Poland's Kin-State Policies

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).

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.

1. Karta Polaka, Poland and its Co-ethnics Abroad

2. Karta Polaka-New Wine in Old Bottles

3. The Paradoxical Nature of Diaspora Engagement Policies: A World Polity Perspective on the Karta Polaka

4. Divided Nationhood and Multiple Membership: A Framework for Assessing Kin-State Policies and Their Impact

5. Pragmatic Trans-Border Nationalism: A Comparative Analysis of Poland's and Hungary's Policies Towards Kin-Minorities in the Twenty-First Century

6. Minority Protection and Kin-State Engagement: Karta Polaka in Comparative Perspective

7. The Polish Minority in Germany: Marginal or Marginalised?

8. Between Two Kin-States: The Round Table Meetings on the German Minority in Poland and the Poles in Germany 2010-2019

9. Relations Between Polish Immigrant Organisations in Germany and Institutions of the Polish and German States

10. Does Polish Origin Matter? The Integration Challenges of Polish Card Holders in Poland

11. Identities of and Policies Towards the Polish National Minority in Lithuania

12. National Bonds, Foreign Policy and the Future of Europe