The Role of Foreign Banks in Poland

The paper examines the process of the Polish banking sector's internationalisation, with a particular intention of describing incentives and the impact of foreign banks entry. In order to carry out an assessment of changes in the banking market structure and banks' performance, the study introduces arguments and motivations of foreign capital inflow into local financial systems with implications for the stability and the development of the banking sector. The role of foreign capital in the Polish economy derives from an analysis of the effects of foreign banks penetration, in terms of changes in competitiveness, efficiency, and stability of the banking sector. An assessment of concentration level and development prospects have also been included.     

二战后在华犹太人研究

第二次世界大战结束后,在华犹太人逐渐离去。在欧洲犹太难民、塞法迪犹商和俄国犹太人这三个群体的内部,不同的人在不同时候离去的原因是不一样的,不能刻意归于政治原因和意识形态因素。在文革前的17年里,仍然有许多犹太人生活在新中国,他们的主要组织上海犹太社团委员会在中国政府支持下顺利开展工作。同时,香港的犹太社团一直十分活跃。当中国改革开放后,许多犹太人又回到了内地,出现了新的犹太居民群体,积极参与当地的新一轮发展热潮。     

Staging Traumatic Memory: Competing Narratives of State Violence in Post-Communist Hungarian Museums

The article examines the way three contemporary Hungarian museums–the House of Terror Museum, the Jewish Museum and the Holocaust Memorial and Documentation Center–represent the history of the Holocaust and the history of Jewish/non-Jewish relations. Reflecting different political agendas, each of the three museums offers a different interpretation of how the Holocaust fits into the larger narrative of Hungary's 20th century history. The article argues that post-communist public memory has been constructed through debates about these histories. By analyzing the three museums' displays, narratives and the debates surrounding them, the article argues that Hungarian public discourse has yet to come to terms with the meaning and place of “Jewishness” (and the way it has informed “Hungarianness”) in modern Hungarian history. Despite the centrality of Jews and Jewish-non-Jewish relations to the museums' narratives, none are able to offer a clear definition of what “Jewishness” means and how it functioned at different times throughout the 20th century.     

The Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow: Judaism for the masses

In 2012, a new Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center opened in Moscow – an event unthinkable during the Soviet regime. Financed at the level of $50 million, created by an international crew of academics and museum designers, and located in a landmark building, the museum immediately rose to a position of cultural prominence in the Russian museum scene. Using interactive technology and multimedia, the museum's core exhibition presents several centuries of complex local Jewish history, including the Second World War period. Naturally, the Holocaust is an important part of the story. Olga Gershenson's essay analyzes the museum's relationship to Holocaust history and memory in the post-Soviet context. She describes the museum's struggle to reconcile a Soviet understanding of the “Great Patriotic War” with a dominant Western narrative of the Holocaust, while also bringing the Holocaust in the Soviet Union to a broader audience via the museum. Through recorded testimonies, period documents, and film, the museum's display narrates the events of the Holocaust on Soviet soil. This is a significant revision of the Soviet-era discourse, which universalized and externalized the Holocaust. But this important revision is limited by the museum's choice to avoid the subject of local collaborators and bystanders. The museum shies away from the most pernicious aspect of the Holocaust history on Soviet soil, missing an opportunity to take historic responsibility and confront the difficult past.     

Moving citizens: citizenship practices among Polish migrants in Norway and the United Kingdom

ABSTRACT

Following post-EU-accession migration, Poles currently form the largest group of foreign nationals in Norway and the second largest group of foreign born residents in the United Kingdom. Given the considerable volume of new arrivals, there is a growing literature on Polish migration to both countries; however, there is little comparative research on Polish migration across different European settings. By exploring how Polish migrants reflect on the possibilities of settlement or return, this paper comparatively examines the effects that permanent and ‘normalised’ mobility has on Polish migrants’ self-perception as citizens in four different cities. In addition to classic citizenship studies, which highlight the influence of a nation-state based institutionalised citizenship regime, we find that transnational exchanges, local provisions and inter-personal relationships shape Polish migrants’ practices of citizenship. The resulting understanding of integration is processual and sees integration as constituted by negotiated transnational balancing acts that respond to (and sometimes contradict) cultural, economic and political demands and commitments. The research is based on semi-structured interviews and focus groups with a total of 80 respondents, conducted in two British and two Norwegian cities that experienced significant Polish immigration, Oslo, Bergen, Bristol and Sheffield.