Poland - Acknowledgments and Preface
Poland
The authors are indebted to numerous individuals and organizations
who provided materials, time, advice, and expertise on Polish affairs
for this volume.
Thanks go to Ralph K. Benesch, who oversees the Country Studies-Area
Handbook Program for the Department of the Army. The authors also
appreciate the advice and guidance of Sandra W. Meditz, Federal Research
Division coordinator of the handbook series. Special thanks also go to
Marilyn L. Majeska, who managed the editing and production process,
assisted by Andrea T. Merrill; to Teresa E. Kemp, who designed the book
cover and the title page illustration for chapter 2; to Marty Ittner and
who designed the other chapter title page illustrations; to David P.
Cabitto, who provided graphics support and, together with the firm of
Greenhorne and O'Mara, prepared maps; and to Tim Merrill, who compiled
geographic data. LTC Peter J. Podbielski, United States Army, provided
invaluable personal insights into the current status of the Polish
military; Marcin Wiesiolek of the Foreign Military Studies Office, Ft.
Leavenworth, Kansas, and Michal Bichniewicz of the Center for
International Studies and Defense Analyses updated the national security
section; and Karl W. Soper assembled basic source materials for
preparation of Chapter 5.
The Polish Information Agency (Polska Agencja Informacyjna) provided
the editor with a wide selection of current photographs of economic and
military activities. Ronald D. Bachman and Sam and Sarah Stulberg also
contributed numerous timely photographs.
The contributions of the following individuals are gratefully
acknowledged as well: Sharon Costello, who edited the chapters; Barbara
Edgerton and Izella Watson, who did the word processing; Catherine
Schwartzstein, who performed the final prepublication editorial review;
Joan C. Cook, who compiled the index; and The Printing and Processing
Section, Library of Congress, prepared the camera-ready copy under the
supervision of Peggy Pixley.
At the end of the 1980s, Poland, like the other countries of Eastern
Europe, underwent a rather sudden shift away from communist rule and
into an uncertain new world of democracy and economic reform. The events
spurred by the repudiation of Poland's last communist regime in 1989
demanded a new and updated version of Poland: A Country Study.
Because the emergence of the opposition Solidarity movement in 1980
increased the flow of information from communist Poland, reliable
coverage of the 1980s has been possible. Thus, this new treatment of
Poland is based on a number of authoritative monographs and a host of
scholarly articles. The most useful of those sources are cited in a
bibliographic summary at the end of each chapter.
The authors of this edition have described changes in the past ten
years against the historical, political, and social background of
Poland. Particular emphasis falls on the transition period that began in
1989 with the rejection of the last communist government. This period, a
historic watershed not yet concluded in 1993, promises to have permanent
impact on all aspects of Polish life. The authors have attempted to
present a compact, accessible, and unbiased treatment of five main
topics: historical setting, society and its environment, the economy,
government and politics, and national security.
Polish personal names are rendered with full diacritics. The spelling
of geographical names conforms to that approved by the United States
Board on Geographic Names, including the use of diacritics, with the
exception of commonly used international spellings such as Warsaw
(Warzawa) and Oder (Odra). On maps English-language generic designations
such as river, plain, and mountain are used. In the text, organizations
commonly known by their acronyms (such as PZPR, the Polish United
Workers' Party) are introduced first by their full English and Polish
names.
The body of the text reflects information available as of October
1992. Certain other portions of the text, however, have been updated.
The Bibliography includes published sources thought to be particularly
helpful to the reader.
Poland
Poland - History
Poland
THE POLES POSSESS one of the richest and most venerable historical
traditions of all European peoples. Convention fixes the origins of
Poland as a nation near the middle of the tenth century, contemporaneous
with the Carolingians, Vikings, and Saracens, and a full hundred years
before the Norman conquest of Britain in 1066. Throughout the subsequent
centuries, the Poles managed despite great obstacles to build and
maintain an unbroken cultural heritage. The same cannot be said of
Polish statehood, which was notoriously precarious and episodic. Periods
of independence and prosperity alternated with phases of foreign
domination and disaster. Especially in more recent centuries, frequent
adversity subjected the Poles to hardships scarcely equaled in European
history.
Many foreign observers perceive Poland as a perennial victim of
history, whose survival through perseverance and a dogged sense of
national identity has left a mixed legacy of indomitable courage and
intolerance toward outsiders. To Poles, their history includes brighter
recollections of Poland as a highly cultured kingdom, uniquely indulgent
of ethnic and religious diversity and precociously supportive of human
liberty and the fundamental values of Western civilization. The contrast
between these images reflects the extremes of fortune experienced by
Poland. The two visions of history combine in uneasy coexistence in the
Polish consciousness. One striking feature of Polish culture is its
fascination with the national past; the unusual variety and intensity of
that past defy tidy conclusions and produce energetic debate among Poles
themselves on the meaning of their history.
Poland
Poland - EARLY HISTORY UNTIL 1385
Poland
In the first centuries of its existence, the Polish nation was led by
a series of strong rulers who converted the Poles to Christendom,
created a strong Central European state, and integrated Poland into
European culture. Formidable foreign enemies and internal fragmentation
eroded this initial structure in the thirteenth century, but
consolidation in the 1300s laid the base for the dominant Polish Kingdom
that was to follow.
The Origins of Poland
According to Polish myth, the Slavic nations trace their ancestry to
three brothers who parted in the forests of Eastern Europe, each moving
in a different direction to found a family of distinct but related
peoples. Fanciful elements aside, this tale accurately describes the
westward migration and gradual differentiation of the early West Slavic
tribes following the collapse of the Roman Empire. About twenty such
tribes formed small states between A.D. 800 and 960. One of these
tribes, the Polanie or Poliane ("people of the plain"),
settled in the flatlands that eventually formed the heart of Poland,
lending their name to the country. Over time the modern Poles emerged as
the largest of the West Slavic groupings, establishing themselves to the
east of the Germanic regions of Europe with their ethnographic cousins,
the Czechs and Slovaks, to the south.
In spite of convincing fragmentary evidence of prior political and
social organization, national custom identifies the starting date of
Polish history as 966, when Prince Mieszko (r. 963-92) accepted
Christianity in the name of the people he ruled. In return, Poland
received acknowledgment as a separate principality owing some degree of
tribute to the German Empire (later officially known as the Holy Roman
Empire). Under Otto I, the German Empire was an expansionist force to
the West in the mid-tenth century. Mieszko accepted baptism directly
from Rome in preference to conversion by the German church and
subsequent annexation of Poland by the German Empire. This strategy
inaugurated the intimate connection between the Polish national identity
and Roman Catholicism that became a prominent theme in the history of
the Poles.
Mieszko is considered the first ruler of the Piast Dynasty (named for
the legendary peasant founder of the family), which endured for four
centuries. Between 967 and 990, Mieszko conquered substantial territory
along the Baltic Sea and in the region known as Little Poland to the
south. By the time he officially submitted to the authority of the Holy
See in Rome in 990, Mieszko had transformed his country into one of the
strongest powers in Eastern Europe.
Mieszko's son and successor Boleslaw I (992-1025), known as the
Brave, built on his father's achievements and became the most successful
Polish monarch of the early medieval era. Boleslaw continued the policy
of appeasing the Germans while taking advantage of their political
situation to gain territory wherever possible. Frustrated in his efforts
to form an equal partnership with the Holy Roman Empire, Boleslaw gained
some non-Polish territory in a series of wars against his imperial
overlord in 1003 and 1004. The Polish conqueror then turned eastward,
extending the boundaries of his realm into present-day Ukraine. Shortly
before his death in 1025, Boleslaw won international recognition as the
first king of a fully sovereign Poland.
Poland
Poland - The Medieval Era
Poland
During the eleventh century and the first half of the twelfth
century, the building of the Polish state continued under a series of
successors to Boleslaw I. But by 1150, the state had been divided among
the sons of Boleslaw III, beginning two centuries of fragmentation that
brought Poland to the brink of dissolution.
Fragmentation and Invasion, 1025-1320
The most fabled event of the period was the murder in 1079 of
Stanislaw, the bishop of Krak�w. A participant in uprisings by the
aristocracy against King Boleslaw II, Stanislaw was killed by order of
the king. This incident, which led to open rebellion and ended the reign
of Boleslaw, is a Polish counterpart to the later, more famous
assassination of Thomas � Becket on behalf of King Henry II of England.
Although historians still debate the circumstances of the death, after
his canonization the martyred St. Stanislaw entered national lore as a
potent symbol of resistance to illegitimate state authority--an
allegorical weapon that proved especially effective against the
communist regime.
During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Poland lost ground in its
complex triangular relationship with the German Empire to the west and
the kingdom of Bohemia to the south. New foreign enemies appeared by the
thirteenth century. The Mongol invasion cut a swath of destruction
through the country in 1241; for fifty years after their withdrawal in
1242, Mongol nomads mounted devastating raids into Poland from bases in
Ruthenia to the southeast. Meanwhile, an even more dangerous foe arrived
in 1226 when a Polish duke invited the Teutonic Knights, a Germanic
crusading order, to help him subdue Baltic pagan tribes. Upon completing
their mission with characteristic fierceness and efficiency, the knights
built a stronghold on the Baltic seacoast, from which they sought to
enlarge their holdings at Polish expense. By that time, the Piasts had
been parceling out the realm into ever smaller units for nearly 100
years. This policy of division, initiated by Boleslaw II to appease
separatist provinces while maintaining national unity, led to regional
governance by various branches of the dynasty and to a near breakdown of
cohesiveness in the face of foreign aggression. As the fourteenth
century opened, much Polish land lay under foreign occupation
(two-thirds of it was ruled by Bohemia in 1300). The continued existence
of a united, independent Poland seemed unlikely.
The Later Piasts
In the fourteenth century, after a long period of instability and
growing menace from without, the Polish state experienced a half century
of recovery under the last monarchs of the house of Piast. By 1320
Wladyslaw Lokietek (1314-33), called the Short, had manipulated internal
and foreign alignments and reunited enough territory to win acceptance
abroad as king of an independent Poland. His son Kazimierz III (1333-70)
would become the only Polish king to gain the sobriquet
"great." In foreign policy, Kazimierz the Great strengthened
his country's position by combining judicious concessions to Bohemia and
the Teutonic Knights with eastward expansion.
While using diplomacy to win Poland a respite from external threat,
the king focused on domestic consolidation. He earned his singular
reputation through his acumen as a builder and administrator as well as
through foreign relations. Two of the most important events of
Kazimierz's rule were the founding of Poland's first university in Krak�w
in 1364, making that city an important European cultural center, and his
mediation between the kings of Bohemia and Hungary at the Congress of
Krak�w (also in 1364), signaling Poland's return to the status of a
European power. Lacking a male heir, Kazimierz was the last ruler in the
Piast line. The extinction of the dynasty in 1370 led to several years
of renewed political uncertainty. Nevertheless, the accomplishments of
the fourteenth century began the ascent of the Polish state toward its
historical zenith.
