Local Self-Government Against the State: Resistance of Polish Municipalities to Creeping Centralization

Research on the relation between cities and democracy focuses on the city as an urban form and as a democratic imaginary generative of radical democratic practices. Established institutions of local and state government are often construed as barriers to such practices. There is a need to explore possible forms of territorial government bodies and modes of governance that could be supportive to them instead. This paper traces the revival of local self-government in Poland as an emancipatory strategy against the communist regime and analyzes its recent resistance to the democratic backsliding of the authoritarian central government. By way of historical ontology and policy instrument analysis it shows that appropriately designed institutions of local government can spur democratic practices, and, if given time, these in turn can engender a robust culture of self-governance. It proposes that local self-government envisioned by Polish anti-communist opposition prefigures institutions supportive to radical urban democracy.