Ethnic identity, tolerance, civil society : identification options of contemporary inhabitants of Upper Silesia

Abstract

For several years extremely heated, although engaging a relatively narrow group of the participants of public life, discussion on the perspective of country’s regionalization has been going on (Gorzelak, Jałowiecki, eds., 1993; Latoszek, ed., 1993). The thematic axis of this extremely interesting and multitrend discussion is the problem of the model of the territorial system of the state and the difference in opinions concerning this problem vary from strongly decentralized autonomous-self-government model and the democratic self-government model assuming preserving the unitary structure of the state and co-operation between self-government and state structures in the negotiative solving of conflict situations and, what follows, the necessity of practicing the active regional policy of the state (Kołodziejski, 1993: 284—285). The advocates of the first of these models stress first of all the benefits which country’s regionalization may bring for the economy and state management, putting an equation mark between regionalization and self-government reform aiming at decentralization of the system of government up to creating territorial autonomy (Bądkowski, 1990; Mażewski, 1991; Kwaśniewski, 1993; Kołodziejski, 1993: 279). (fragment tekstu)