Poland
Poland - Integration into European Civilization
Poland
Without question the most significant development of the formative
era of Poland's history was the gradual absorption of the country into
the culture of medieval Europe. After their relatively late arrival as
pagan outsiders on the fringes of the Christian world, the Western Slavs
were fully and speedily assimilated into the civilization of the
European Middle Ages. Latin Christianity came to determine the identity
of that civilization and permeate its intellect and creativity. Over
time the Central Europeans increasingly patterned their thought and
institutions on Western models in areas of thought ranging from
philosophy, artistic style, literature, and architecture to government,
law, and social structure. The Poles borrowed especially heavily from
German sources, and successive Polish rulers encouraged a substantial
immigration of Germans and Jews to invigorate urban life and commerce.
From its beginning, Poland drew its primary inspiration from Western
Europe and developed a closer affinity with the French and Italians, for
example, than with nearer Slavic neighbors of Eastern Orthodox and
Byzantine heritage. This westward orientation, which in some ways has
made Poland the easternmost outpost of Latinate and Catholic tradition,
helps to explain the Poles' tenacious sense of belonging to the
"West" and their deeply rooted antagonism toward Russia as the
representative of an essentially alien way of life.
Poland
Poland - THE JAGIELLON ERA, 1385-1572
Poland
The next major period was dominated by the union of Poland with
Lithuania under a dynasty founded by the Lithuanian grand duke Jagiello.
The partnership proved profitable for the Poles, who played a dominant
role in one of the most powerful empires in Europe for the next three
centuries.
The Polish-Lithuanian Union
Poland's unlikely partnership with the adjoining Grand Duchy of
Lithuania, Europe's last heathen state, provided an immediate remedy to
the political and military dilemma caused by the end of the Piast
Dynasty. At the end of the fourteenth century, Lithuania was a warlike
political unit with dominion over enormous stretches of present-day
Belarus and Ukraine. Putting aside their previous hostility, Poland and
Lithuania saw that they shared common enemies, most notably the Teutonic
Knights; this situation was the direct incentive for the Union of Krewo
in 1385. The compact hinged on the marriage of the Polish queen Jadwiga
to Jagiello, who became king of Poland under the name Wladyslaw
Jagiello. In return, the new monarch accepted baptism in the name of his
people, agreed to confederate Lithuania with Poland, and took the name
Wladyslaw II. In 1387 the bishopric of Wilno was established to convert
Wladyslaw's subjects to Roman Catholicism. (Eastern Orthodoxy
predominated in some parts of Lithuania.) From a military standpoint,
Poland received protection from the Mongols and Tatars, while Lithuania
received aid in its long struggle against the Teutonic Knights.
The Polish-Lithuanian alliance exerted a profound influence on the
history of Eastern Europe. Poland and Lithuania would maintain joint
statehood for more than 400 years, and over the first three centuries of
that span the "Commonwealth of Two Nations" ranked as one of
the leading powers of the continent.
The association produced prompt benefits in 1410 when the forces of
Poland-Lithuania defeated the Teutonic Knights in battle at Grunwald
(Tannenberg), at last seizing the upper hand in the long struggle with
the renegade crusaders. The new Polish Lithuanian dynasty, called
"Jagiellon" after its founder, continued to augment its
holdings during the following decades. By the end of the fifteenth
century, representatives of the Jagiellons reigned in Bohemia and
Hungary as well as PolandLithuania , establishing the government of
their clan over virtually all of Eastern Europe and Central Europe. This
farflung federation collapsed in 1526 when armies of the Ottoman Empire
won a crushing victory at the Battle of Moh�cs (Hungary), wresting
Bohemia and Hungary from the Jagiellons and installing the Turks as a
menacing presence in the heart of Europe.
Poland
Poland - The "Golden Age" of the Sixteenth Century
Poland
The Jagiellons never recovered their hegemony over Central Europe,
and the ascendancy of the Ottomans foreshadowed the eventual subjection
of the entire region to foreign rule; but the half century that followed
the Battle of Moh�cs marked an era of stability, affluence, and
cultural advancement unmatched in national history and widely regarded
by Poles as their country's golden age.
Poland-Lithuania as a European Power
The Teutonic Knights had been reduced to vassalage, and despite the
now persistent threats posed by the Turks and an emerging Russian
colossus, Poland-Lithuania managed to defend its status as one of the
largest and most prominent states of Europe. The wars and diplomacy of
the century yielded no dramatic expansion but shielded the country from
significant disturbance and permitted significant internal development.
An "Eternal Peace" concluded with the Ottoman Turks in 1533
lessened but did not remove the threat of invasion from that quarter.
A lucrative agricultural export market was the foundation for the
kingdom's wealth. A population boom in Western Europe prompted an
increased demand for foodstuffs; Poland-Lithuania became Europe's
foremost supplier of grain, which was shipped abroad from the Baltic
seaport of Gdansk. Aside from swelling Polish coffers, the prosperous
grain trade supported other notable aspects of national development. It
reinforced the preeminence of the landowning nobility that received its
profits, and it helped to preserve a traditionally rural society and
economy at a time when Western Europe had begun moving toward
urbanization and capitalism.
The Government of Poland-Lithuania
In other respects as well, the distinctive features of Jagiellonian
Poland ran against the historical trends of early modern Europe. Not the
least of those features was its singular governmental structure and
practice. In an era that favored the steady accumulation of power within
the hands of European monarchs, Poland-Lithuania developed a markedly
decentralized system dominated by a landed aristocracy that kept royal
authority firmly in check. The Polish nobility, or szlachta,
enjoyed the considerable benefits of landownership and control over the
labor of the peasantry. The szlachta included 7 to 10 percent
of the population, making it a very large noble class by European
standards. The nobility manifested an impressive group solidarity in
spite of great individual differences in wealth and standing. Over time,
the gentry induced a series of royal concessions and guarantees that
vested the noble parliament, or Sejm, with decisive control over most
aspects of statecraft, including exclusive rights to the making of laws.
The Sejm operated on the principle of unanimous consent, regarding each
noble as irreducibly sovereign. In a further safeguard of minority
rights, Polish usage sanctioned the right of a group of gentry to form a
confederation, which in effect constituted an uprising aimed at redress
of grievances. The nobility also possessed the crucial right to elect
the monarch, although the Jagiellons were in practice a hereditary
ruling house in all but the formal sense. The prestige of the Jagiellons
and the certainty of their succession supplied an element of cohesion
that tempered the disruptive forces built into the state system.
In retrospect historians frequently have derided the idiosyneratic,
delicate governmental mechanism of PolandLithuania as a recipe for
anarchy. Although its eventual breakdown contributed greatly to the loss
of independence in the eighteenth century, the system worked reasonably
well for 200 years while fostering a spirit of civic liberality
unmatched in the Europe of its day. The host of legal protections that
the nobility enacted for itself prefigured the rights generally accorded
the citizens of modern democracies, and the memory of the "golden
freedoms" of Poland-Lithuania is an important part of the Poles'
present-day sense of their tradition of liberty. On the other hand, the
exclusion of the lower nobility from most of those protections caused
serious resentment among that largely impoverished class, and the
aristocracy passed laws in the early sixteenth century that made the
peasants virtual slaves to the flourishing agricultural enterprises.
Poland-Lithuania in the Reformation Era
In modern eyes, the most saliently liberal aspect of Jagiellon Poland
is its exceptional toleration of religious dissent. This tolerance
prevailed in Poland even during the religious upheavals, war, and
atrocities associated with the Protestant Reformation and its
repercussions in many parts of sixteenth-century Europe. The Reformation
arrived in Poland between 1523 and 1526. The small Calvinist, Lutheran,
and Hussite groups that sprang up were harshly persecuted by the Roman
Catholic Church in their early years. Then in 1552 the Sejm suspended
civil execution of ecclesiastical sentences for heresy. For the next 130
years, Poland remained solidly Roman Catholic while refusing to repress
contending faiths and providing refuge for a wide variety of religious
nonconformists.
Such broad-mindedness derived as much from practical necessity as
from principle, for Poland-Lithuania governed a populace of remarkable
ethnic and religious diversity, embracing Roman Catholics, Eastern
Orthodox, Protestants, and numerous nonChristians . In particular, after
the mid-sixteenth century the Polish lands supported the world's largest
concentration of Jews, whose number was estimated at 150,000 in 1582.
Under the Jagiellons, Jews suffered fewer restrictions in
Poland-Lithuania than elsewhere in Europe while establishing an economic
niche as tradesmen and managers of noble estates.
The Polish Renaissance
The sixteenth century was perhaps the most illustrious phase of
Polish cultural history. During this period, Poland-Lithuania drew great
artistic inspiration from the Italians, with whom the Jagiellon court
cultivated close relations. Styles and tastes characteristic of the late
Renaissance were imported from the Italian states. These influences
survived in the renowned period architecture of Krak�w, which served as
the royal capital until that distinction passed to Warsaw in 1611. The
University of Krak�w gained international recognition as a cosmopolitan
center of learning, and in 1543 its most illustrious student, Nicolaus
Copernicus (Mikolaj Kopernik), literally revolutionized the science of
astronomy.
The period also bore the fruit of a mature Polish literature, once
again modeled after the fashion of the West European Renaissance. The
talented dilettante Mikolaj Rej was the first major Polish writer to
employ the vernacular, but the elegant classicist Jan Kochanowski
(1530-84) is acknowledged as the genius of the age. Accomplished in
several genres and equally adept in Polish and Latin, Kochanowski is
widely regarded as the finest Slavic poet before the nineteenth century.
The Eastern Regions of the Realm
The population of Poland-Lithuania was not overwhelmingly Catholic or
Slavic. This circumstance resulted from the federation with Lithuania,
where ethnic Poles were a distinct minority. In those days, to be Polish
was much less an indication of ethnicity than of rank; it was a
designation largely reserved for the landed noble class, which included
members of Polish and non-Polish origin alike. Generally speaking, the
ethnically nonPolish noble families of Lithuania adopted the Polish
language and culture. As a result, in the eastern territories of the
kingdom a Polish or Polonized aristocracy dominated a peasantry whose
great majority was neither Polish nor Catholic. This bred resentment
that later grew into separate Lithuanian, Belorussian, and Ukrainian
nationalist movements.
In the mid-sixteenth century, Poland-Lithuania sought ways to
maintain control of the diverse kingdom in spite of two threatening
circumstances. First, since the late 1400s a series of ambitious tsars
of the house of Rurik had led Russia in competing with Poland-Lithuania
for influence over the Slavic territories located between the two
states. Second, Sigismund II Augustus (1548-72) had no male heir. The
Jagiellon Dynasty, the strongest link between the halves of the state,
would end after his reign. Accordingly, the Union of Lublin of 1569
transformed the loose federation and personal union of the Jagiellonian
epoch into the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, deepening and formalizing
the bonds between Poland and Lithuania.
Poland
Poland - THE NOBLE REPUBLIC, 1572-1795
Poland
Although most accounts of Polish history show the two centuries after
the end of the Jagiellon Dynasty as a time of decline leading to foreign
domination, Poland-Lithuania remained an influential player in European
politics and a vital cultural entity through most of the period.
