UNIVERSITY OF ŁÓDŹ Department of Political Geography and Regional Studies GOVERNMENTAL RESEARCH INSTITUTE Silesian Institute in Opole SILESIAN INSTITUTE SOCIETY HISTORICAL REGIONS IN THE STRUCTURES OF EUROPEAN UNION Historical divisions of the territory in Central Europe and in different states of the world REGION AND REGIONALISM No. 10 vol. 2 edited by Krystian Heffner Łódź–Opole 2011 CONTENTS Foreword (Krystian Heffner) .................................................................................. 5 Section I HISTORICAL REGIONS IN THE CENTRAL EUROPE 7 Andrzej R ĄCZASZEK Territory, borders, borderlands and development prospects .................................. 9 Waldemar CUDNY Role of the Łód ź Region in the united Europe ....................................................... 27 Krystian HEFFNER and Brygida SOLGA Historical Silesia in the European Union structures ............................................... 37 Marta CHMIELEWSKA and Alicja SZAJNOWSKA-WYSOCKA Upper Silesia as a historical region of cultural borderland ..................................... 59 Tadeusz SIWEK Hypothesis of changes of the ethnic and religious structure of the Czech Republic after the next census 2011 ....................................................................... 67 Ziemowit SZCZEREK Niniety years after Trianon: Hungarians out of Hungary ....................................... 73 Katarzyna LE ŚNIEWSKA and Marek BARWI ŃSKI Vilnius Region as a historical region ...................................................................... 91 Vidmantas DAUGIRDAS Depopulation – a new stage of a demographic change? ........................................ 105 Alexandru ILIE Ş, Jan WENDT, Dorina Camelia ILIE Ş and Vasile GRAMA Structures and typology of the Romanian borderland ........................................... 117 Marek BARWI ŃSKI and Katarzyna LE ŚNIEWSKA Lemko Region – historical region in the Polish-Slovakian borderland .................. 131 Section II TRANSBORDER COOPERATION IN THE CENTRAL EUROPEAN SPACE 155 Sylwia DOŁZBŁASZ Transborder cooperation in the Polish-Czech borderderland – activity at the local level level ......................................................................................................................... 157 Łukasz LEWKOWICZ Forms of transborder cooperation in the region of the Tatra and Sub-Tatra Mountains. The past and the present ...................................................................... 169 Halina POW ĘSKA Cross-border shopping in the Polish eastern borderland 179 Section III HISTORICAL DIVISIONS OF THE TERRITORY IN DIFFERENT STATES OF THE WORLD 191 William STANLEY Cultural preservance and change in a Pivotal American region ............................ 193 Vincenc KOPE ČEK, Tomáš HOCH and Vladimir BAAR The origins of toponyms and ethnonyms in the region of the South Caucasus ...... 201 Georgi GOGSADZE 2008 Georgia-Russia war: Geopolitical implications and international law .......... 213 No 10 FOREWORD The tenth volume of Region and Regionalism contains papers prepared by wide interdisciplinary group of researchers, dealing with areas and regions with complicated historical background, often divided by latter political, administrative and cultural borders which were involved different political, economic, cultural and social powers as well as triggered off numerous problems in the changeable circumstances at the turn of the century. An interesting example of such kind of European region is Silesia ( Śląsk , Slezko , Schlesien ) near by Polish-Czech border but may other examples of problem areas one should find in contemporary Eastern part of European Union and neighbouring countries. Nowadays as the discussion on the geopolitical, socio-economic and spatial terms of European regionalisation became a „hot” subject for sup- ranational organisation, as well as national states. Special attention must be paid to the question of future of historical regions in the structures of the European Union. It is a growing need for an exchange of scientific output concerning these issues 1. Increasing popularity of less state-centred and more regional understandings of power has also contributed to a questioning of established conventions about states and their territorialities in historical context as well 2. The clear bounding of territory by state is one of the major differences between modern European-origin political organisation and the 1 See: J. Agnew, Sovereignty Regimes: Territoriality and State Authority in Contem- porary World Politics, Annals of the Association of American Geographers , vol. 95/2 (2005), p. 437–461. 2 See e.g. R.B.J. Walker, Inside/outside: international relations as political theory, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1993. 