Poland

European Journal of Political Research -     

French engagement versus British commitment. Was it interlingual miscommunication or political manipulation?

ABSTRACT

The efforts undertaken to establish the contemporary European Union started many years earlier. The history of establishing a pan-European organization is interesting not only for historians and economists but also translators and linguists as it is the history of interlingual communication (negotiations and agreements). One such negotiation was allegedly ineffective due to the difference in understanding the French term engagement and its English equivalent employed by translators and interpreters, that is to say the English term commitment. The authors aim at presenting the political background of negotiations and the social semiotic analysis of the terms in question in order to provoke the reader to find the answer to the question whether the negotiation was broken due to interlingual miscommunication resulting from erroneously chosen equivalent or it was destined to failure from the very beginning due to socio-political and economic interests of negotiating parties. In order to achieve that goal, the authors have analysed notes exchanged between the governments of France and Great Britain in course of negotiation. The history of negotiation and the linguistic analysis are combined to illustrate the complexity of meaning construction and the semiotic implications of the contextual dependence of meanings of terms and their dynamic evolution in time and space.     

Contextualising the Notion of Context in Jurilinguistic Studies

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique - Context is a notion that is commonly invoked in many linguistic studies, either with very...     

The Stability of 4-Chloromethcathinone in Blood and Vitreous Humor

We present results of our study on the stability of 4-chloromethcathinone (4-CMC) in authentic postmortem peripheral blood and vitreous humor samples. The stability of 4-CMC was determined in postmortem blood samples (for a period of 90 days) and vitreous humor (30 days) at three different temperatures: −15°C, +4°C, and + 23°C. The analyses were carried out using ultra-high-performance liquid chromatography coupled with triple-quadrupole tandem mass spectrometry (UHPLC-QqQ-MS/MS). In both materials, the lowest 4-CMC stability was demonstrated at room temperature. The blood samples stored in a freezer (−15°C) showed stability for the entire study period (90 days), while in the case of the vitreous humor sample stored at the same temperature the concentration of the substance decreased by 53% after 30 days. The study carried out in authentic postmortem blood and vitreous humor samples confirms the previous reports of 4-CMC instability in biological material. Authors suggest that the biological material should be stored frozen until analyses are carried out as soon as possible after collection of the material.     

Poland's conception of European security and Russia

This article examines the problem of contemporary bilateral relations between Poland and Russia. Its thesis largely attributes the rivalry of these two states in Eastern Europe to conceptions relating to the balancing and bandwagoning of power. This rivalry can be put down to the fact that Polish-Russian relations are being developed within broader global processes such as Russia's relations with NATO, the USA and European Union. The greatest obstacle to the maintenance of mutually beneficial relations is the sensitive issue of security. In recent years Poland has consistently underlined its willingness to reinforce NATO's mutual defense mechanisms by supporting the organization's continued presence in Central-Eastern Europe. This issue has been compounded by Poland's striving to bring the countries of Eastern Europe (especially Ukraine) into closer affiliation with Western institutions favoring European integration, which is evidently perceived as interference in what is regarded by Moscow to be a sphere of Russian influence. This has provoked a number of serious crises in bilateral relations between Poland and Russia since the Euro-Maidan Revolution in Ukraine. Russian plans to install new (Iskander) missile systems close to the Polish border and Poland's effective attempts post-2014 to extend NATO presence within its own country testify to the scale of conflicts of interest between the two states and the lack of trust afforded by both sides. The issues highlighted in this paper are of great importance, since they not only enable the complexity of Central European issues to be more fully comprehended but also help to elucidate other global actors' conceptions relating to cooperation with Europe.     

Managing the difficult past: Ukrainian collective memory and public debates on history

This article analyzes the status of difficult historic events in Ukrainian collective memory. Difficult elements of collective memory are defined as those which divide society on basic matters, such as identity and national cohesion, and events which are being actively forgotten because of the role of Ukrainians as perpetrators. Three such issues were analyzed: World War II and the role of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), the Holocaust, and the ethnic purge of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia in 1943–1945. Utilizing data from quantitative and qualitative studies, the author showcases the significance of these issues for contemporary Ukrainian identity and Ukraine’s relations with its neighbors. In particular, the evaluation of World War II and the role of the UPA in Ukrainian history polarizes Ukrainian society to a great degree. At the same time, this element of national history is used to construct a common, anti-Russian identity. The difficulty of relating to the memory of the Holocaust and the ethnic purge in Volhynia is of a different character. These events are problematic for Ukrainian collective memory because they demand a painful settling of accounts with the past. At present, only Ukrainian elites are willing to work on these subjects, and only to a limited degree, while the common consciousness either denies or ignores them altogether.     

Population Pressures and the North–South Divide between the first century and 2100

This article examines the relationship between the populations of the more and less developed societies between the first century and 2100. Such an analysis reveals a changing dependency between the level of development (and GDP) achieved and population numbers between the first century and 1998. In relation to the past the article suggests a dynamic model for dividing the world into more and less developed areas. In relation to the present and the future it bases the population analysis on the developmental division of the world as published by one of the co-authors of this article. The article largely uses population estimates (with those referring to the past taken from Angus Maddison and those referring to the future from the most recent projections by the United Nations). Taking the 2013 UN projection as a model, it discusses three variants for demographic development in the North and South up to 2100. It argues that the more restrictive population growth variants of the UN projection predict a greater relative ‘Third Worldisation’ of the world than does the most dynamic projection.