Act of March 11, 2022. on defense of the Homeland is a classic example of an “executive act” for the constitutional regulation of issues related to state security, including military security. The Homeland Defence Act contains the so far missing specification of the normative solutions contained in the Constitution of the Republic of Poland of April 2, 1997. They concern in particular the development of regulations concerning the following constitutional issues: the Armed Forces of the Republic of Poland, the duty of a Polish citizen to defend the Homeland, the President of the Republic as the supreme commander of the Armed Forces of the Republic of Poland and the Council of Ministers as the body that ensures the external security of the state and exercises general management in the field of national defense. The main goal of the legislator is to replace the archaic and incompatible with the current needs and tasks of the Polish state and the Armed Forces of the Republic of Poland regulations contained in the Act of November 21, 1967. on the general duty to defend the Republic of Poland.

Life plans of the inhabitants of the Polish-Czech borderland against a comparative background

The article concerns a part of the research carried out among learners and university students from the Polish-Czech border area (Prudnik, Nysa and Opole counties on the Polish side and Moravian-Czech district on the Czech side) within the Pradziad Euroregion Project. The theoretical aim of the project was to get to know the lifestyle and quality of life of the inhabitants of the Czech-Polish border area, their life plans and identity, as regards the activities of the Pradziad Euroregion, as well as the knowledge of young borderland inhabitants about the life and problems of their neighbours from abroad. The practical aim of the project was to raise awareness of the role of quality of life for the functioning of the society by popularising the issue (conferences, publications) and the possibility of enriching the knowledge of these young inhabitants. This article presents only the part of the research that deals with respondents’ opinions on life plans in the context of the Polish-Czech borderland. The analysis was focused on one of the specific questions of the research: What are the life plans of pupils and university students from the Polish-Czech borderland? The research results refer to the declarations related to plans to stay in the homeland, perceptions of the respondents’ place of residence, or perceptions of the different qualities of their own towns and countries. In the data analysis, statistical methods related to testing the statistical significance of differences between variables with the Chi-square test (x2) were applied.

Imagination of the HOMELAND of the inhabitants of the Belarusian-Polish-Lithuanian cultural and linguistic borderland (based on the material of Polish peripheral dialects)

The article discusses the concept of HOMELAND based on the material of Polish peripheral dialects on the territory of Voronovo district, Belarus. As a context, the author used selected dictionaries of other researchers of the “Polish language of Borderlands” in the Belarusian-Polish-Lithuanian borderlands, narratives of the inhabitants of the Myadel region (Belarus), memories of emigrants from the Vilnius region (Lithuania), as well as residents of Podlasie, Warmia and Mazuria (Poland). The author collected the material as records of continuous texts on various topics, it was not a purposeful study of vocabulary and semantics on the topic of the homeland. The method of cognitive definition proposed by Jerzy Bartminski, which provides for the reconstruction of the “mental object”, i.e. the maximum set of characteristics fixed in the language, was used in the article. As a result of the analysis of the material, similar features, indicated earlier by the researchers of this borderland, were found. Among the components of the imagination of HOMELAND, in the first place there was a warm attitude to native places (the emotional connection of a person with the place of birth and the period of childhood) and ancestors (including the deceased, the cemetery). The importance of the place of residence and neighbours (their own, ours, etc. people with similar experience), as well as religion (their own and neighbouring parishes, the cult of the Virgin Mary) was also emphasized. Less often, but expressively accentuated cultural (for example, traditions and language) and everyday signs of the concept (stability; private property; homeland where you can live). At the same time, more expressive than in other works, sketching of the ideological homeland by local residents was noticed (for the older it is the Second Polish Republic, for the younger – Belarus). According to the author, this is explained by the fact that among the respondents were, among other things, the residents whose ancestors participated in the uprising of 1863, fought with the Bolsheviks in the Polish-Soviet war, as well as those associated with the Home Army. In addition to the traditional point of view of an ordinary peasant/ petty nobleman, the perspective of a patriot not only of a “small homeland”, but also of a non-existent state (Second Polish Republic) is also considered.