Hungary is a prime example of how to create an uneven playing field. The opinion polls for the 2022 elections were close - the opposition had no chance to win.

The euro crisis has brought about remarkable changes in the economic governance of the European Union (EU) and consequently in the ways the executives can be held to account. By focusing on the interactions between national parliament and government in Poland, the fifth-largest EU member state by population, this chapter discusses debates concerning the EU annual cycle of fiscal and economic surveillance - the European Semester, related in particular to its most important element – the Country Specific Recommendations (CSRs). The goal of this paper is to assess how parliamentary scrutiny affects the level of implementation of CSRs. The positions of Members of Parliament (MPs) towards CSRs and connected arguments expressed in parliamentary discussions are explained by applying an analytical framework of justification and contestation as two basic forms of accountability. On accountability dimension, most questions, which were asked by both majority and opposition MPs, fall within the justification category in which the demands for explanation or information from the representatives from two ministries responsible for finance and development were made. On the efficiency dimension, one can hardly see any link at all as the scrutiny of the CSRs has a limited impact on their implementation.

Like other developing countries, Poland based its interwar monetary policy on the gold exchange standard. Following a bout of hyperinflation , Władysław Grabski’s 1924 reform led to the establishment of the Bank of Poland. Early efforts to return to the gold standard, however, were not entirely successful. In 1925, an economic crisis weakened the zloty dramatically, before futher monterary reforms were introduced in 1927. Post-war monetary instability made Poland reluctant to abandon the gold standard after 1929 and foreign exchange controls were first introduced as late as 1936. The central banks reluctance to abandon the gold standard contributed to the depth and persistence of the Great Depression in Poland. The chapter thus reveals the challenges faced by a newly-formed country lacking adequate reserves and a financial track record to stabilise its currency; it also points to the path dependent nature of interwar monetary policy: the hyperinflation of 1919-23 and the crisis of 1925 created the belief that any easing of monetary policy would trigger an inflationary spiral. When the Great Depression struck, exchange rate stability trumped all other macroeconomic and financial policy objectives.

This chapter is dedicated to the Wilhelmine Empire (Kaiserreich), an era that saw the apex of German imperial expansionism. It was a period ripe with numerous intersecting visions of supersessionism, expansion, and domination. A major challenge for Baeck was Adolf Harnack’s turn-of-the-century popular lectures and subsequent book titled The Essence of Christianity. Harnack presented a pure and positive essence of Christianity against a legalistic and negative Jewish tradition. Baeck’s first major work, The Essence of Judaism (1905) responds to Harnack and subsequent challenges from the History of Religions School. Yet this type of response was shaped by the heydays of German imperialism, both abroad and in the attempts to colonize the former Polish territories. This is a formative phase for Baeck’s thought and many of his ideas, including the distinction between state power (Macht) and spiritual energy (Kraft), his views on Jewish missionizing, as well as his relation to Zionism. All these emerge in this period and continue to play a role in his thought throughout his life.

The chapter describes the main nature conservation challenges in Poland, its main policy responses and actions, and their achievements and lessons, primarily over the last 40 years. This covers the country’s natural characteristics, habitats and species of particular importance; the status of nature and main pressures affecting it; nature conservation policies (including biodiversity strategies), legislation, governance and key actors; species measures (e.g. regulation of hunting and fishing, and species action plans); protected areas and networks; general conservation measures (e.g. concerning development planning, agri-environment schemes, forestry, water management and pollution); nature conservation costs, economic benefits and funding sources; and biodiversity monitoring. Likely future developments are also identified. Conclusions are drawn on what measures have been most effective and why, and what is needed to improve the implementation of existing measures and achieve future nature conservation goals.

As the Middle Ages drew to a close, however, a rising share of Europeans were eating fish from systems other than their natural local waters. By 1500 around Paris, for instance, elite menus featured carp and headless codfish, while lesser folk made do with herring and haddock. Beside the Mediterranean, Valencia was receiving millions of Atlantic sardines and hake, while Romans could get herring from the North Sea, Norwegian cod, and tuna from Sicily. Both cultured carp and fishes from Europe’s economic frontiers changed Europeans’ relations with aquatic nature.

Carp aquaculture colonized nature, creating artificial habitats to rear an organism alien to western Europe. Late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century financial records and instructional manuals from east-central Europe detail an original and distinctive European mode for farming fish. Those practices provide a benchmark to identify and trace their creation in twelfth- to thirteenth-century France – where the carp was a late invader – and subsequent spread eastwards of the innovation. Human-controlled aquaculture created thousands of local ecological revolutions across interior Europe, providing inland elites with a steady source of live fresh fish, serving as a vehicle of elite power over subjected nature and people, and replacing indigenous ecosystems with private anthropogenic habitats tailored for domesticated, soon also feral, invaders. For contemporary writers fish had become objects of human agency.

Chapter 3 discusses the war from the attack on Poland in 1939 to the invasion of Norway, the Low Countries, and France in 1940, and Yugoslavia and Greece in 1941. Chaplains accompanied Wehrmacht units wherever they went, and this period of Blitzkrieg, rapid German victories, proved formative for them. Germany’s conquests opened up new territory for chaplains, who seized the opportunities to assert their loyalty and prove their worth. They gained an enormous audience of soldiers and also ministered to Christian populations in conquered and occupied territories. Chaplains witnessed and got used to German attacks on civilians, such as terror bombings in the Netherlands, shooting of prisoners in Norway, and rampant abuse of Jews and destruction of Jewish sites in Poland. This chapter makes extensive use of chaplains’ periodic reports, submitted up the chain of command. A surprising number of reports refer to chaplains ministering to German soldiers condemned to death by military authorities. The Wehrmacht chaplains projected an image as heroic, battle-hardened men who strengthened the resolve of the troops and built bridges to the homefront, for instance by providing Christian burials.

This snapshot is a tapestry of voices from the major groups who came after the second great caesura, 1989, the end of Cold War and the opening toward the East: the ethnic Germans (2.3 million after 1987 and Gorbachev’s Perestroika) and 230,000 Jewish “quota refugees” (from 1990 onwards), both from the former Soviet Union and subjects of subsequent chapters; and many others, such as the ethnic Germans from Poland or Polish labor migrants who work in Germany but continue to live in Poland. It also touches on the 400,000 Soviet soldiers who left the former GDR until 1994 and the Eastern German “interior” migrants who began commuting to jobs in Western Germany.

The German invasion and early occupation of Poland drained the resources of Jews and their communities even before ghettoization. On the individual and household levels, many Jews were severely impacted by the German seizure of their assets, the inability to work, and the requirement to expend limited resources even before ghettoization in order to provide food for themselves and their families as a result of these financial realities. Violence during the early occupation also could serve to pauperize a family through seizing, killing, or severely injuring a key family member on whom the household relied for support through work. Migration due to the war also sometimes served to sever social networks or access to assets as well as diminish social standing which endangered some individuals and families. The pressures placed on individuals and households left them more vulnerable to hunger and starvation. At the very point at which individuals and households were most in need of support, communities faced multiple challenges. These included an influx of refugees, seizure of community resources, and the flight of communal leadership during the occupation.