Transnational ties and ethnic activism: The case of Poland

Abstract

Spanish

French

The second half of the 20th century was characterized by debate on the implementation of minorities’ rights. Poland, similar to other Central Eastern European states, was not able to participate in this process until the 1990s. After 1989, there was a rapid increase in legislation on minorities’ rights in Poland. Simultaneously, ethnic groups entered the public sphere as actors who were able to legitimately voice their demands. While the anti-discrimination prescriptions created in the framework of supranational institutions and Poland’s democratic transformation facilitated the ethnic organizations’ activism, the supranational and domestic institutional environment was not decisive in determining different minorities’ levels of participation in the public sphere. This article argues that transnational linkages in which minorities are embedded variously empower them and allow them to break loose from the constraints imposed by the nation-state.

Keywords

ethnic activism Poland political sociology public sphere transnational networks

Introduction

The second half of the 20th century was characterized by debate on the implementation of minorities’ rights, both in the United States and Western Europe. Poland, similar to other Central Eastern European states, was not able to participate in this debate until the 1990s. With the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the issue of minorities’ rights legislation entered the political agenda of governments in all the ‘new democracies’. Since 1989, there has been a significant and rapid increase in legislation that refers to the protection of minorities’ rights in Poland.¹ Simultaneously, the end of the century was witness to a rising presence of minorities in the public sphere. It was only then, after decades of forced silence, that ethnic groups were able to voice their demands.

This article aims to explain the above-mentioned rise assuming that the democratic transition and the state’s determination to join the European structures, together with the need to comply with international norms on minorities’ protection, modified the structure of political opportunity, opening new possibilities for action to ethnic groups. The European Union influenced the candidate countries’ minority policies by making admission to the EU conditional on the candidates’ fulfilment of the Copenhagen Criteria. The Copenhagen Criteria require states to adopt the Acquis Communautaire, which among other things includes the development of institutions that guarantee respect for and protection of minorities. While it facilitated ethnic organizations’ activism, the EU law was not decisive in determining different minorities’ level of participation in the public sphere. I argue that transnational linkages in which minorities are embedded variously empower them and allow them to break loose from the constraints imposed by the nation-state in ways that make possible challenging domestic politics from outside the state’s boundaries. This article contributes to the literature on transnational networks by demonstrating that the quality of a network matters as much as its extensiveness in determining its effects on constituent groups. In particular, I show that embeddedness in more professional transnational networks gave a decisive advantage to the Ukrainian minority relative to the German minority when exploiting the new political opportunity structures in Poland. (It is worth underlining, at this point, that in this article I define minorities’ transnational networks as ties that link ethnic and national minorities settled in different states. The term ‘transnational ties’ also covers minorities’ links to supranational institutions, that is, organizations that extend across national boundaries, such as the United Nations, the EU or the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe [OSCE]. On the other hand, international links refer to the networks between minorities and their kin-states.)

My research is informed by the new institutionalism premise that political structures, in this case the EU and domestic setting, shape political results (Powell and DiMaggio, 1991), that is, the political mobilization of minority organizations. I also rely on findings in the transnational networks literature that emphasize the resources such networks can at times provide to groups that mobilize in order to improve their situation in a given state. The change in the political opportunity structure that resulted from Poland’s democratization and from the requirement to implement international minority rights legislation opened up new possibilities of action at the national level. I argue that this transformation has benefited ethnic minorities in Poland differently depending on the type and characteristics of their links to transnational networks. Only certain groups were able to draw on powerful ties to enhance their participation in the public sphere at the domestic level. It is essential to stress that from the vantage point of political mobilization the ethnic organizations that constitute transnational networks can exert considerable impact on the effect of a transnational network. It is through these ethnic organizations that novel norms and values (to which leading organization members are socialized by actively taking part in a transnational network) diffuse to junior or less prominent members. Thus, the internal structure and type of ethnic organization matter. In addition to this, the degree and type of empowerment of ethnic minorities are also influenced by the main goals pursued by dominant ethnic organizations within the network. Therefore, when analysing the influence of transnational ties, one should not overlook the type of ethnic organizations involved.

According to Skrentny, ‘to measure the boundaries of possibility, we must appreciate the importance of what the political actors themselves are usually very concerned with: their discourse, patterns of argument with which they can safely advocate political change’ (Skrentny, 1996: 233). Following Skrentny’s advice, this article uses ‘claims-making analysis’, as successfully applied to other topics by Ruud Koopmans and Paul Statham (1999a, 1999b, 2003). I apply this technique to the examination of ethnic minority claims in the public sphere. This technique allows for the analysis of the distribution of minorities’ claims, arguments and frames. In order to study ethnic group discourse and action, I gathered and coded newspaper data from 1992 to 2006 (with the exception of 2000 and 2001). The source of my sample is the Polish quality newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza. The articles were gathered from the Monday, Wednesday and Friday editions.² The unit of analysis is the political claim, defined as an act of strategic communication in the public sphere, entailing the expression of a political opinion or demand through physical or verbal action, which may take various forms (verbal statements, judicial rulings, political decisions, violent or non-violent public demonstrations, etc.) and be made by various actors, such as governments, MPs, political parties, interest groups, social movements and NGOs (see Koopmans, 2002).

The claims-making approach enabled me to examine the relationship between the minorities’ involvement in transnational networks and the presence of their demands in the public sphere. It is important to underline here that the number of ethnic minority claims is my measure of ethnic political mobilization in the public sphere. The number of claims made in the public arena informs us about the extent to which minorities were publicly active and capable of making their demands politically relevant for the wider Polish audience and policy-makers. I do not rule out the possibility that ethnic minorities engage in activities hidden from the public view. In fact, ethnic groups may lobby both national and kin-states’ governments. Nonetheless, lacking major economic resources, ethnic and national minorities or migrants find it difficult to exert pressure on decision-makers. Thus, they have to search for public visibility and support. As Koopmans et al. stress, ‘for most groups, and particularly those in immigration, successful lobbying must be backed by public visibility, resonance, and legitimacy’ (2005: 436).

The claims-making method must overcome two potential problems: the possibility of description bias (events might be reported in a distorted way) and the possibility of selection bias (not all events are covered by the press), as discussed extensively by Koopmans and Statham (1999b). Following their recommendation, and in order to avoid description bias, I focused only on the factual coverage of statements and events, disregarding comments issued by journalists. To address the potential of selection bias, I also follow Koopmans and Statham and restrict my focus to ethnic organizations’ activism in the public sphere. My focus on presence in the public sphere as the dependent variable makes the selection bias less problematic than in other research designs since ‘acts of claims-making become relevant – and potentially controversial – only when they reach the public sphere’ (Koopmans and Statham, 1999a). In other words, I do not examine all attempts to advance claims but exclusively those publicized, ‘successful’ (in terms of media coverage) and politically relevant ones that had a chance to become part of the public deliberation and decision-making processes. Importantly, only publicized claims can influence public opinion – and by and large what ethnic and national minority actors in Poland strive for is recognition and participation.³

For the purpose of this article, the impact of supranational institutions such as the EU, the OSCE and the Council of Europe on minority rights is taken as a constant that frames the Polish public debate and opens the possibility of participating in the public sphere to all groups in Poland. What we see, however, is that some ethnic organizations are more active than others. The hypothesis that I develop and test in this article is that ethnic minority groups that established links with transnational networks were more present in the public sphere than were other ethnic minority groups.

In the first section of the article, I illustrate how the new institutionalism and transnational networks literatures provide powerful tools to study ethnic political action. Then, in the second section I describe trends in the presence of ethnic groups in the public sphere and move to the explanation of ethnic minority groups’ mobilization levels. My focus in this article is on Ukrainian and German minorities in Poland. The reason for this choice is that the aforementioned minorities differ substantially both in the degree to which they are present in the public sphere and in the number of transnational organizations they belong to.