The Elective Monarchy
The death of Sigismund II Augustus in 1572 was followed by a
three-year Interregnum during which adjustments were made in the
constitutional system. The lower nobility was now included in the
selection process, and the power of the monarch was further
circumscribed in favor of the expanded noble class. From that point, the
king was effectively a partner with the noble class and constantly
supervised by a group of senators. Once the Jagiellons passed from the
scene, the fragile equilibrium of the commonwealth government began to
go awry. The constitutional reforms made the monarchy electoral in fact
as well as name. As more and more power went to the noble electors, it
also eroded from the government's center.
In its periodic opportunities to fill the throne, the szlachta
exhibited a preference for foreign candidates who would not found
another strong dynasty. This policy produced monarchs who were either
totally ineffective or in constant debilitating conflict with the
nobility. Furthermore, aside from notable exceptions such as the able
Transylvanian Stefan Batory (1576-86), the kings of alien origin were
inclined to subordinate the interests of the commonwealth to those of
their own country and ruling house. This tendency was most obvious in
the prolonged military adventures waged by Sigismund III Vasa
(1587-1632) against Russia and his native Sweden. On occasion, these
campaigns brought Poland near to conquest of Muscovy and the Baltic
coast, but they compounded the military burden imposed by the ongoing
rivalry with the Turks, and the Swedes and Russians extracted heavy
repayment a few decades later.
Poland
Poland - The Deluge, 1648-67
Poland
Although Poland-Lithuania escaped the ravages of the Thirty
Years' War, which ended in 1648, the ensuing two
decades subjected the country to one of its severest trials. This
colorful but ruinous interval, the stuff of legend and the popular
historical novels of Nobel laureate Henryk Sienkiewicz (1846-1916),
became known as the potop, or deluge, for the magnitude of its
hardships. The emergency began with an uprising of Ukrainian Cossacks
that persisted in spite of Warsaw's efforts to subdue it by force. After
the rebels won the intervention of Muscovy on their behalf, Tsar Aleksei
conquered most of the eastern half of the country by 1655. Taking
advantage of Poland's preoccupation, Charles X of Sweden rapidly overran
much of the remaining territory of the commonwealth in 1655. Pushed to
the brink of dissolution, Poland-Lithuania rallied to recover most of
its losses to the Swedes. Swedish brutality raised widespread revolts
against Charles, whom the Polish nobles had recognized as their ruler in
the meantime. Under Stefan Czarniecki, the Poles and Lithuanians drove
the Swedes from their territory by 1657. Further complicated by noble
dissension and wars with the Ottoman Turks, the thirteen-year struggle
over control of Ukraine ended in the Truce of Andrusovo in 1667.
Although Russia had been defeated by a new Polish-Ukrainian alliance in
1662, Russia gained eastern Ukraine in the peace treaty.
Despite the improbable survival of the commonwealth in the face of
the potop, one of the most dramatic instances of the Poles'
knack for prevailing in adversity, the episode inflicted irremediable
damage and contributed heavily to the ultimate demise of the state. When
Jan II Kaziemierz abdicated in 1668, the population of the commonwealth
had been nearly halved by war and disease. War had destroyed the
economic base of the cities and raised a religious fervor that ended
Poland's policy of religious tolerance. Henceforth, the commonwealth
would be on the strategic defensive facing hostile neighbors. Never
again would Poland compete with Russia as a military equal.
Poland
Poland - Decay of the Commonwealth
Poland
Before another 100 years had elapsed, Poland-Lithuania had virtually
ceased to function as a coherent and genuinely independent state. The
commonwealth's last martial triumph occurred in 1683 when King Jan
Sobieski drove the Turks from the gates of Vienna with a cavalry charge.
Poland's important role in aiding the European alliance to roll back the
Ottoman Empire was rewarded with territory in western Ukraine by the
Treaty of Karlowicz (1699). Nonetheless, this isolated success did
little to mask the internal weakness and paralysis of the
PolishLithuanian political system. For the next quarter century, Poland
was often a pawn in Russia's campaigns against other powers. Augustus II
of Saxony (1697-1733), who succeeded Jan Sobieski, involved Poland in
Peter the Great's war with Sweden, incurring another round of invasion
and devastation by the Swedes between 1704 and 1710.
In the eighteenth century, the powers of the monarchy and the central
administration became purely trivial. Kings were denied permission to
provide for the elementary requirements of defense and finance, and
aristocratic clans made treaties directly with foreign sovereigns.
Attempts at reform were stymied by the determination of the szlachta
to preserve their "golden freedoms" as well as the rule of
unanimity in the Sejm, where any deputy could exercise his veto right to
disrupt the parliament and nullify its work. Because of the chaos sown
by the veto provision, under Augustus III (1733-63) only one of thirteen
Sejm sessions ran to an orderly adjournment.
Unlike Spain and Sweden, great powers that were allowed to settle
peacefully into secondary status at the periphery of Europe at the end
of their time of glory, Poland endured its decline at the strategic
crossroads of the continent. Lacking central leadership and impotent in
foreign relations, PolandLithuania became a chattel of the ambitious
kingdoms that surrounded it, an immense but feeble buffer state. During
the reign of Peter the Great (1682-1725), the commonwealth fell under
the dominance of Russia, and by the middle of the eighteenth century
Poland-Lithuania had been made a virtual protectorate of its eastern
neighbor, retaining only the theoretical right to self-rule.
Poland
Poland - The Three Partitions, 1764-95
Poland
During the reign of Empress Catherine the Great (1762-96), Russia
intensified its manipulation in Polish affairs. Prussia and Austria, the
other powers surrounding the republic, also took advantage of internal
religious and political bickering to divide up the country in three
partition stages. The third partition in 1795 wiped Poland-Lithuania
from the map of Europe.
First Partition
In 1764 Catherine dictated the election of her former favorite,
Stanislaw August Poniatowski, as king of PolandLithuania . Confounding
expectations that he would be an obedient servant of his mistress,
Stanislaw August encouraged the modernization of his realm's ramshackle
political system and achieved a temporary moratorium on use of the
individual veto in the Sejm (1764-66). This turnabout threatened to
renew the strength of the monarchy and brought displeasure in the
foreign capitals that preferred an inert, pliable Poland. Catherine,
among the most displeased by Poniatowski's independence, encouraged
religious dissension in Poland-Lithuania's substantial Eastern Orthodox
population, which earlier in the eighteenth century had lost the rights
enjoyed during the Jagiellon Dynasty. Under heavy Russian pressure, the
Sejm restored Orthodox equality in 1767. This action provoked a Catholic
uprising by the Confederation of Bar, a league of Polish nobles that
fought until 1772 to revoke Catherine's mandate.
The defeat of the Confederation of Bar again left Poland exposed to
the ambitions of its neighbors. Although Catherine initially opposed
partition, Frederick the Great of Prussia profited from Austria's
threatening military position to the southwest by pressing a
long-standing proposal to carve territory from the commonwealth.
Catherine, persuaded that Russia did not have the resources to continue
unilateral domination of Poland, agreed. In 1772 Russia, Prussia, and
Austria forced terms of partition upon the helpless commonwealth under
the pretext of restoring order in the anarchic Polish situation.
National Revival
The first partition in 1772 did not directly threaten the viability
of Poland-Lithuania. Poland retained extensive territory that included
the Polish heartland. In fact, the shock of the annexations made clear
the dangers of decay in government institutions, creating a body of
opinion favorable to reform along the lines of the European
Enlightenment. King Stanislaw August supported the progressive elements
in the government and promoted the ideas of foreign political figures
such as Edmund Burke and George Washington. At the same time, Polish
intellectuals discussed Enlightenment philosophers such as Montesquieu
and Rousseau. During this period, the concept of democratic institutions
for all classes was accepted in Polish society. Education reform
included establishment of the first ministry of education in Europe.
Taxation and the army underwent thorough reform, and government again
was centralized in the Permanent Council. Landholders emancipated large
numbers of peasants, although there was no official government decree.
Polish cities, in decline for many decades, were revived by the
influence of the Industrial Revolution, especially in mining and
textiles.
Stanislaw August's process of renovation reached its climax on May 3,
1791, when, after three years of intense debate, the "Four Years'
Sejm" produced Europe's first written constitution. Conceived in
the liberal spirit of the contemporaneous document in the United States,
the constitution recast Poland-Lithuania as a hereditary monarchy and
abolished many of the eccentricities and antiquated features of the old
system. The new constitution abolished the individual veto in
parliament; provided a separation of powers among the legislative,
executive, and judicial branches of government; and established
"people's sovereignty" (for the noble and bourgeois classes).
Although never fully implemented, the Constitution of May 3 gained an
honored position in the Polish political heritage; tradition marks the
anniversary of its passage as the country's most important civic
holiday.
Destruction of Poland-Lithuania
Passage of the constitution alarmed nobles who would lose
considerable stature under the new order. In autocratic states such as
Russia, the democratic ideals of the constitution also threatened the
existing order, and the prospect of Polish recovery threatened to end
domination of Polish affairs by its neighbors. In 1792 domestic and
foreign reactionaries combined to end the democratization process.
Polish conservative factions formed the Confederation of Targowica and
appealed for Russian assistance in restoring the status quo. Catherine
gladly used this opportunity; enlisting Prussian support, she invaded
Poland under the pretext of defending Poland's ancient liberties. The
irresolute Stanislaw August capitulated, defecting to the Targowica
faction. Arguing that Poland had fallen prey to the radical Jacobinism
then at high tide in France, Russia and Prussia abrogated the
Constitution of May 3, carried out a second partition of Poland in 1793,
and placed the remainder of the country under occupation by Russian
troops.
The second partition was far more injurious than the first. Russia
received a vast area of eastern Poland, extending southward from its
gains in the first partition nearly to the Black Sea. To the west,
Prussia received an area known as South Prussia, nearly twice the size
of its first-partition gains along the Baltic, as well as the port of
Gdansk (then renamed Danzig). Thus, Poland's neighbors reduced the
commonwealth to a rump state and plainly signaled their designs to
abolish it altogether at their convenience.
In a gesture of defiance, a general Polish revolt broke out in 1794
under the leadership of Tadeusz Kosciuszko, a military officer who had
rendered notable service in the American Revolution. Kosciuszko's ragtag
insurgent armies won some initial successes, but they eventually fell
before the superior forces of Russian General Alexander Suvorov. In the
wake of the insurrection of 1794, Russia, Prussia, and Austria carried
out the third and final partition of Poland-Lithuania in 1795, erasing
the Commonwealth of Two Nations from the map and pledging never to let
it return.
Much of Europe condemned the dismemberment as an international crime
without historical parallel. Amid the distractions of the French
Revolution and its attendant wars, however, no state actively opposed
the annexations. In the long term, the dissolution of Poland-Lithuania
upset the traditional European balance of power, dramatically magnifying
the influence of Russia and paving the way for the Germany that would
emerge in the nineteenth century with Prussia at its core. For the
Poles, the third partition began a period of continuous foreign rule
that would endure well over a century.
Poland
Poland - PARTITIONED POLAND
Poland
Although the majority of the szlachta was reconciled to the
end of the commonwealth in 1795, the possibility of Polish independence
was kept alive by events within and outside Poland throughout the
nineteenth century. Poland's location in the very center of Europe
became especially significant in a period when both Prussia/Germany and
Russia were intensely involved in European rivalries and alliances and
modern nation states took form over the entire continent.
