration of the voivodeships (provinces) that took place was in part consequent on the demands of Poland’s German minority. In light of that, this chapter seeks to establish two things. The first is to assess Germany’s relationship with Poland in order to better understand modern Polish attitudes towards Germany and the Germans. Secondly and bearing in mind that federalism is identified in Poland as being Germanic, to establish why, despite a historically grounded quasi-federal tradition, neither federalism as classically defined, nor indeed federacy is seen as being suitable for today’s Poland. Yet, the chapter concludes that in order to accommodate and integrate its German minority fully, Polish elites might not use territorial autonomy via federalization, but need to recognize and promote federal values, indeed a federal spirit, as promoted by Michael Burgess in his 2012 book In Search of the Federal Spirit. Some of these federal values have been demonstrated by Polish elites in the 1990s and 2000s by granting more rights to the German minority and also incorporating it into local and regional governments. A key challenge however is to keep the commitment to these federal values alive in particular since they are not protected via territorial autonomy (i.e. federalism).