Neoinstitutionalism and transnational perspective: Complementary approaches to study the mobilization of ethnic organizations

Ethnic mobilization takes place in a complex environment where domestic and international legislation, norms, groups’ traditions and national culture and myths play an important role. This environment offers opportunities and at the same time imposes constraints that shape ethnic minorities’ action. Drawing on the new institutionalist paradigm, according to which ‘institutional frameworks define the ends and shape the means by which interests are defined and pursued’ (Scott, 1987: 508), it is possible to account for ethnic groups’ mobilization in Poland as a consequence of institutional change – namely the transformations in the domestic legislative framework that resulted from the application of the principle of conditionality enshrined in the EU’s Copenhagen Criteria. The transposition of EU law on ethnic minorities into national law not only provided ethnic minorities in Poland with new mobilization opportunities but, more importantly, it showed ethnic minorities what kind of goals they could aspire to. Indeed, the standards of minorities’ rights observance outlined in EU legal documents gave ethnic groups in Poland both a purpose and the appropriate tools to claim their rights in Poland. As Powell and DiMaggio insightfully state, ‘institutions do not just constrain options; they establish the very criteria by which people discover their preferences’ (Powell and DiMaggio, 1991: 11). Careful consideration of the structural environment is therefore needed when examining patterns of ethnic minority mobilization in Poland.

The new institutionalist perspective fails to account, however, for the different impact that general norms exert on distinct actors. This approach clarifies levels and changes in ethnic minority demands but it cannot explain differences in the mobilization levels of various groups. To answer this question we can draw on the insights of the recently flourishing literature on transnational phenomena.⁴

Mechanisms of transnational networks’ impact on minority groups

The scholarship on transnational mobilization points out that European integration opened up new opportunities for action only to those actors that were able to create a new type of capital reaching beyond the boundaries of the nation-state (Favell, 1998). In this section I outline several mechanisms through which transnational networks facilitate ethnic organization and solidarity.

Most scholars studying the topics that fall under the umbrella term ‘transnationalism’ define it as ‘multiple ties and interactions linking people or institutions across the borders of nation-states’ (Vertovec, 1999: 1). Researchers also agree that transnational practices can be studied both as dependent and independent variables. Beyond this agreement, however, one finds multiple approaches to the conceptualization of transnational activities.

The participation in transnational networks carries broad implications for members of ethnic groups. Network ties with supranational institutions and transnational minority organizations provide access to different regulatory environments, as described by Dicken et al. (2001). Polish minorities through participation in such networks may thus acquire new knowledge on the boundaries of legitimate action in the EU framework. They start to perceive inequalities at the domestic level and opportunities embedded in the EU arena in new ways. Indeed, as noted by Powell and DiMaggio (1991: 13) ‘Environments . . . penetrate the organization, creating the lenses through which actors view the world and the very categories of structure, action and thought.’

Besides studying the impact of transnational networks on local groups, the literature has analysed the functions that these networks fulfil. In her study of Turkish mobilization, Kastoryano finds that transnational networks are used to gain representation at the EU level in order to achieve recognition nationally. She convincingly argues that a Europeanization of the action does not necessarily lead to a Europeanization of demands, which often remain national (Kastoryano, 2005). One of the implications of this finding is that, thanks to the participation in transnational networks, groups gain access to information on the kinds of identities and rights that are currently promoted by European legislation. They can thus present themselves as similar to the groups that have already been recognized and supported by the EU, as described by Skrentny (2002).

The new institutional perspective suggests that transnational ties can become a source of practical and first-hand knowledge of the boundaries of legitimate action and of strategies that proved most successful for other ethnic groups. Through participation in transnational networks, minority leaders are socialized in the discourse employed by other ethnic groups and in the categories used by supranational institutions. At the same time, the monitoring of the experiences of peer organizations and of the enactment of the EU policies directed at ethnic communities, through participation in these networks, is a source of information for those who participate in them. More mundane but also important is the fact that networks can provide ethnic groups with access to information on funding opportunities available for organized actors at the supranational level.

Social networks are one of the organizational resources on which an ethnic organization can draw (Edwards and McCarthy, 2004: 127). I contribute to the theoretical discussion on social networks by demonstrating that the character of a network in which an ethnic organization takes part matters as far as the minority’s participation in the public sphere is concerned. Examining the German and the Ukrainian minorities’ claims-making leads me to advance the argument that the networks which provide cognitive resources can exert greater impact on ethnic participation levels in the public sphere than networks that offer solely access to financial capital. The Ukrainians, whose strong transnational ties provide them with access to vital cognitive resources, have mobilized to a greater extent than the Germans, who have not developed extensive transnational networks. The Germans have built close links with their co-ethnics in Germany, which, endowing them primarily with economic resources, have not influenced their participation levels in the public sphere.