The Napoleonic Period
At the turn of the nineteenth century, Europe had begun to feel the
impact of momentous political and intellectual movements that, among
their other effects, would keep the "Polish Question" on the
agenda of international issues needing resolution. Most immediately,
Napoleon Bonaparte had established a new empire in France in 1804
following that country's revolution. Napoleon's attempts to build and
expand his empire kept Europe at war for the next decade and brought him
into conflict with the same East European powers that had beleaguered
Poland in the last decades of the previous century. An alliance of
convenience was the natural result of this situation. Volunteer Polish
legions attached themselves to Bonaparte's armies, hoping that in return
the emperor would allow an independent Poland to reappear out of his
conquests.
Although Napoleon promised more than he ever intended to deliver to
the Polish cause, in 1807 he created a Duchy of Warsaw from Prussian
territory that had been part of old Poland and was still inhabited by
Poles. Basically a French puppet, the duchy did enjoy some degree of
self-government, and many Poles believed that further Napoleonic
victories would bring restoration of the entire commonwealth.
In 1809, under J�zef Poniatowski, nephew of Stanislaw II Augustus,
the duchy reclaimed the land taken by Austria in the second partition.
The Russian army occupied the duchy as it chased Napoleon out of Russia
in 1813, however, and Polish expectations ended with the final defeat of
Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815. In the subsequent peace settlement of the
Congress of Vienna, the victorious Austrians and Prussians swept away
the Duchy of Warsaw and reconfirmed most of the terms of the final
partition of Poland.
Although brief,the Napoleonic period occupies an important place in
Polish annals. Much of the legend and symbolism of modern Polish
patriotism derives from this period, including the conviction that
Polish independence is a necessary element of a just and legitimate
European order. This conviction was simply expressed in a fighting
slogan of the time, "for your freedom and ours." Moreover, the
appearance of the Duchy of Warsaw so soon after the partitions proved
that the seemingly final historical death sentence delivered in 1795 was
not necessarily the end of the Polish nation. Instead, many observers
came to believe that favorable circumstances would free Poland from
foreign domination.
The Impact of Nationalism and Romanticism
The intellectual and artistic climate of the early nineteenth century
further stimulated the growth of Polish demands for selfgovernment .
During these decades, modern nationalism took shape and rapidly
developed a massive following throughout the continent, becoming the
most dynamic and appealing political doctrine of its time. By stressing
the value and dignity of native cultures and languages, nationalism
offered a rationale for ethnic loyalty and resistance to assimilation.
The associated principle of the nation state, or national homeland,
provided a rallying cry for the stateless peoples of Europe.
Romanticism was the artistic element of nineteenth-century European
culture that exerted the strongest influence on the Polish national
consciousness. The Romantic movement was a natural partner of political
nationalism, for it echoed the nationalist sympathy for folk cultures
and manifested a general air of disdain for the conservative political
order of postNapoleonic Europe. Under this influence, Polish literature
flourished anew in the works of a school of nineteenth-century Romantic
poets, led by Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855). Mickiewicz concentrated on
patriotic themes and the glorious national past. Fr�d�ric Chopin
(1810-49), a leading composer of the century, also used the tragic
history of his nation as a major inspiration.
Nurtured by these influences, nationalism awoke first among the
intelligentsia and certain segments of the nobility, then more gradually
in the peasantry. At the end of the process, a broader definition of
nationhood had replaced the old class-based "gentry
patriotism" of Poland.
The Era of National Insurrections
For several decades, the Polish national movement gave priority to
the immediate restoration of independence, a drive that found expression
in a series of armed rebellions. The insurgencies arose mainly in the
Russian zone of partition to the east, about three-quarters of which was
formerly Polish territory. After the Congress of Vienna, St. Petersburg
had organized its Polish lands as the Congress Kingdom of Poland,
granting it a quite liberal constitution, its own army, and limited
autonomy within the tsarist empire. In the 1820s, however, Russian rule
grew more arbitrary, and secret societies were formed by intellectuals
in several cities to plot an overthrow. In November 1830, Polish troops
in Warsaw rose in revolt. When the government of Congress Poland
proclaimed solidarity with the insurrectionists shortly thereafter, a
new Polish-Russian war began. The rebels' requests for aid from France
were ignored, and their reluctance to abolish serfdom cost them the
support of the peasantry. By September 1831, the Russians had subdued
Polish resistance and forced 6,000 resistance fighters into exile in
France, beginning a time of harsh repression of intellectual and
religious activity throughout Poland. At the same time, Congress Poland
lost its constitution and its army.
After the failure of the November Revolt, clandestine conspiratorial
activity continued on Polish territory. An exiled Polish political and
intellectual elite established a base of operations in Paris. A
conservative group headed by Adam Czartoryski (leader of the November
Revolt) relied on foreign diplomatic support to restore Poland's status
as established by the Congress of Vienna, which Russia had routinely
violated beginning in 1819. Otherwise, this group was satisfied with a
return to monarchy and traditional social structures.
The radical factions never formed a united front on any issue besides
the general goal of independence. Their programs insisted that the Poles
liberate themselves by their own efforts and linked independence with
republicanism and the emancipation of the peasants. Handicapped by
internal division, limited resources, heavy surveillance, and
persecution of revolutionary cells in Poland, the Polish national
movement suffered numerous losses. The movement sustained a major
setback in the 1846 revolt organized in Austrian Poland by the Polish
Democratic Society, the leading radical nationalist group. The uprising
ended in a bloody fiasco when the peasantry took up arms against the
gentry rebel leadership, which was regarded as potentially a worse
oppressor than the Austrians. By incurring harsh military repression
from Austria, the failed revolt left the Polish nationalists in poor
position to participate in the wave of national revolution that crossed
Europe in 1848 and 1849. The stubborn idealism of this unprising's
leaders emphasized individual liberty and separate national identity
rather than establishment of a unified republic--a significant change of
political philosophy from earlier movements.
The last and most tenacious of the Polish uprisings of the mid-
nineteenth century erupted in the Russian-occupied sector in January
1863. Following Russia's disastrous defeat in the Crimean War, the
government of Tsar Alexander II enacted a series of liberal reforms,
including liberation of the serfs throughout the empire. High-handed
imposition of land reforms in Poland aroused hostility among the landed
nobles and a group of young radical intellectuals influenced by Karl
Marx and the Russian liberal Alexander Herzen. Repeating the pattern of
1830-31, the open revolt of the January Insurrection by Congress Poland
failed to win foreign backing. Although its socially progressive program
could not mobilize the peasants, the rebellion persisted stubbornly for
fifteen months. After finally crushing the insurgency in August 1864,
Russia abolished the Congress Kingdom of Poland altogether and revoked
the separate status of the Polish lands, incorporating them directly as
the Western Region of the Russian Empire. The region was placed under
the dictatorial rule of Mikhail Muravev, who became known as the Hangman
of Wilno. All Polish citizens were assimilated into the empire. When
Russia officially emancipated the Polish serfs in early 1864, it removed
a major rallying point from the agenda of potential Polish
revolutionaries.
The Time of "Organic Work"
Increasing oppression at Russian hands after failed national
uprisings finally convinced Polish leaders that insurrection was
premature at best and perhaps fundamentally misguided and
counterproductive. During the decades that followed the January
Insurrection, Poles largely forsook the goal of immediate independence
and turned instead to fortifying the nation through the subtler means of
education, economic development, and modernization. This approach took
the name Organic Work for its philosophy of strengthening
Polish society at the grass roots. For some, the adoption of Organic
Work meant permanent resignation to foreign rule, but many advocates
recommended it as a strategy to combat repression while awaiting an
eventual opportunity to achieve self-government.
Not nearly as colorful as the rebellions nor as loftily enshrined in
national memory, the quotidian methods of Organic Work proved well
suited to the political conditions of the later nineteenth century. The
international balance of forces did not favor the recovery of statehood
when both Russia and Germany appeared bent on the eventual eradication
of Polish national identity. The German Empire, established in 1871 as
an expanded version of the Prussian state, aimed at the assimilation of
its eastern provinces inhabited by Poles. At the same time, St.
Petersburg attempted to Russify the former Congress Kingdom, joining
Berlin in levying restrictions against use of the Polish language and
cultural expression. Poles under Russian and German rule also endured
official campaigns against the Roman Catholic Church: the Cultural
Struggle (Kulturkampf) of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck to bring the
Roman Catholic Church under state control and the Russian campaign to
extend Orthodoxy throughout the empire.
The Polish subjects under Austrian jurisdiction (after 1867 the
Habsburg Empire was commonly known as Austria-Hungary) confronted a
generally more lenient regime. Poles suffered no religious persecution
in predominantly Catholic Austria, and Vienna counted on the Polish
nobility as allies in the complex political calculus of its
multinational realm. In return for loyalty, Austrian Poland, or Galicia,
received considerable administrative and cultural autonomy. Galicia
gained a reputation as an oasis of toleration amidst the oppression of
German and Russian Poland. The Galician provincial Sejm acted as a
semiautonomous parliamentary body, and Poles represented the region in
the empire government in Vienna. In the late 1800s, the universities of
Krak�w and L'vov (Polish form Lw�w) became the centers of Polish
intellectual activity, and Krak�w became the center of Polish art and
thought. Even after the restoration of independence, many residents of
southern Poland retained a touch of nostalgia for the days of the
Habsburg Empire.
Social and Political Transformation
Throughout the later nineteenth century, profound social and economic
forces operated on the Polish lands, giving them a more modern aspect
and altering traditional patterns of life. Especially in Russian Poland
and the Silesian regions under German control, mining and manufacturing
commenced on a large scale. This development sped the process of
urbanization, and the emergence of capitalism began to reduce the
relative importance of the landed aristocracy in Polish society. A
considerable segment of the peasantry abandoned the overburdened land.
Millions of Poles emigrated to North America and other destinations, and
millions more migrated to cities to form the new industrial labor force.
These shifts stimulated fresh social tensions. Urban workers bore the
full range of hardships associated with early capitalism, and the
intensely nationalistic atmosphere of the day bred frictions between
Poles and the other peoples remaining from the old heterogeneous
Commonwealth of Two Nations. The movement of the former noble class into
cities created a new urban professional class. Mirroring a trend visible
throughout Central Europe, antisemitic sentiment mounted visibly, fed by
Poles competing for the urban livelihoods long regarded as Jewish
specialties.
These transformations changed the face of politics as well, giving
rise to new parties and movements that would dominate the Polish
landscape for the next century. The grievances of the lower classes led
to the formation of peasant and socialist parties. Communism gained only
a marginal following, but a more moderate socialist faction led by J�zef
Pilsudski (1867-1935) won broader support through its emphatic advocacy
of Polish independence. By 1905 Pilsudski's party, the Polish Socialist
Party, was the largest socialist party in the entire Russian Empire. The
National Democracy of Roman Dmowski (1864-1939) became the leading
vehicle of the right by espousing a doctrine that combined nationalism
with mistrust of Jews and other minorities. By the turn of the century,
Polish political life had emerged from the relative quiescence of
Organic Work and entered a stage of renewed assertiveness. In
particular, Pilsudski and Dmowski had initiated what would be long
careers as the paramount figures in the civic affairs of Poland. After
1900 political activity was suppressed only in the Prussian sector.
Poland
Poland - INDEPENDENCE WON AND LOST, 1914-45
Poland
Beginning in 1914, the newly invigorated Polish political scene
combined with cataclysmic events on the European continent to offer both
new hope and grave threats to the Polish people. By the end of World War
II, Poland had seen the defeat or retreat of all three occupying powers,
establishment of a shaky independent government, world economic crisis,
then occupation and total domination by the resurgent Germans and
Russians.
World War I
The first general European conflict since the Napoleonic Wars exerted
a huge impact on the Poles, although their position in Europe was not an
issue among the combatants. Again, however, Poland's geographical
position between Germany and Russia meant much fighting and terrific
human and material losses for the Poles between 1914 and 1918.
War and the Polish Lands
The war split the ranks of the three partitioning empires, pitting
Russia as defender of Serbia and ally of Britain and France against the
leading members of the Central Powers, Germany and Austria-Hungary. This
circumstance afforded the Poles political leverage as both sides offered
pledges of concessions and future autonomy in exchange for Polish
loyalty and recruits. The Austrians wanted to incorporate Congress
Poland into their territory of Galicia, so they allowed nationalist
organizations to form there. The Russians recognized the Polish right to
autonomy and allowed formation of the Polish National Committee, which
supported the Russian side. In 1916, attempting to increase Polish
support for the Central Powers, the German and Austrian emperors
declared a new kingdom of Poland. The new kingdom included only a small
part of the old commonwealth, however.
As the war settled into a long stalemate, the issue of Polish
self-rule gained greater urgency. Roman Dmowski spent the war years in
Western Europe, hoping to persuade the Allies to unify the Polish lands
under Russian rule as an initial step toward liberation. In the
meantime, Pilsudski had correctly predicted that the war would ruin all
three of the partitioners, a conclusion most people thought highly
unlikely before 1918. Pilsudski therefore formed Polish legions to
assist the Central Powers in defeating Russia as the first step toward
full independence for Poland.
Much of the heavy fighting on the war's Eastern Front took place on
the territory of the former Polish state. In 1914 Russian forces
advanced very close to Krak�w before being beaten back. The next
spring, heavy fighting occurred around Gorlice and Przemysl, to the east
of Krak�w in Galicia. By the end of 1915, the Germans had occupied the
entire Russian sector, including Warsaw. In 1916 another Russian
offensive in Galicia exacerbated the already desperate situation of
civilians in the war zone; about 1 million Polish refugees fled eastward
behind Russian lines during the war. Although the Russian offensive of
1916 caught the Germans and Austrians by surprise, poor communications
and logistics prevented the Russians from taking full advantage of their
situation.
A total of 2 million Polish troops fought with the armies of the
three occupying powers, and 450,000 died. Several hundred thousand
Polish civilians were moved to labor camps in Germany. The
scorched-earth retreat strategies of both sides left much of the war
zone uninhabitable.
Recovery of Statehood
In 1917 two separate events decisively changed the character of the
war and set it on a course toward the rebirth of Poland. The United
States entered the conflict on the Allied side, while a process of
revolutionary upheaval in Russia weakened and then removed the Russians
from the Eastern Front, finally bringing the Bolsheviks to power in that
country. After the last Russian advance into Galicia failed in mid-1917,
the Germans went on the offensive again, the army of revolutionary
Russia ceased to be a factor, and the Russian presence in Polish
territory ended for the next twenty-seven years.
The defection of Russia from the Allied coalition gave free rein to
the calls of Woodrow Wilson, the American president, to transform the
war into a crusade to spread democracy and liberate the Poles and other
peoples from the suzerainty of the Central Powers. Polish opinion
crystallized in support of the Allied cause. Pilsudski became a popular
hero when Berlin jailed him for insubordination. The Allies broke the
resistance of the Central Powers by autumn 1918, as the Habsburg
monarchy disintegrated and the German imperial government collapsed. In
November 1918, Pilsudski was released from internment in Germany,
returned to Warsaw, and took control as provisional president of an
independent Poland that had been absent from the map of Europe for 123
years.
Poland
Poland - Interwar Poland
Poland
Pilsudski's first task was to reunite the Polish regions that had
assumed various economic and political identities since the partition in
the late eighteenth century, and especially since the advent of
political parties. Pilsudski took immediate steps to consolidate the
Polish regions under a single government with its own currency and army,
but the borders of the Second Polish Republic were not established until
1921. Between 1921 and 1939, Poland achieved significant economic growth
despite world economic crisis. The Polish political scene remained
chaotic and shifting, however, especially after Pilsudski's death in
1935.
Formative Years, 1918-21
From its inception, the Second Polish Republic struggled to secure
and maintain its existence in difficult circumstances. The extraordinary
complications of defining frontiers preoccupied the state in its
infancy. To the southwest, Warsaw encountered boundary disputes with
Czechoslovakia. More ominously, an embittered Germany begrudged any
territorial loss to its new eastern neighbor. The 1919 Treaty of
Versailles settled the German-Polish borders in the Baltic region. The
port city of Danzig, a city predominantly German but as economically
vital to Poland as it had been in the sixteenth century, was declared a
free city. Allied arbitration divided the ethnically mixed and highly
coveted industrial and mining district of Silesia between Germany and
Poland, with Poland receiving the more industrialized eastern section.
These terms would be a primary incentive to the German aggression that
ignited World War II.
Military force proved the determinant of Poland's frontiers in the
east, a theater rendered chaotic by the repercussions of the Russian
revolutions and civil war. Pilsudski envisioned a new federation with
Lithuania and Polish domination of western Ukraine, centered at Kiev,
forming a Polish-led East European confederation to block Russian
imperialism. Vladimir I. Lenin, leader of the new communist government
of Russia, saw Poland as the bridge over which communism would pass into
the labor class of a disorganized postwar Germany. When Pilsudski
carried out a military thrust into Ukraine in 1920, he was met by a Red
Army counterattack that drove into Polish territory almost to Warsaw.
Although many observers marked Poland for extinction and Bolshevization,
Pilsudski halted the Soviet advance before Warsaw and resumed the
offensive. The Poles were not able to exploit their new advantage fully,
however; they signed a compromise peace treaty at Riga in early 1921
that split disputed territory in Belorussia and Ukraine between Poland
and Soviet Russia. The treaty avoided ceding historically Polish
territory back to the Russians.
From Democracy to Totalitarianism
Reborn Poland faced a host of daunting challenges: extensive war
damage, a ravaged economy, a population one-third composed of wary
national minorities, and a need to reintegrate the three zones kept
forcibly apart during the era of partition. Under these trying
conditions, the experiment with democracy faltered. Formal political
life began in 1921 with adoption of a constitution that designed Poland
as a republic modeled after the French example, vesting most authority
in the legislature. The postwar parliamentary system proved unstable and
erratic. In 1922 disputes with political foes caused Pilsudski to resign
his posts as chief of state and commander of the armed forces, but in
1926 he assumed power in a coup that followed four years of ineffectual
government. For the next decade, Pilsudski dominated Polish affairs as
strongman of a generally popular centrist regime. Military in character,
the government of Pilsudski mixed democratic and dictatorial elements
while pursuing sanacja, or national cleansing. After
Pilsudski's death in 1935, his prot�g� successors drifted toward open
authoritarianism.
In many respects, the Second Republic fell short of the high
expectations of 1918. As happened elsewhere in Central Europe, the
attempt to implant democracy did not succeed. Minority peoples became
increasingly alienated, and antisemitism rose palpably in the general
population. Nevertheless, interwar Poland could justifiably claim some
noteworthy accomplishments: economic advances, the revival of Polish
education and culture after decades of official curbs, and, above all,
reaffirmation of the Polish nationhood that had been disputed so long.
Despite its defects, the Second Republic retained a strong hold on later
generations of Poles as a genuinely independent and authentic expression
of Polish national aspirations.
Poland's International Situation
By far the gravest menace to Poland's longevity came from abroad, not
from internal weaknesses. The center of Poland's postwar foreign policy
was a political and military alliance with France, which guaranteed
Poland's independence and territorial integrity. Although Poland
attempted to join the Little Entente, the French-sponsored alliance of
Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia, Czechoslovak suspicions of
Polish territorial ambitions prevented Polish membership. Beginning in
1926, Pilsudski's main foreign policy aim was balancing Poland's still
powerful neighbors, the Soviet Union and Germany. Pilsudski assumed that
both powers wished to regain the Polish territory lost in World War I.
Therefore, his approach was to avoid Polish dependence on either power.
Above all, Pilsudski sought to avoid taking positions that might cause
the two countries to take concerted action against Poland. Accordingly,
Poland signed nonaggression pacts with both countries in the early
1930s. After Pilsudski's death, his foreign minister J�zef Beck
continued this policy.
The failure to establish planned alliances in Eastern Europe meant
great reliance on the French, whose enthusiasm for intervention in the
region waned markedly after World War I. The Locarno Pact, signed in
1926 by the major West European powers with the aim of guaranteeing
peace in the region, contained no guarantee of Poland's western border.
Over the next ten years, substantial friction arose between Poland and
France over Polish refusal to compromise with the Germans and French
refusal to resist Adolf Hitler's rise to power in the early 1930s. The
Polish nonaggression treaties with Germany and the Soviet Union resulted
from this bilateral deterioration of confidence.
The Polish predicament worsened in the 1930s with the advent of
Hitler's openly expansionist Nazi regime in Germany and the obvious
waning of France's resolve to defend its East European allies. Pilsudski
retained the French connection but had progressively less faith in its
usefulness. As the decade drew to an end, Poland's policy of equilibrium
between potential enemies was failing. Complete Nazi occupation of
Czechoslovakia in early 1939 encircled Poland on three sides (East
Prussia to the northeast had remained German). Hitler's next move was
obvious. By 1939 Hitler had shattered the continental balance of power
by a concerted campaign of armed diplomatic extortion that brought most
of Central Europe into his grasp.
Poland
Poland - World War II
Poland
Profiting from German national resentment of World War I peace terms
and international aversion to new armed conflict, Hitler began driving a
new German war machine across Europe in 1939. His invasion of Poland in
September 1939 was the tripwire that set off World War II, the most
devastating period in the history of the Polish state. Between 1939 and
1945, 6 million people, over 15 percent of Poland's population,
perished, with the uniquely cruel inclusion of mass extermination of
Jews in concentration camps in Poland. Besides its human toll, the war
left much of the country in ruins, inflicting indelible material and
psychic scars.
The Outbreak of War
The crisis that led directly to renewed European conflict in 1939
commenced with German demands against Poland, backed by threats of war,
for territorial readjustments in the region of Danzig and the Baltic
coast to connect East Prussia with the rest of Germany. When Warsaw
refused, correctly reading Hitler's proposal as a mere prelude to
further exactions, it received only hesitant promises of British and
French backing. Hitler overcame the deterrent effect of this alliance on
August 23 when Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed a nonaggression
treaty that ended their interwar hostility. A secret provision of the
treaty essentially divided all of Eastern Europe into Soviet and German
spheres of domination. This provision signified the blessing of Soviet
dictator Joseph V. Stalin for Berlin to attack Poland without fear of
Soviet interference.
The Hitler-Stalin pact sealed Poland's fate and put the country in an
indefensible position. On September 1, Germany hurled the bulk of its
armed forces at its eastern neighbor, touching off World War II. Based
on existing guarantees of security, Britain and France declared war two
days later, but they gave no effective assistance to their ally. By
midSeptember , Warsaw was surrounded in spite of stout resistance by
outnumbered Polish forces. As Poland reeled under the assault from the
west, the Soviet Union administered the coup de grace by invading from
the east on September 17. By the end of the month, the "September
campaign" was over, Hitler and Stalin had reached terms defining
their respective gains, and the Polish lands had been subjected once
more to occupation.
German and Soviet Rule
For the next five years, Poland endured the most severe wartime
occupation conditions in modern European history. Initially, Germany
annexed western Poland directly, establishing a brutal colonial
government whose expressed goal was to erase completely the concept of
Polish nationhood and make the Poles slaves of a new German empire.
About 1 million Poles were removed from German-occupied areas and
replaced with German settlers. An additional 2.5 million Poles went into
forced labor camps in Germany.
Until mid-1941, Germany and the Soviet Union maintained good
relations in the joint dominion they had established over Poland. Moscow
had absorbed the eastern regions largely inhabited by Ukrainians and
Belorussians. By 1941 the Soviets had moved 1.5 million Poles into labor
camps all over the Soviet Union, and Stalin's secret police had murdered
thousands of Polish prisoners of war, especially figures in politics and
public administration. The most notorious incident was the 1940 murder
of thousands of Polish military officers; the bodies of 4,000 of them
were discovered in a mass grave in the Katyn forests near Smolensk in
1943. Because Soviet authorities refused to admit responsibility until
nearly the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, Polish opinion regarded the
Katyn Massacre as the ultimate symbol of Soviet cruelty and mendacity.
After Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, all the Polish
lands came under control of the Third Reich, whose occupation policies
became even more bloodthirsty as the war continued. Hitler considered
Poland to be an integral part of German Lebensraum, his concept of
German domination of the European continent. Eastern Europe would be
purged of its population of putative racial inferiors and prepared as
the hinterland of a grandiose Germanic empire. This vision fueled the
genocidal fanaticism of the conquerors. Reduced to slave status, the
Poles lived under severe restrictions enforced with savage punishment.
As the principal center of European Jewry, Poland became the main
killing ground of the Nazi Holocaust; several of the most lethal death
camps, including Auschwitz, Majdanek, and Treblinka, operated on Polish
soil. The Germans annihilated nearly all of Poland's 3 million Jews.
Roughly as many Polish gentiles also perished under the occupation.
Resistance at Home and Abroad
Poland was the only country to combat Germany from the first day of
the Polish invasion until the end of the war in Europe. After the
disaster of September 1939, a constitutionally legitimate Polish
government-in-exile established a seat in London under the direction of
General Wladyslaw Sikorski. In the early years of the war, Stalin
maintained a strained cooperation with the Polish government-in-exile
while continuing to demand retention of the eastern Polish territories
secured by the Hitler-Stalin pact and assurances that postwar Poland
would be "friendly" toward the Soviet Union.
Shortly after Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the Kremlin sought to
organize Polish forces to aid in repelling the Nazis on the Eastern
Front. Although 75,000 Polish troops were amassed on Soviet soil from
Soviet camps, they never were deployed on the Soviet front because of
disagreements about their utilization. Instead, the forces under the
command of the "London Poles" fought with great distinction in
the British Eighth Army in North Africa and Italy. The armored Polish I
Corps played an important role in the Normandy invasion. Although some
Polish units fought with the Red Army on the Eastern Front in the early
years of the war, by 1943 Stalin had broken relations with the Sikorski
government and the Soviet Union formed a rival front group, the Union of
Polish Patriots, led by Polish communists in the Soviet Union. That
group formed an entire field army that aided the Red Army in the last
year of the war.
Polish intelligence personnel also made a major contribution to the
Allied side. In the 1930s, Polish agents had secured information on the
top-secret German code machine, Enigma, and in the war �migr� Polish
experts aided the British in using this information to intercept
Hitler's orders to German military leaders.
In Poland itself, most elements of resistance to the German regime
organized under the banner of the Home Army (Armia Krajowa), which
operated under direction of the London government-in-exile. The Home
Army became one of the largest and most effective underground movements
of World War II. Commanding broad popular support, it functioned both as
a guerrilla force, conducting a vigorous campaign of sabotage and
intelligence gathering, and as a means of social defense against the
invaders. The Home Army became the backbone of a veritable underground
state, a clandestine network of genuine Polish institutions and cultural
activities. By 1944 the Home Army claimed 400,000 members. Acting
independently of the overall Polish resistance, an underground Jewish
network organized the courageous but unsuccessful 1943 risings in the
ghettos of Warsaw, Bialystok, and Vilnius.
Soviet Liberation of Poland
Later in the war, the fate of Poland came to depend on the Soviet
Union, which was initially the agent of deliverance from Nazi tyranny
but later was the bearer of a new form of oppression. Stalin responded
to Polish indignation over the Katy Massacre by establishing an
alternative Polish government of communists. The underground Polish
Workers' Party (Polska Partia Robotnicza) had already been active in
German-occupied Poland for over a year. In 1943 it established a small
military arm, the People's Army (Armia Ludowa). The Home Army and the
Polish Workers' Party acted separately throughout the war.
As the tide of war turned in favor of the Allies, the Soviet shadow
over Poland and Central Europe loomed larger. When Soviet forces neared
Warsaw in the summer of 1944, the Home Army, anticipating imminent Red
Army assistance, launched a rebellion against the German garrisons in
the capital. Instead, the Soviets halted their advance just short of
Warsaw, isolating the uprising and enabling the Germans to crush it
after two months of intense fighting. In retaliation against the Poles,
the Germans demolished Warsaw before retreating westward, leaving 90
percent of the city in ruins.
Just before the Home Army uprising, the communist factions had formed
the Polish Committee of National Liberation, later known as the Lublin
Committee, as the official legal authority in liberated territory. In
January 1945, the Lublin Committee became a provisional government, was
recognized by the Soviet Union, and was installed in Warsaw. From that
time, the Polish communists exerted primary influence on decisions about
the restoration of Poland. Given this outcome, there is a strong
suspicion that the Soviet failure to move on Warsaw in 1944 was an
intentional strategy used by Stalin to eliminate the noncommunist
resistance forces. The Red Army expelled the last German troops from
Poland in March 1945, several weeks before the final Allied victory in
Europe.
Poland
Poland - THE POLISH PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC
Poland
Soviet success in liberating Poland began an entirely new stage in
Polish national existence. With the reluctant blessing of the Allies,
the communist-dominated government was installed in 1945. During the
next seven years, Poland became a socialist state modeled on the Soviet
Union. Although Poland remained within this political structure through
the 1980s, open social unrest occurred at intervals throughout the
communist period. Protests in 1980 spawned the Solidarity (Solidarnosc)
labor movement, which forced fundamental compromise in the socialist
system.
Consolidation of Communist Power
The shattered Poland that emerged from the rubble of World War II was
reconstituted as a communist state and incorporated within the newly
formed Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, despite the evident
wishes of the overwhelming majority of the Polish nation. The deciding
factor in this outcome was the dominant position gained by the
victorious Red Army at the end of the war. At the conferences of Yalta
and Potsdam in 1945, United States presidents and Britain's prime
minister, Winston Churchill, met with Stalin to determine postwar
political conditions, including the disposition of Polish territory
occupied by the Red Army. At Yalta in February, Stalin pledged to permit
free elections in Poland and the other Soviet-occupied countries of
Eastern Europe. At Potsdam in July-August, the Allies awarded Poland
over 100,000 square kilometers of German territory, west to the Oder and
Neisse rivers, commonly called the Oder-Neisse Line. In turn, about 3
million Poles were removed from former Polish territory awarded to the
Soviet Union and resettled in the former German lands; similarly about 2
million Germans had to move west of the new border.
The Yalta accords sanctioned the formation of a provisional Polish
coalition government composed of communists and proponents of Western
democracy. From its outset, the Yalta formula favored the communists,
who enjoyed the advantages of Soviet support, superior morale, control
over crucial ministries, and Moscow's determination to bring Eastern
Europe securely under its thumb as a strategic asset in the emerging
Cold War. The new regime in Warsaw subdued a guerrilla resistance in the
countryside and gained political advantage by gradually whittling away
the rights of their democratic foes. By 1946 the coalition regime held a
carefully controlled national referendum that approved nationalization
of the economy, land reform, and a unicameral rather than bicameral
Sejm. Rightist parties had been outlawed by that time, and a
progovernment Democratic Bloc formed in 1947 included the forerunner of
the communist Polish United Workers' Party (Polska Zjednoczona Partia
Robotnicza--PZPR) and its leftist allies.
The first parliamentary election, held in 1947, allowed only
opposition candidates of the now-insignificant Polish Peasant Party,
which was harassed into ineffectiveness. Under these conditions, the
regime's candidates gained 417 of 434 seats in parliament, effectively
ending the role of genuine opposition parties. Within the next two
years, the communists ensured their ascendancy by restyling the PZPR as
holders of a monopoly of power in the Polish People's Republic.
Poland
Poland - From Stalinism to the Polish October
Poland
Communist social engineering transformed Poland nearly as much as did
the war. In the early years of the new regime, Poland became more urban
and industrial as a modern working class came into existence. The Polish
People's Republic attained its principal accomplishments in this
initial, relatively dynamic phase of its existence. The greatest gains
were made in postwar reconstruction and in integration of the
territories annexed from Germany. Imposition of the Soviet model on the
political, economic, and social aspects of Polish life was generally
slower and less traumatic than in the other East European countries
following World War II. The PZPR took great care, for example, to limit
the pace of agricultural collectivization lest Soviet-style reform
antagonize Polish farmers.
Nevertheless, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, PZPR rule grew
steadily more totalitarian and developed the full range of Stalinist
features then obligatory within the Soviet European empire: ideological
regimentation, the police state, strict subordination to the Soviet
Union, a rigid command economy, persecution of the Roman Catholic
Church, and blatant distortion of history, especially as it concerned
the more sensitive aspects of Poland's relations with the Soviet Union.
Stringent censorship stifled artistic and intellectual creativity or
drove its exponents into exile. At the same time, popular restiveness
increased as initial postwar gains gave way to the economic malaise that
would become chronic in the party-state.
Soviet-style centralized state planning was introduced in the First
Six-Year Plan, which began in 1950. The plan called for accelerated
development of heavy industry and forced collectivation of agriculture,
abandoning the previous go-slow policy in that area. As the earlier
policy had cautioned, however, collectivization met stubborn peasant
resistance, and the process moved much more slowly than anticipated. The
state also took control of nearly all commercial and industrial
enterprises. Leaving only family-run shops in the private sector, the
government harassed such independent shopkeepers with bureaucratic
requirements.
In its relations with the Roman Catholic Church, the communist
government carefully avoided open intervention, seeking rather to foment
anticlerical sentiment in society. Polish Catholic clergy denounced the
atheism and materialism in the regime; in 1949 the Vatican's
excommunication of Catholics belonging to the PZPR brought open
hostility from both sides, including state control of church
institutions and propaganda against them and church officials. By 1954
nine high Polish churchmen, including Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski, had
been imprisoned.
A brief liberalizing "thaw" in Eastern Europe followed the
death of Stalin in early 1953. In Poland this event stirred ferment,
calls for systemic reform, and conflict in the ranks of the PZPR. The
de-Stalinization of official Soviet dogma left Poland's Stalinist regime
in a difficult position, especially following Nikita S. Khrushchev's
1956 attack on Stalin's cult of personality. In the same month as
Khrushchev's speech, the death of hard-liner Boleslaw Bierut exacerbated
an existing split in the PZPR. In 1951 Bierut had won a struggle with
Wladyslaw Gomulka for the top position in the party. In June 1956,
scores of demonstrators died when army troops quelled street riots in
Poznan, inaugurating a recurrent phenomenon of Polish worker protest
against the self-proclaimed workers' state.
Realizing the need for new leadership, the PZPR chose Gomulka as
first secretary in October 1956. This decision was made despite Moscow's
threats to invade Poland if the PZPR picked Gomulka, a moderate who had
been purged after losing his battle with Bierut. When Khrushchev was
reassured that Gomulka would not alter the basic foundations of Polish
communism, he withdrew the invasion threat. On the other hand, Gomulka's
pledge to follow a "Polish road to socialism" more in harmony
with national traditions and preferences caused many Poles to interpret
the dramatic "Polish October" confrontation of 1956 as a sign
that the end of the dictatorship was in sight.
Poland
Poland - Gomulka and Gierek
Poland
Although Gomulka's accession to power raised great hopes, the 1956
incident proved to be a prelude to further social discontent when those
hopes were disappointed. The 1960s and 1970s saw Gomulka's decline in
power and his eventual ouster; spectacular economic reforms without
long-term results; widespread dissent, often including open
confrontations, from intellectuals, the church, and the workers; and,
finally, the near-collapse of the Polish economy.
The Gomulka Years
The elevation of Gomulka to first secretary marked a milestone in the
history of communist Poland. Most importantly, it was the first time
that popular opinion had influenced a change at the top of any communist
government. Gomulka's regime began auspiciously by curbing the secret
police, returning most collective farmland to private ownership,
loosening censorship, freeing political prisoners, improving relations
with the Catholic Church, and pledging democratization of communist
party management. In general, Gomulka's Poland gained a deserved
reputation as one of the more open societies in Eastern Europe. The new
party chief disappointed many Poles, however, by failing to dismantle
the fundamentals of the Stalinist system. Regarding himself as a loyal
communist and striving to overcome the traditional Polish-Russian
enmity, Gomulka came to favor only those reforms necessary to secure
public toleration of the party's dominion. The PZPR was to be both the
defender of Polish nationalism and the keeper of communist ideology. By
the late 1960s, Gomulka's leadership had grown more orthodox and
stagnant as the memory of the Poznan uprising faded. In 1968 Gomulka
encouraged the Warsaw Pact military suppression of the democratic
reforms in Czechoslovakia.
Gomulka's hold on power weakened that year when Polish students,
inspired by the idealism of the Prague Spring, demonstrated to protest
suppression of intellectual freedom. Popular disenchantment mounted as
police attacked student demonstrators in Warsaw. The PZPR hardliners,
who had been alarmed by Gomulka's modest reforms, seized the opportunity
to force the first secretary into purging Jews from party and
professional positions, exacerbating discontent among the most vocal
elements of Polish society.
The downfall of the Gomulka regime in December 1970 was triggered by
a renewed outbreak of labor violence protesting drastic price rises on
basic goods. When strikes spread from the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk to
other industrial centers on the Baltic coast, Gomulka interpreted the
peaceful stoppages and walkouts as counterrevolution and ordered them
met with deadly force. The bloodshed claimed hundreds of victims and
inflamed the entire coastline before the party annulled the price
increases and pushed Gomulka into retirement. The Baltic slayings
permanently embittered millions of workers, while the events of the
later Gomulka period convinced Polish progressives that enlightened
communist rule was a futile hope. Many of the future leaders of
Solidarity and other opposition movements gained their formative
political experiences in 1968 and 1970.
Edward Gierek
In the wake of the Baltic upheavals, Edward Gierek was selected as
party chief. A well-connected party functionary and technocrat, Gierek
replaced all of Gomulka's ministers with his own followers and blamed
the former regime for all of Poland's troubles. Gierek hoped to pacify
public opinion by administering a dose of measured liberalization
coupled with a novel program of economic stimulation. The center of the
program was large-scale borrowing from the West to buy technology that
would upgrade Poland's production of export goods. Over the long term,
the export goods would pay for the loans and improve Poland's world
economic position. The program paid immediate dividends by raising
living standards and expectations, but it quickly soured because of
worldwide recession, increased oil prices, and the inherent weaknesses
and corruption of communist planning and administration. By the
mid-1970s, Poland had entered a seemingly irreversible economic nosedive
compounded by a crushing burden of external debt. Another attempt to
raise food prices in 1976 failed after an additional round of worker
protests.
Domestic economic problems were accompanied by increased pressure
from the Soviet Union for closer Polish cooperation with the other
members of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon). In 1971
Poland abandoned Gomulka's strict opposition to closer economic
integration, and a series of long-term agreements committed Polish
resource and capital investment to Soviet-sponsored projects. Such
agreements guaranteed Poland access to cheap Soviet raw materials,
especially oil and natural gas. Nonetheless, in the 1970s Poland
experienced shortages of capital goods such as computers and locomotives
because Comecon obligations moved such products out of Poland.
Meanwhile, the Helsinki Accords of 1975 inspired open dissent over
human rights issues. The immediate objects of dissent were the regime's
proposal of constitutional amendments that would institutionalize the
leading role of the PZPR, Poland's obligations to the Soviet Union, and
the withholding of civil rights pending obedience to the state. In 1976
a group of intellectuals formed the Committee for Defense of Workers
(Komitet Obrony Robotnik�w--KOR), and students formed the Committee for
Student Solidarity. Together those organizations intensified public
pressure on Gierek to liberalize state controls, and many publications
emerged from underground to challenge official dogma.
By the end of the 1970s, the hard-pressed Gierek regime faced an
implicit opposition coalition of disaffected labor, dissident
intelligentsia, and Roman Catholic clergy and lay spokespeople
sympathetic to dissident activities. Democratically oriented activists
grew more adept at defending workers' interests and human rights, a
strategy that paid off handsomely in 1980. Under the stellar leadership
of its longtime primate Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski, the Catholic Church
attained unrivaled moral authority in the country. The prestige of the
church reached a new peak in 1978 with the elevation to the papacy of
the archbishop of Krak�w, Cardinal Karol Wojtyla. As John Paul II,
Wojtyla became the first non-Italian pope since the sixteenth century.
The election of the Polish pope sparked a surge of joy and pride in the
country, and John Paul's triumphant visit to his homeland in 1979 did
much to precipitate the extraordinary events of the next year.
Poland
Poland - The Birth of Solidarity
Poland
When the government enacted new food price increases in the summer of
1980, a wave of labor unrest swept the country. Partly moved by local
grievances, the workers of the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk went on strike
in mid-August. Led by electrician and veteran strike leader Lech Walesa,
the strikers occupied the shipyard and issued far-reaching demands for
labor reform and greater civil rights. The workers' top priority was
establishment of a trade union independent of communist party control
and possessing the legal right to strike. Buoyed by a wave of popular
support and formally acknowledged by other striking enterprises as their
leader, the Gdansk workers held out until the government capitulated.
The victorious strikers hailed the Gdansk
Agreement of August 31 as a veritable social
contract, authorizing citizens to introduce democratic change to the
extent possible within the confines of the communist system.
Solidarity, the free national trade union that arose from the nucleus
of the Lenin Shipyard strike was unlike anything in the previous
experience of Comecon nations. Although primarily a labor movement led
and supported by workers and represented by its charismatic chairman
Walesa, Solidarity attracted a diverse membership that quickly swelled
to 10 million people, or more than one of every four Poles. Because of
its size and massive support, the organization assumed the stature of a
national reform lobby. Although it disavowed overtly political
ambitions, the movement became a de facto vehicle of opposition to the
communists, who were demoralized but still in power. With the
encouragement of Pope John Paul II, the church gave Solidarity vital
material and moral support that further legitimized it in the eyes of
the Polish population.
In the sixteen months following its initial strike, Solidarity waged
a difficult campaign to realize the letter and spirit of the Gdansk
Agreement. This struggle fostered an openness unprecedented in a
communist East European society. Although the PZPR ousted Gierek as
first secretary and proclaimed its willingness to cooperate with the
fledgling union, the ruling party still sought to frustrate its rival
and curtail its autonomy in every possible way. In 1980-81, repeated
showdowns between Solidarity and the party-state usually were decided by
Solidarity's effective strikes. The movement spread from industrial to
agricultural enterprises with the founding of Rural Solidarity, which
pressured the regime to recognize private farmers as the economic
foundation of the country's agricultural sector.
Meanwhile, the persistence of Solidarity prompted furious objections
from Moscow and other Comecon members, putting Poland under constant
threat of invasion by its Warsaw Pact allies. This was the first time a
ruling communist regime had accepted organizations completely beyond the
regime's control. It was also the first time an overwhelming majority of
the workers under such a regime were openly loyal to an organization
fundamentally opposed to everything for which the party stood. In 1981
an estimated 30 percent of PZPR members also belonged to an independent
union.
In late 1981, the tide began to turn against the union movement. In
the midst of the virtual economic collapse of the country, many Poles
lost the enthusiasm that had given Solidarity its initial impetus. The
extremely heterogeneous movement developed internal splits over
personality and policy. Walesa's moderate wing emphasized nonpolitical
goals, assuming that Moscow would never permit Poland to be governed by
a group not endorsed by the Warsaw Pact. Walesa sought cooperation with
the PZPR to prod the regime into reforms and avoid open confrontation
with the Soviet Union. By contrast, the militant wing of Solidarity
sought to destabilize the regime and force drastic change through
wildcat strikes and demonstrations.
In 1981 the government adopted a harder line against the union, and
General Wojciech Jaruzelski, commander in chief of the Polish armed
forces, replaced Stanislaw Kania as party leader in October.
Jaruzelski's very profession symbolized a tougher approach to the
increasingly turbulent political situation. At the end of 1981, the
government broke off all negotiations with Solidarity, and tension
between the antagonists rose sharply.
Poland
Poland - Jaruzelski
Poland
The Jaruzelski regime marked another historic turning point in
governance of the Polish state. Beginning with repressive measures to
silence all opposition, Jaruzelski eventually presided over the popular
rejection of Polish communism.
Martial Law
In December 1981, Jaruzelski suddenly declared martial law, ordering
the army and special police units to seize control of the country,
apprehend Solidarity's leaders, and prevent all further union activity.
