Regionalizacja Polski w perspektywie doświadczeń europejskich

The notion of regionalization should be understood as denoting the process of determination of boundaries of administrative regions of a country and vesting the regional authorities with respective competences. In the countries of Western Europe the policy of regionalization started to be conducted already in the '60s, as the response to the appearance of the so called regional question. In the subsequent years active regional policy was initiated first of all in France, Italy and Spain, as well as in The Netherlands. This policy found its reflection also in the activities of the Common Market bodies (presently - European Union), whose evidence can be seen in the adoption of the unified system of regional breakdown into the units called NUTS, as well as in the granting of broad support for the idea of the transboundary regions, frequently referred to as euroregions. After 1989 this experience of the countries of Western Europe in the conduct of regionalization policy started to inspire the politicians and experts dealing with the regional problems in Central and Eastern Europe. This can most distinctly be seen in Poland and in the Czech Republic. The reform of the local authority system which occurred in 1990 in Poland entailed liquidation of the second level of the self-governmental bodies. In this situation the government took in 1992 the decision of re-establishment of poviats (counties). Parallelly to the discussion concerning reappearance of poviats the question emerged of modification of the existing division of Poland into voivodships (provinces). Besides this, a number of transboundary regions were created.