Germans and Ukrainians compared

In this article I focus on the Ukrainian and German minorities in Poland. The comparison is of interest because these two groups differ significantly in the degree to which they are present in the public sphere and in the number of transnational organizations they belong to. The organizational level of Germans and Ukrainians is similar; that is, organizational density cannot explain variation in these minorities’ presence in the Polish public sphere. Since most of claims were made by the German and Ukrainian umbrella organizations, it is worth briefly examining their characteristics (see Table 1).

Table 1.

The organizations of the German and Ukrainian minorities in Poland

Number and type of ethnic organizations

Association of German Socio-Cultural Societies – has 10 regional branches, close to 600 local subdivisions, 6 associated members and 6 other cooperating organizations. There are more than 20 other, independent organizations supporting the umbrella one.

The Association of Ukrainians in Poland – has 10 regional branches, around 90 local subdivisions and 5 independent associated centres in large cities. 10 other organizations support the umbrella one.

Source: Author’s own elaboration on the basis of data gathered by ‘claims-making’ method, information on minorities’ web pages www.vdg.pl and www.zup.ukraina.com.pl and correspondence with minority leaders.

After the Communist regime collapsed in 1989, many local German grassroots minority organizations emerged, a number of which soon united under the umbrella of the Association of German Socio-Cultural Societies. At present, there are 10 principal associations at the voivodship, or provincial, level and close to 600 local ones clustered around the umbrella association. The German minority is tightly and rather centrally and hierarchically organized, with a grid of associations stemming from or allied with the main umbrella one. They draw heavily on a powerful, wealthy ally – Germany.

Turning to the Ukrainian minorities, their actions develop around the Association of Ukrainians in Poland (Związek Ukraińców w Polsce, ZUwP), which has 10 regional branches and 90 local subdivisions. Moreover, various separate Ukrainian organizations such as the Association of Independent Ukrainian Youth and the Union of Lemcos formally support and cooperate with the ZUwP. There are also independent organizations that undertake cultural and social activities in the main Polish cities.

Both minorities are thus pretty well structured internally. In both instances we find an umbrella association with a branch of local subdivisions and autonomous organizations (often grouping specific categories within the minority, e.g. gender, age or occupation) that collaborate with the main one. On the whole, the peak organizations of both minorities have integrated into the domestic political culture and are present at both local and national levels. There are of course differences in the number of associations but this is mainly due to differences in the sizes of the two minority populations.

There are slight differences in Germans’ and Ukrainians’ political representation levels. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, Germans seized the opportunity to send their representatives to parliament. In 1993, they gained two seats in the Sejm (the lower house of the Polish parliament) and three in the Senate. Since then, they have lost the Senate seats (1997 elections) and one seat in the Sejm (2007 election). Ukrainians managed to win one seat in the Sejm (from the Civic Platform party [Platforma Obywatelska] list) but in contrast to the Germans, they could not set up an electoral committee. Since, as Rabagliati (2001) emphasizes, the support for the German minority representatives is declining, one would expect the Germans to mobilize and present more claims in the public sphere. As the claims analysis shows, however, the Ukrainians put forward more demands than did the Germans.

The comparison of the German and Ukrainian minorities in Poland provides an opportunity to gauge the role played by a set of different variables in the extent to which ethnic minorities mobilize. I argue that the key explanation for the contrast is the extent and character of their participation in transnational networks. First, however, it is essential to look more closely at the two groups’ patterns of mobilization.

Trends in ethnic minority mobilization: Claims analysis

Figure 1 displays an aggregate frequency distribution of all minority actors’ claims over a period of 14 years.

Figure 1.

