KINPOL: Observatory on Kin-State Policies

Ethnopolitics Special Issue: Poland’s Kin-state Policies: Opportunities and Challenges, Forthcoming January 2021

Andreea Udrea, David Smith, Karl Cordell

The special issue edited and introduced by Dr Andreea Udrea, Professor David Smith and Professor Karl Cordell deals with what has become one of the most contentious features of European politics in recent years – namely, the increased engagement of many states with their co-ethnics abroad. Discussion of this topic has been strongly anchored in the security paradigm, yet a review of the broader European picture shows that kin-state engagement can have a positive societal impact when it actually responds effectively to the claims formulated by co-ethnics abroad. This new collection of articles offers new insights into these issues and debates, by examining Poland’s fast-evolving relationship with Polish communities living beyond its borders. Its central focus is the Act on the Polish Card (generally known as Karta Polaka), which has received surprisingly little attention within the growing academic literature on kin-state – kin minority relations. Drawn from a joint academic-practitioner conference at the University of Warsaw in May 2019, the special issue engages comprehensively with the ‘what?’, the ‘why?’ and the ‘for whom?’ of Poland’s kin-state engagement, tracing policymaking processes and the underlying political agendas that have shaped them, situating Karta Polaka in relation to broader conceptual and normative debates around kin-state and diaspora politics and exploring how kin-state engagement has been received in neighbouring states (Ukraine, Germany, Lithuania) and the implications it has carried for the Polish communities living in these countries. Overall, the volume highlights how the issue of co-ethnics abroad is increasingly being instrumentalised, most especially for the purposes of attracting labour migration to resolve the demographic crisis in Poland. This in turn has had significant and rather negative implications for the fate of Polish minorities in their home-states. By exploring the different rationales of this instrumentalisation, the volume situates Poland’s kin-state engagement more firmly within broader European political and normative developments, showing how it sits at the confluence of interrelated political trajectories of national conservativism and neoliberalism.

Poland's Kin-state Policies: Opportunities and Challenges Table of Contents

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First published: 29 July 2020