Britain Gives Poles Democracy Lessons

LEICESTER, England —  Half a dozen town councilors stared at a three-story apartment block and debated whether a resident’s television satellite dish was unsightly.

Fifteen Poles, in Britain to learn how to run a democracy, stared in disbelief.

“We don’t pay attention to such small things, but maybe here they don’t have such big things,” said Maria Komarnicka, a professor of finance at the University of Wroclaw.

Satellite dishes have been an issue in Poland because the Communist government banned private ones in an attempt to keep Western influence out.

Now those restrictions are gone, but in the tough new economic regime that has replaced communism, most Poles can’t afford dishes. Britons can, but need permission from local authorities charged with preserving the landscape.

These are the kind of issues the Poles came to study. Komarnicka’s group is the first to undergo a two-week course in local government in Leicester, a town in central England.

It is part of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s aid program for Europe’s new democracies, built on a “know-how” fund for Poland and Hungary of 75 million pounds ($128 million).

Other East European governments also may get funds for programs ranging from how to operate a small business to managing large commercial enterprises and running city government.

Most of the Poles are academics who will train the 52,000 officials who were elected in May in Poland’s first free local elections in half a century.

“We have no tradition of local government; it died 50 years ago,” said Chris Mularczyk, deputy director of the Warsaw-based Foundation for Local Democracy, which oversees the training programs.

“In Britain, there is an ethos of local democracy, and even if you are a new councilor you instinctively have an idea of what to do.”

Mularczyk said those elected in Poland, however, “all of a sudden realize, I’m a councilor, but what does that mean?”

At Leicester, they learned that detail is a major part of local democracy.

One exercise simulated a dispute between a group of gardeners and a property developer, with the local council mediating.

“These people are much more hard-nosed and more concerned with principles than the British students who usually take the class, but this is small beer compared to a revolution,” said the exercise leader, Lynton Robins.

The dispute was resolved by having the developer pay off the gardeners. Then the visitors joined the Charnwood Borough Council in a large, green bus for a tour.

They visited an attractive, historic stone house the owner wants to extend.

Charnwood councilors mulled it over, standing in the tree-lined street. Course member Grzegorz Walendzik of the town council in Starachowice put a hand to his head.

“We haven’t enough schools or flats for people” in Starachowice, he said. “There is no time to visit individual houses.”.

Witold Kalinowski, a professor at the Polish Academy of Science, looked at the satellite dish earlier and said: “It is now proved for me that the words community and communism have the same etymological root. In Poland we may be in disarray and shambles, but we don’t have people deciding if we can have a satellite dish.”

John Greenwood, director of the Leicester Polytechnic program, replied: “Local democracy boils down to smaller things. As boring as many of these things are, we have to go through the procedures because we’re taking about people’s rights.”