Time trends in the number of presented claims (all minorities)

The number of claims peaks in 1993 and then stabilizes at about 35 claims per year between 1995 and 2003. In the last few years the number of claims steadily decreases. A first intuitive explanation for these trends is that the very first years after the fall of the Iron Curtain created new opportunities for various advocacy groups to shape the ‘new order’. Once the new legislative and political framework was established, however, it became time-consuming and costly to push for changes in the recently approved legislation, because groups would have needed to spend large resources on convincing the wider public, and also because it is during the foundation period that the basic principles, ideas and norms on which a political system rests are established. The outcome of the discussion about ‘what is good’, ‘what is bad’ and ‘who we are’ (as a nation, citizens, society, etc.) has direct effects on the situation of minority groups. To illustrate this point, let me refer to the following example. Before negotiations at the ‘Round Table’ began in 1989, Poland was ‘officially’ an ethnically homogeneous, nationally unified country. Consequently, it was crucial for ethnic minorities to seize the opportunities available after 1989 to push for a redefinition of the concepts of citizen and nation. The process of redefinition concerned a long set of issues, norms and meanings: which groups constitute minorities, are ethnic communities entitled to special rights, is the compensation for past injustices right, for what categories of events should reparations be offered, etc. Had they not aired their opinions on these and other crucial topics at the beginning of the 1990s, ethnic communities would have missed a unique chance to influence the future character of the state.

Let’s now look at the distribution of claims brought by the two minorities at the centre of this analysis. Figures 2 and 3 display trends in publicized claims made by Ukrainians and Germans over a span of 14 years. Aside from peak fluctuations, publicized claims by the two groups follow a similar pattern. In both cases, the number of claims declines slowly over time.

Figure 2.

Time trends in the number of presented claims: Germans

Figure 3.

Time trends in the number of presented claims: Ukrainians

When we look at the nature of claims we see that the ‘unspecified public statement’ category is the most frequent, accounting for 57 percent of all claims in the case of Germans and 38 percent in the case of Ukrainians.⁵ The ‘other conferences/meetings, debate’ ranks second, accounting for 13.6 percent of the German claims and 25.7 percent of the Ukrainian.

In Table 2 we observe that compared to Germans, Ukrainians organized more meetings, wrote more public letters, gave more interviews and fewer press releases. In other words, Ukrainians undertook a more diverse range of actions in the public sphere.

Table 2.

The number and form of the German and Ukrainian minorities’ claims

	German	Ukrainian
Number and type of claims-making events	66 claims of which:	72 claims of which:
	Public unspecified statement: 57.6%	Public unspecified statement: 38.6%
	Other conferences/meetings:13.6%	Other conferences/meetings: 25.7%
	Public letter: 1.5%	Public letter: 12.9%
	Interview: 0%	Interview: 8.6%

Source: Author’s own elaboration on the basis of the data gathered by the ‘claims-making’ analysis.

The most striking finding, however, is that in the period between 1992 and 2006, Ukrainians made more claims than Germans did (72 vs 66) despite the fact that the Ukrainian minority is five times smaller than the German and is geographically more dispersed, which should hinder both organization and mobilization.⁶

Explaining the paradox: Transnational lives vs transnational organizational ties

This section of the article compares the German and Ukrainian communities in Poland. I demonstrate that Ukrainians and Germans differ substantially in the degree to which they have been involved in activities beyond the borders of the state and that this has had an impact on the amount of claims made in the public sphere. As my empirical analysis of the public sphere shows, the Ukrainians’ participation levels in the Polish public sphere are much higher than the Germans’. I argue that this contrast can be best explained by the fact that transnational organizational links have afforded the Ukrainian minority access to information on the most useful strategies of action in Poland’s new institutional setting. These links have also provided Ukrainians with an opportunity to familiarize themselves with the types of identities and rights supported by European legislation and present themselves as akin to the ethnic or national minorities that have already been recognized and protected by the EU.

To understand the contrast between Germans and Ukrainians we must distinguish between transnational lives and transnational ties. Germans lead transnational lives. Table 3 shows that almost 70 percent of the German population and only 2.7 percent of Ukrainians hold dual citizenship. The reasons for this sharp contrast are both economic and political. Germany is much wealthier than Ukraine and has a higher average salary. Until very recently, holding a German passport offered an additional benefit: access to the German and in general the EU employment market. Until 1993, Germany granted without particular restrictions a second citizenship to Poles ‘if their ancestors had lived on German territory before 1939 or if they had been re-naturalized as Germans between 1939 and 1945’ (Palenga-Möllenbeck, 2006: 3). Individuals who acquired German citizenship after 1993, however, due to changes in the German citizenship regime, were no longer entitled to the same social benefits as those who obtained it before. This has led to a preference among members of the German minority for shuttle migration over permanent settlement. Simultaneously, vast networks have developed between short-term migrants, their relatives in Germany and Poland, friends and neighbours. In short, many current members of the German minority in Poland lead truly ‘transnational lives’ (see, for example, Levitt and Waters, 2006; Smith, 2006). In the case of Ukraine, pull-factors do not intervene and neither significant shuttle nor permanent migration by Ukrainian Poles to Ukraine has taken place.⁷

Table 3.

