Legal Culture · Legal Culture under Stalinism in Poland

Legal Culture under Stalinism in Poland

The objective of the project "Legal Culture under Stalinism in Poland" was to describe the legal culture in Poland under communism on the basis of cultural texts, especially films and literature. The experience of communism caused Polish citizens to distance themselves from laws and legally binding regulations and to use the strategy of “playing the law”. This means that members of the democratic opposition, while they understood that authorities treated communist law instrumentally, acted as if their basic rights were binding both for them, and for the authorities. The strategy in the long run was of considerable importance for the evolutionary exit from communism. Cultural texts: films and literature, serve as a rich source of information about popular ways of on the one hand, using the law by the authorities, and on the other, understanding the law by the citizens and reacting to it in everyday life. Legal culture is one of the most important spaces where European integration takes place. The implementation of European law in CEE cannot proceed by means of thoughtlessly copying the solutions from Western legal culture. This has been particularly well visible since in countries like Poland and Hungary in the recent years took on a new course towards the rule of law and European Union. This project's aim was to develop a context-sensitive conception of legal norms implementation by investigating the deep roots of a particular legal culture. This was done with the consciousness that such a task should not be left to a small number of directly engaged officials and administrators, but should be supported by the best methodology and the most innovative scholarly research. The project provided the framework of notions, tools, and materials, needed to undertake such a process of understanding. Conducting comparative research on the basis of cultural texts and currently available works of historians and sociologists allowed me to investigate: (1) How the contents of these texts reflected and reacted to the oppression from the communist regime; (2) To what extent cultural texts were a medium in which strategies of "playing the law" were negotiated; (3) To what extent the rule-of-law environment of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) is different from that of Western Europe, and (4) To what extent the Polish example might help formulate more general conclusions about the previous and further implementation of EU legal norms in Poland and CEE, and might help us understand both the current crisis of the rule of law and constitutionalism in Poland, and the legal culture of new democracies, e.g. countries which participated in the Arab Spring.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз