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Politicization of Ethnicity: The Moravian-Silesian Movement in the Czech Republic and the Silesian Movement in Poland—A Comparative Approach

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 November 2019

Anna Muś*
Affiliation:
Faculty of Social Science, University of Silesia, Katowice, Poland
*
*Corresponding author. Email: anna.mus@onet.eu

Abstract

Ethnoregionalism in Europe is a phenomenon usually studied in the context of Western Europe. Still, in Central and Eastern Europe, there are some social and political movements that can be categorized as ethnoregionalist. The phenomenon started to play a role even before the Great War and in the interwar period, but was suppressed during the times of socialist regimes. It resurfaced immediately after 1989 during the times of transformation of political systems to fully democratic systems when problems of decentralization, authority, and division of power became openly discussed. In this article, I compare two such movements in the context of their political potential. The Moravian-Silesian movement in the Czech Republic and the Silesian movement in Poland have both similarities and differences, but the article mostly focuses on the evolution of these movements.

Type
Article
Copyright
© Association for the Study of Nationalities 2019

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