Characteristics of the German and Ukrainian minorities in Poland

Variables	German	Ukrainian
Size	147,094	27,172
Territorial concentration/dispersion	Concentration:	Dispersion:
	71% in Opolskie voivodship	43.7% in Warminsko-mazurskie
	20.8% in ślśskie voivodship	13.6% in Zachodniopomorskie
		11.0% in Podkarpackie
		10.4% in Pomorskie voivodship
Schooling level	3.12% higher education	13.88% higher education
	18.05% secondary education	25.18% secondary education
	34.85% vocational school	13.71% vocational school
	38.95% primary (completed)	34.73% primary (completed)
	2.24% primary (not completed) and without education	8.65% primary (not completed) and without education
Dual citizenship	69.5% have dual citizenship	2.7% have dual citizenship
Resources	1. German Ministry of Foreign Affairs	1. Polish Ministry of Internal Affairs
	2. German–Polish Cooperation Foundation (Stiftung für deutsch-polnische Zusammenarbeit)
	3. Polish–German Youth Exchange programme
	4. Polish Ministry of Internal Affairs
	5. Polish local government
	6. Local NGO founded by two German ethnic organizations: Foundation for Silesian Development and Support of Local Initiatives

Source: Author’s own elaboration on the basis of National Census 2002, data available at: www.stat.gov.pl/gus/5342_PLK_HTML.htm; II Report for the Secretary General of Council of Europe on Poland’s realization of the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, at: www.mswia.gov.pl/portal/pl/118/5208/II_Raport_dla_Sekretarza_Generalnego_Rady_Europy_z_realizacji_przez_Rzeczpospoli.html; and minorities web pages www.vdg.pl and www.zup.ukraina.com.pl.

In contrast to the transnational lives that characterize the German minority, Ukrainians have focused more on developing broad transnational organizational ties. Table 4 displays the number and type of transnational minority organizations to which the German and Ukrainian minorities belong to and supranational organizations with which they cooperate.

Table 4.

Transnational network links of the German and Ukrainian minorities in Poland

Number and type of transnational network links	1. FUEN – The Federal Union of European Nationalities	1. FUEN
	2. Polish Bureau for Lesser-Used Languages (EBLUL, European Bureau for Lesser-Used Languages)	2. Ukrainian World Congress
		3. European World Congress
		4. Ukrainian World Coordination Council
		5. Polish Bureau for Lesser-Used Languages (EBLUL, European Bureau for Lesser-Used Languages)
		6. Cooperation with OSCE
		7. Cooperation with the Secretary of Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities
		8. Cooperation with the Council of Europe – division working on media issues (in the confines of projects carried out in Ukraine)

Source: Author’s own elaboration on the basis of the minorities’ web pages: www.vdg.pl and www.zup.ukraina.com.pl, and correspondence with the ZUwP leader.

It can be seen that the Ukrainians have joined three transnational organizations: the Ukrainian World Congress, the Ukrainian European Congress and the Ukrainian World Coordination Council (according to www.zup.ukraina.com.pl). Moreover, the Ukrainians in Poland cooperate with the OSCE within the framework of a project aimed at improving electoral transparency in Ukraine and have a representative in the European Bureau for Lesser-Used Languages. Also, an organization associated with the ZUwP, Zjednoczenie Łemków (the Union of Lemcos), is a member of the Federal Union of European Nationalities (FUEN). The Union of Lemcos also collaborates with the World Federation of Ukrainian-Ruthenian Organizations, with the US-based Organization for the Protection of Lemkowszczyzna and with the Union of Lemcos in Canada. Additionally, the ZUwP has established contacts with the secretary of the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities and with the Council of Europe. In sum, the Ukrainians, thanks to their ties to transnational minority organizations and cooperation with supranational institutions, have had an opportunity to become acquainted with the norms and discourse on ethnic group rights. These links, although rarely profitable in a direct financial sense, are crucial since they open up access to the ideology of minority rights, to the tactical know-how and to the information on funding opportunities available at the supranational level.