6 Foreword prevailed previous types 3. Quite new political and economic concepts of European state spatial hierarchisation, transitional areas and zones in border- lands as well as inner-state disintegration to regional and local structures crushed earlier geopolitical ideas. The multicultural regions as well as such cities are regarded as spatial structures of complicated historical, political and social situation. Their future development and transformation will closely connected to the process of European integration and influenced geopolitical stabilisation in this part of the world. As the concept of Europe of regions in the Western Europe was born and developed and the national states with their complicated regional structures in Central-Eastern Europe have to fit European standards with numerous, ethnically, socially and economically homogeneous regions were compliated conglomerates of many groups and communities. Many metropolitan centres and regions, both through history and contemporary development, became places of new multicultural and multidirectional processes of creation of Europe-wide society. The question is what kind of social, ethnic, cultural and economic change take place in European cities and regions? Is it an integration process or process of growing social and political conflicts? Different aspects of those processes, appearing as in scale of metropolitan areas as whole regions, they are a subject of an interdisciplinary research and wide scientific discussion of political scientists, sociologists, economists and geographers. It is possible to compare a situation in different cases and reflection on its future development. The careful selection of papers included to the volume Historical Regions in the Structures of the European Union are concerned three groups of problems: historical regions in the Central Europe and the question of transborder cooperation in the Central European Space and chosen problems of historical divisions of the territory in different states in the World. The special attention was given to above problems in Central and Eastern Europe as well as to regions bordering the European Union especially eastward, was transitions of economic and social systems of the States appears most distinctly exactly in border areas and border regions and deeply touch a still existing historical regional structures. Krystian Heffner State Scientific Institute. The Silesian Institute in Opole, POLAND 3 E.g. R.J. Johnston, Geography and the state: an essay in political geography , St. Martin’s Press, New York 1982. Section I HISTORICAL REGIONS IN THE CENTRAL EUROPE Andrzej R ĄCZASZEK University of Economics in Katowice, POLAND No 10 TERRITORY, BORDERS, BORDERLANDS AND DEVELOPMENT PROSPECTS 1. CURRENT BORDERS OF THE REPUBLIC OF POLAND The following table lists Poland's European neighbours and the length of its inland international borders. It presents how, during the decade of 1988 to 1998, Poland's borders and neighbours changed. Although the current year is 2010, the basic data for years 1988 and 1998 is justified by the 1998 change in the country's administrative division, which was crucial to borderland areas. Besides, since that reform no changes the country's external borders have been made. Through a caprice of history, even though nothing changed in strictly geographical terms, Poland no longer borders any country it used to be neighbours with prior to 1989. The number of countries in the table and their names reflect changes in Europe's political map, which took place in the represented decade in Central-Western Europe. The figures representing borders' length in kilometres require some explanation. Total length of land borders in 1988 amounted to 3,014 km. In 1998 this length of the Republic of Poland inland borders (according to the source cited above) went down to 2,706 km. According to these changes, the former western border with what used to be the German Democratic Republic, after this country's unification with the Federal Republic of Germany changed from 460 km to 440 km. The southern border with Czechoslovakia, of 1,310 km, changed into a border with the Czech Republic and Slovakia with the total length of 1,008 km. The border with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic was 1,244 km long. Currently, the border with the countries which emerged after the collapse of the USSR measures 1,258 km. 10 Andrzej R ączaszek Table 1. Poland's neighbours on the map of Europe Year Country Border length (km) 1988 USSR 1,244 Czechoslovakia 1,310 GDR 460 1998 Russia 210 Lithuania 103 Belarus 416 Ukraine 529 Slovakia 541 The Czech Republic 467 Germany 440 Source: Rocznik statystyczny (1989), Rocznik statystyczny Rzeczy- pospolitej Polskiej (1999). The author does not know the reasons behind such inconsistencies.