No. 5(16)/2022 includes:
In the third English-language issue of our journal, we address problems which have already been signalled earlier by participants in the debate on the Eastern policy of Poland. After all, this is the issue of 2022, which will be remembered as the year of the Russian Federation’s military aggression against Ukraine. This aggression brings death or disability, and at the same time prompts refection on the essence of the state, the normative boundaries of actions of leaders guided by “political realism,” and the justification of their crossing of these boundaries.
Therefore, by presenting analyses of Vladimir Putin’s speeches of February 2022 in the “Articles” section, we want to show the rationale with which he justified not so much a “special operation” as a violation of the territorial integrity of a neighbouring state against the norms recognised in a memorandum signed by several states, including the aggressor and the attacked state.
A specific complement to these analyses is a reconstruction of the views of the conservative publicist Stanisław Cat-Mackiewicz on the Polish-Russian rivalry over Ukraine in the interwar period. Scholars of political thought can thus perceive an actual dimension of the long-lasting civilisational struggle. A struggle in which respect for the right to self-determination clashes with aggressive expansion. A struggle that makes one wonder both about the foundation of statehood and the goals pursued by leaders who deny the statehood of other nations, sometimes resorting to myths similar to, at other times different from, those honoured by those attacked. While undertaking a general reflection on the founding myths of the state, explaining their role and presenting their typology, we also publish texts indirectly related to the ongoing conflict, as they describe Lithuanian and Serbian state-building myths. The analyses were prepared by scholars looking “from the inside,” so they are highly original.