Turning to the Association of German Socio-Cultural Societies, we discover that it belongs to the FUEN and that it has a representative in the Polish division of the European Bureau for Lesser-Used Languages. These, however, are the only transnational organizations that the German minority in Poland has joined.

Information provided by the main minority organizations’ web pages about their respective goals and transnational ties offers further evidence of the Ukrainian minority’s greater involvement in transnational organizational networks compared to the Germans. Table 5 shows that Germans express most concern over issues of interest representation in contacts with Polish and German authorities and that their sole international partners are German associations. Meanwhile, Ukrainians have established a broad network of ties with a wide range of organizations in countries including Canada, Russia, Hungary, Slovakia and Estonia.

Table 5.

Goals of umbrella associations of the German and Ukrainian minorities in Poland

	Association of German Socio-Cultural Societies	Association of Ukrainians in Poland
Organizations’ goals	– Intermediation in problem solving between the organization’s members	– Maintaining the cultural identity of Ukrainian community in Poland
	– Representing interests of organization’s members in relations with Polish authorities, local associations and Polish social and cultural org.	– Development of good neighbourly contacts between Poland and Ukraine
	– Representing interests of organization’s members in relations with local and state authorities of Germany and with consulates and other diplomatic representatives in Poland	– Cultural, educational and publishing activities
	– Representing interests of organization’s members when they forge partner cooperation with other associations in Poland, org. of other minorities, German org. in Poland and abroad, especially in Germany and in German-speaking countries, also on economic grounds	– Cooperation with NGOs from PL, Ukraine, Hungary, Slovakia, Lithuania and Estonia in developing educational activities
	– Development of German culture and education	– Activities in favour of European integration and development of contacts and cooperation between societies
	– Taking care of development of German-speaking media	– Activities in favour of national minorities
	– Searching for funding possibilities	– Popularization and protection of human rights and liberties, civic liberties and activities supporting the development of democracy
	– Activities in favour of European integration and development of contacts and cooperation between societies	– International activities of ZUwP are an important element of the mission and programme of the organization
	– Popularization and protection of human rights and liberties, civic liberties and activities supporting the development of democracy	– In future, the development of cooperation with more NGOs from Ukraine and Russia is planned

Source: Author’s own elaboration on the basis of information available at: www.vdg.pl, www.zup.ukraina.com.pl and bazy.ngo.pl.

Also, while both Ukrainian and German organizations refer to the need to develop activities in favour of European integration and the popularization of human rights, Ukrainians use a separate web page (bazy.ngo.pl/search/info.asp?id=7659&p=zagranica) to describe their international engagement, which, as the web page indicates, has been an important element of the ZUwP’s mission and program since its founding. Moreover, Ukrainians openly lobby to improve relationships between Poland and Ukraine.

This contrast between the two minority groups cannot be explained through differences in the two groups’ average level of education. Although, as Table 2 shows, Ukrainians display much higher levels of education than do Germans, this should not have an impact on the cultural capital of those leading and staffing the minorities’ main organizations.

Differences in the levels of economic resources available to German and Ukrainian organizations are also an unlikely explanation of the contrasts observed. German organizations since their founding have maintained close links with associations in Germany of Germans expelled from Poland. It is in fact the organizations of German expellees that have been pushing for the observance of German minority rights since the early 1970s. The CDU–CSU–FDP coalition formed after the 1982 elections in Germany was also heavily involved in improving the situation of Germans in Poland. In 1984 it put forward a proposal in the European Parliament calling for Poland to stop discrimination (Fleming, 2002). These long-standing links together with regular capital flows from Germany are fundamental economic resources available to the German minority in Poland. To be precise, the Association of German Socio-Cultural Societies lists as its sources of funding the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the German–Polish Cooperation Foundation (Stiftung für deutsch-polnische Zusammenarbeit), the Polish–German Youth Exchange, the Polish Ministry of Internal Affairs, the local government and a local NGO founded by two German ethnic organizations: Fundacja Rozwoju Śląska oraz Wspierania Inicjatyw Lokalnych (Foundation for Silesian Development and Support of Local Initiatives). It was also Germany, which, in the early 1990s, granted citizenship to thousands of members of the German minority in Poland, that has opened the gates of the EU for them. Remittances by individuals who then migrated to the EU have also contributed to the region’s prosperity. In sum, Germans can count on Poland’s wealthy neighbour’s financial support whereas Ukrainians’ main source of funding are subsidies from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which cover expenses for major cultural events and everyday expenditures.

