Poland's Kin-state Policies: Opportunities and Challenges

The increased engagement of states with their co-ethnics abroad has recently become one of the most contentious features of European politics. Until recently, the issue has been discussed predominantly within the paradigm of international security; yet a review of the broader European picture shows that kin-state engagement can in fact have a positive societal impact when it actually responds effectively to the claims formulated by co-ethnic communities themselves.

Poland's Kin-State Policies: Opportunities and Challenges offers new insights into this issue 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). Tracing policymaking processes and the underlying political agendas that have shaped them, the volume situates Poland’s engagement within broader conceptual and normative debates around kin-state and diaspora politics and explores its reception and impact in neighbouring states (Ukraine, Germany, Lithuania). 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.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Ethnopolitics.

Andreea Udrea co-convenes KINPOL Observatory on Kin-state Policies at the University of Glasgow. With Professor David Smith, she led a two-year project entitled ‘Poland’s Kin-state Policies: Opportunities and Challenges’ funded by the Noble Foundation Programme on Modern Poland.

David Smith is Professor and Alec Nove Chair in Russian and East European Studies at the University of Glasgow, where he co-convenes the KINPOL Observatory on Kin-state Policies and the Glasgow Baltic Research Unit.

Karl Cordell is Emeritus Professor of Politics at the University of Plymouth.