The presented results relate to the study conducted in the period from December 2018 to March 2019, as part of the project “Law and the Economy. Challenges for Poland”2. According to the latest statistics, the role of NGOs is very important from a social point of view. In the context of public trust, the situation of NGOs appears much better than, e.g. the situation of the government. Edelman Trust Barometer (2018) results show that 54% of the Polish society trusts NGOs. The business sector comes second (43%), media – third (34%), and the government – fourth and last (25%). By its definition, the non-governmental sector plays the role of a free electron between society and the broadly understood state. However, due to the fact, that the scope of activities of NGOs in social space is significant, and even some tasks of the government sector are carried out by non-governmental organizations, it was justified to verify the public awareness of their functioning. The aim of the research was to verify how such a high trust index translates into social awareness within the area of NGOs

Social activity of railway workers’ associations in Poland in interwar period

The aim of the article is to present the activities of railwaymen’s associations and social activity in the period of the Second Polish Republic. Railwaymen belonged to numerous and very diverse social organizations, engaged in charity, cooperative, and sports work as well as local and national initiatives. Railway workers’ associations were one of the forms of supporting the Polish state in solving important social and living problems. Their activity is an excellent example of social commitment – the implementation of educational and cultural, social and living as well as health and recreational goals, not only of the railway community but also other social associations of the interwar period. The article presents the social activity of railwaymen undertaken within the associations, with an indication of their theoretical and legal foundations and practical ways of achieving their goals. The article is based on printed sources, including statutes and reports, normative documents, articles from magazines published in the interwar years referring to the issue under study, and contemporary studies. The presented examples of associations indicate that they played an important role in the socio-political, economic, educational and cultural life of the interwar period. The activities of railwaymen undertaken within the associations initiated many useful actions, which became a creative factor that had a positive impact on the life of this professional group.

Symbols as language signs of the expression of Fedor Patushnyak’s world perception

The article considers symbols as linguistic signs of expression of Fedor Potushnyak’s perception. The focus is on the fact that the symbol preserves a huge amount of information and is the key to understanding many mental and culturalhistorical phenomena. In fact, the symbols in a way «encode» the life of the people, forming its corresponding linguistic and cultural picture of the world. Every nation retains the richness of its traditions, which have been formed for centuries and which in today’s pragmatic world, unfortunately, are so easy to lose, especially if you seek a common cultural space. And this national and cultural code is fixed in the language; it is thanks to symbols that the cultural phenomenon is «objectified». Of course, not every cultural reality becomes a symbol, and not every token that names cultural reality has a symbolic meaning. A symbol «grows» only when reality acquires special significance in the life not only of a particular person, but also of society, religious community or cultural community, and the verbal symbol also needs traditions of word usage. A verbal symbol is a multifaceted open semantic structure that has the ability to detect several symbolic meanings in one context. The problem of determining the semantics of the symbol is due to its complex internal nature, ambiguity of interpretation, the dependence of interpretation on the individual reading of the text and the symbol in it. Each new reading of even the same or another text will evoke new associations and new interpretations, will involve other texts and symbols in this process. One of the links of Ukrainian symbolism of the 1930-s was the poetic work of F. Potushnyak, which absorbed the experience of Ukrainian and Western European modern culture. F. Potushnyak’s poetry is a holistic artistic system with produced key images-symbols, the lost aesthetic code of which must be rediscovered. Based on the symbolization of images of the sea, boats, distant, unknown pier, changes in nature, the poet models various existential situations of individual and universal existence in the infinity of living space, creates a paradigm of endless movement of humanity into the unknown , into the whirlpool of passions, impulses, dangers, dreams. Means of the latest poetic technique, contrasts of sounds and colors, polysemantism of images-symbols give the chance to recreate all the complexity of a person’s spiritual life.

On the 25th of September, 2015 the Polish Parliament adopted the act amending the 1989 Act on Associations. Though there had been eight subsequent amendments, the 2015 act was the first aiming to substantially adapt the Act on Associations – the first legal effect of the political consensus achieved within the Round Table negotiations of the then Communist government and the “democratic opposition” – to new social and economic conditions of Poland. 26 years of functioning of the Act have been the time of passage from “real socialism” to “democratic state of law” having to base, according to the 1997 Constitution, on “social market economy”, and from a practical isolation of Poland within its borders to its opening to the world, in particular within the framework of European institutions. The article sketches, also on the basis of the author’s personal experience due to his participation in drafting and legislative works, the course of the revision works initiated in 2009, in particular of parliamentary works on the 2014 President’s draft law, as well as their limited results achieved in the 2015 act. Analyses of causes of such limitation are presented on the plane of the most important items of the pre- -parliamentary and parliamentary debates, i.e. right of legal persons to associate on equal terms with physical persons (not included in the President’s proposal), right of foreigners to associate on equal terms with citizens (and inhabitants) of Poland (its application had been proposed by the President, but not included in the act), and legal effect of the, generally agreed, elevation of the status of “ordinary association” on functioning of the present ordinary associations that would not wish to become new ordinary associations; the latter question relates to the fundamental issue of the sense of the freedom of association.