ABSTRACT
The starting point of this book was the somewhat astonishing observation that old modernist beliefs in progress and in the governability of human development are alive as always, although we are constantly enlightened and informed about the problems of ‘active intervention’, i.e. its remainders, dark sides, repercussions and unintended consequences. It seems, in fact, that the spirit of ‘active intervention’ is even more vivid than ever, and we have seen that it now reaches areas and dimensions of social life that have been widely untapped and unexplored until recently. As we have seen in the previous study the spirit of all-embracing social, economic and cultural mobilization has seized social spaces and regions in the literal sense. The previous pages have provided rich evidence of an all embracing world-cultural mobilization of sub-national areas in contemporary Europe. It has been shown that a ‘new regionalism’ that has spread in Western Europe during the past three decades has also expanded to post-socialist countries in Central and Eastern Europe and fostered a dynamism of structural change, even in areas of Poland which were until today widely considered to be ‘peripheral’ and ‘backward’.
