Across Europe and beyond, political polarization has become a defining challenge of democratic life. Yet the debate often overlooks a structural driver of division: the concentration of power at the national level. Let’s Agree on Poland: A Case Study of Constitutional Design (Oxford University Press, 2025) — the outcome of a decade-long collaboration among 130 progressive and conservative intellectuals in the Social Contract Incubator (IUS) — argues that meaningful decentralization may be the most promising antidote to democratic fragmentation. As one abstract in the document notes, the book “proposes symmetrical territorial subsidiarity as the remedy for Poland’s endemic polarization and weak resilience,” showing how shifting authority closer to citizens can transform zero‑sum national conflicts into locally negotiated compromises.
Drawing on both rigorous institutional design and innovative narrative tools, the Polish blueprint reframes decentralization not as a threat to state cohesion but as a strategy for rebuilding trust. Several abstracts emphasize that decentralization empowers communities to “defend workers’ rights and resist xenophobia from the ground up” and that devolving fiscal and regulatory powers can “give regions genuine responsibility and ownership while reducing polarization at the national level.”
This session will explore whether the Polish experiment offers a transferable model for other democracies struggling with deep value divides. Can decentralization create the institutional space needed for civic friendship, mutual recognition, and cross‑ideological cooperation? Does Poland’s contractarian approach — designed jointly by conservatives and progressives — point toward a new social contract for polarized societies? And what lessons emerge from a reform process that combines constitutional engineering with imaginative storytelling to illuminate the lived consequences of institutional change?
By placing Poland’s proposal in comparative perspective, the discussion will ask a broader question: can decentralization, when designed strategically rather than opportunistically, become a structural cure for polarization — not only in Poland, but across democracies facing similar pressures?