One may thus argue that the German minority did not push for wider rights because it already has what resources it needs. Yet, this is not consistent with predictions drawn from the literature on resource mobilization. As Edwards and McCarthy put it, ‘the availability of diverse kinds of resources to social actors and privileged access to them enhance the likelihood of effective collective action’ (Edwards and McCarthy, 2004: 142). Actually, if one scrutinizes the German minority’s electoral results, one detects a decline in support for German candidates. Also, the 2002 census shows a decline in the propensity of members of this ethnic minority to identify as such. Finally, since 1997 German organizations have had to compete for members against the Silesian Autonomy Movement. All these developments suggest that the organizations of the German minority had a strong motivation to be active in the public sphere. It is then not relative deprivation or lack of resources that made Ukrainians more visible in the public sphere. If anything, lack of financial resources would have prevented Ukrainians from mobilizing effectively. Yet academic studies have described cases of rather underprivileged communities that have overcome this lack of financial resources and mobilized. In particular, researchers have pointed out that at times ‘it was the creative deployment of human, cultural, and social-organizational resources by movement leaders’ (Edwards and McCarthy, 2004: 143), the groups’ ‘strategic capacity’ (Ganz, 2000), that contributed to these groups’ unexpected success. In sum, I would argue that material factors do not account for the contrasts in levels of political activism undertaken by the German and Ukrainian organizations. In line with Ganz, I consider other types of resources, namely, cognitive ones, as a more significant factor. These cognitive resources were scarce in the German movement but abundant in the Ukrainian one because of different levels of participation in transnational networks.

Conclusions

In this article I have argued that EU law and changes in domestic legislation, although significant, were not crucial in determining the German and Ukrainian minorities’ different levels of participation in the public sphere. Supranational and domestic regulations have created a favourable environment for ethnic groups and have established useful criteria for the observance of minority rights. They cannot account, however, for the contrast in Germans’ and Ukrainians’ mobilization.

The comparison of the German and Ukrainian minorities in Poland lends support for the argument that participation in transnational networks has had an impact on ethnic minorities’ levels of participation in the public arena. The Ukrainians, who have established vast transnational ties, put forward a proportionally much higher number of claims in the public sphere than the Germans. The Ukrainian minority’s network links at supranational level are broad, ranging from transnational ties to organizations established by Ukrainians abroad to transnational links with associations grouping distinct minorities and cooperation with supranational institutions, such as the OSCE and the Council of Europe. On the contrary, the Germans who lead transnational lives but whose transnational networks are scarce have mobilized less. My analysis suggests that transnational ties open up access to different sorts of capital otherwise unavailable to ethnic groups and thus empower them to be free from the limits established by the nation-state. I have argued that thanks to their participation in transnational networks, groups gain access to information on the kinds of identities and rights that are currently promoted by European legislation. Also, transnational ties can become a source of practical and first-hand knowledge of the strategies that have proved most successful for other ethnic groups and of information on funding opportunities available for organized actors at the supranational level.

Footnotes

Funding

Research reported in this article was generously supported by the scholarship FPU from the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science (AP2005-3756) and the postdoctoral grant awarded by the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences, Germany.

Acknowledgements

I thank Juan Díez Medrano, Christian Joppke, Susan Olzak, John D Skrentny, Michael Keating, Rebecca Emigh, Ulrike Liebert and three anonymous reviewers for insightful comments. I also thank Juan Díez Medrano, Benedict Hitchins and Kathryn Lum for improving the quality of the English.

Notes

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