In effect, Jaruzelski executed a carefully planned and efficient
military coup on behalf of the beleaguered and paralyzed the PZPR. The
motives of this act remain unclear. The general later claimed that he
acted to head off the greater evil of an imminent Soviet invasion;
detractors dismissed this explanation as a pretext for an ironfisted
attempt to salvage party rule. In any case, the junta suppressed
resistance with a determination that cost the lives of several
protesters, and by the new year the stunned nation was again under the
firm grip of a conventional communist regime.
Under martial law, Jaruzelski's regime applied draconian restrictions
on civil liberties, closed the universities, and imprisoned thousands of
Solidarity activists, including Walesa. During the succeeding months,
the government undid much of Solidarity's work and finally dissolved the
union itself. Official pressure overcame repeated attempts by Solidarity
sympathizers to force the nullification of the December coup. By the end
of 1982, the junta felt sufficiently secure to free Walesa, whom it now
characterized as the "former leader of a former union." After
gradually easing the most onerous features of the state of emergency,
Warsaw lifted martial law in July 1983, but Jaruzelski and his generals
continued to control the most critical party and government posts.
Poland at an Impasse
From the viewpoint of the regime, implementing martial law
efficiently extinguished the immediate challenge posed by Solidarity. It
did nothing, however, to resolve the long-standing crisis of
"People's Poland," which in many ways originated in the very
foundation of communist rule and the shadow of illegitimacy and
ineptitude from which it never escaped. Jaruzelski presented himself as
a realistic moderate, a proponent of reform who nevertheless insisted on
the leading role of the party. Polish society remained sullenly
unresponsive to his appeals, however. At the same time, he encountered
resistance from the PZPR conservatives. These so-called hardheads, held
in contempt by the public, regarded the party chief as too conciliatory
and resented the interference of Jaruzelski's fellow generals in the
affairs of the civilian party apparatus.
Time proved that Jaruzelski's coup had staggered Solidarity but not
killed it. Adherents of the union operated underground or from jail
cells, advocating a waiting game to preserve the principles of the
Gdansk Agreement. Walesa in particular refused to fade into obscurity;
he gained added luster by his receipt of the Nobel Prize for Peace in
1983. In the next year, the Jaruzelski government suffered embarrassment
when secret policemen were discovered to have abducted and murdered
Father Jerzy Popieluszko, a priest who had gained recognition as the
spiritual adviser of the repressed Solidarity. At that juncture, Poland
seemed mired in frustrating deadlock, with no reasonable prospect of
resuscitating the stricken economy or achieving political harmony.
Collapse of the Communist Regime
The deadlock was broken chiefly by events elsewhere in the Soviet
alliance. The birth of Solidarity proved to be a precursor of forces of
change across all of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Once again
Poland was in the midst of cataclysmic European events, but in this case
Poland had a decisive influence on events in neighboring countries.
Beginning with the liberalization programs of Mikhail S. Gorbachev in
the Soviet Union and continuing with the unforeseen and sudden demise of
Poland's communist regime, decades of tension had been released
throughout the region by the end of 1989.
Toward the Round-Table Talks
The first break in the Polish logjam occurred in 1985 when Gorbachev
assumed leadership of the Soviet Union. Although Gorbachev in no way
willed the demolition of the communist order in Poland and elsewhere in
Eastern Europe, his policies of glasnost' and perestroika
inadvertently accelerated the indigenous systemic rot in those
countries. As the literal and figurative bankruptcy of East European
communism became obvious, apologists resorted more frequently to the
Brezhnev Doctrine--the understanding that Moscow would use force to
prevent ceding any territory once under its control--as the ultimate
justification of the status quo. But the sustained liberalism of the
Gorbachev era undermined the credibility of this last-ditch argument.
The inhibiting fear of Red Army retaliation, which had blocked reform in
Poland and elsewhere in earlier years, gradually faded. Hastening to
identify itself with Gorbachev, the Jaruzelski team welcomed the spirit
of reform wafting from the east and cautiously followed suit at home. By
1988 most political prisoners had been released, unofficial opposition
groups were flourishing, and Solidarity, still nominally illegal,
operated quite openly.
In the meantime, however, economic malaise and runaway inflation had
depressed Polish living standards and deepened the anger and frustration
of society. In early 1988, strikes again were called in Gdansk and
elsewhere, and a new generation of alienated workers called for
representation by Solidarity and Walesa. Amid widespread predictions of
a social explosion, Jaruzelski took the momentous step of beginning
round table talks with the banned trade union and other opposition
groups. This measure was taken over the objections of the
still-formidable hard-line faction of the PZPR.
Poland
Poland - The 1989 Elections
Poland
After months of haggling, the round table talks yielded a historic
compromise in early 1989: Solidarity would regain legal status and the
right to post candidates in parliamentary elections (with the outcome
guaranteed to leave the communists a majority of seats). Although to
many observers the guarantee seemed a foolish concession by Solidarity
at the time, the election of June 1989 swept communists from nearly all
the contested seats, demonstrating that the PZPR's presumed advantages
in organization and funding could not overcome society's disapproval of
its ineptitude and oppression.
Solidarity used its newly superior position to broker a coalition
with various small parties that until then had been silent satellites of
the PZPR. The coalition produced a noncommunist majority that formed a
cabinet dominated by Solidarity. Totally demoralized and advised by
Gorbachev to accept defeat, the PZPR held its final congress in January
1990. In August 1989, the Catholic intellectual Tadeusz Mazowiecki
became prime minister of a government committed to dismantling the
communist system and replacing it with a Western-style democracy and a
free-market economy. By the end of 1989, the Soviet alliance had been
swept away by a stunning succession of revolutions partly inspired by
the Polish example. Suddenly, the history of Poland, and of its entire
region, had entered the postcommunist era.
Poland
Poland - Geography
Poland
Generally speaking, Poland is an unbroken plain reaching from the
Baltic Sea in the north to the Carpathian Mountains in the south. Within
that plain, terrain variations generally run in bands from east to west.
The Baltic coast lacks natural harbors except for the Gdansk-Gdynia
region and Szczecin in the far northwest. The northeastern region,
called the Lake District, is sparsely populated and lacks agricultural
and industrial resources. To the south and west of the lake district, a
vast region of plains extends to the Sudeten (Sidetu) Mountains on the
Czech and Slovak borders to the southwest and to the Carpathians on the
Czech, Slovak, and Ukrainian borders to the southeast. The country
extends 649 kilometers from north to south and 689 kilometers from east
to west. Poland's total area is 312,683 square kilometers, including
inland waters--a slightly smaller area than that of New Mexico. The
neighboring countries are Germany to the west, the Czech and Slovak
Federative Republic the south, Ukraine and Belarus to the east, and
Lithuania and the Russian province of Kaliningrad to the northeast.
Topography
The average elevation of Poland is 173 meters, and only 3 percent of
Polish territory, along the southern border, is higher than 500 meters.
The highest elevation is Mount Rysy, which rises 2,499 meters in the
Tatra Range of the Carpathians, 95 kilometers south of Krak�w. About 60
square kilometers along the Gulf of Gdansk are below sea level. Poland
is traditionally divided into five topographic zones from north to
south. The largest, the central lowlands, is narrow in the west, then
expands to the north and south as it extends eastward. Along the eastern
border, this zone reaches from the far northeast to within 200
kilometers of the southern border. The terrain in the central lowlands
is quite flat, and earlier glacial lakes have been filled by sediment.
The region is cut by several major rivers, including the Oder (Odra),
which defines the Silesian Lowlands in the southwest, and the Vistula
(Wisla), which defines the lowland areas of east-central Poland.
To the south of the lowlands are the lesser Poland uplands, a belt
varying in width from ninety to 200 kilometers, formed by the gently
sloping foothills of the Sudeten and Carpathian mountain ranges and the
uplands that connect the ranges in southcentral Poland. The topography
of this region is divided transversely into higher and lower elevations,
reflecting its underlying geological structure. In the western section,
the Silesia-Krak�w Upthrust contains rich coal deposits.
The third topographic area is located on either side of Poland's
southern border and is formed by the Sudeten and Carpathian ranges.
Within Poland, neither of these ranges is forbidding enough to prevent
substantial habitation; the Carpathians are especially densely
populated. The rugged form of the Sudeten range derives from the
geological shifts that formed the later Carpathian uplift. The highest
elevation in the Sudeten is 1,602 meters, in the Karkonosze Mountains.
The Carpathians in Poland, formed as a discrete topographical unit in
the relatively recent Tertiary Era, are the highest and most picturesque
mountains in the country. They are the northernmost edge of a much
larger range that extends into Czechsolvakia, Ukraine, Hungary, and
Romania. Within Poland the range includes two major basins, the Oswiecim
(Auschwitz) and Sandomierz, which are rich in several minerals and
natural gas.
To the north of the central lowlands, the lake region includes the
only primeval forests remaining in Europe and much of Poland's shrinking
unspoiled natural habitat. Glacial action in this region formed lakes
and low hills in the otherwise flat terrain adjacent to Lithuania and
the Baltic Sea. Small lakes dot the entire northern half of Poland, and
the glacial formations that characterize the lake region extend as much
as 200 kilometers inland in western Poland. Wide river valleys divide
the lake region into three parts. In the northwest, Pomerania is located
south of the Baltic coastal region and north of the Warta and Notec
rivers. Masuria occupies the remainder of northern Poland and features a
string of larger lakes. Most of Poland's 9,300 lakes that are more than
one hectare in area are located in the northern part of the lake region,
where they occupy about 10 percent of the surface area.
The Baltic coastal plains are a low-lying region formed of sediments
deposited by the sea. The coastline was shaped by the action of the
rising sea after the Scandinavian ice sheet retreated. The two major
inlets in the smooth coast are the Pomeranian Bay on the German border
in the far northwest and the Gulf of Gdansk in the east. The Oder River
empties into the former, and the Vistula forms a large delta at the head
of the latter. Sandbars with large dunes form lagoons and coastal lakes
along much of the coast.
<>Drainage
<>Climate
<>Environment
Poland
Poland - Drainage
Poland
Nearly all of Poland is drained northward into the Baltic Sea by the
Vistula, the Oder, and the tributaries of these two major rivers. About
half the country is drained by the Vistula, which originates in the
Tatra Mountains in far south-central Poland. The Vistula Basin includes
most of the eastern half of the country and is drained by a system of
rivers that mainly join the Vistula from the east. One of the
tributaries, the Bug, defines 280 kilometers of Poland's eastern border
with Ukraine and Belarus. The Oder and its major tributary, the Warta,
form a basin that drains the western third of Poland into the bays north
of Szczecin. The drainage effect on a large part of Polish terrain is
weak, however, especially in the lake region and the inland areas to its
south. The predominance of swampland, level terrain, and small, shallow
lakes hinders large-scale movement of water. The rivers have two
high-water periods per year. The first is caused by melting snow and ice
dams in spring adding to the volume of lowland rivers; the second is
caused by heavy rains in July.
Poland
Poland - Climate
Poland
Poland's long-term and short-term weather patterns are made
transitional and variable by the collision of diverse air masses above
the country's surface. Maritime air moves across Western Europe, Arctic
air sweeps down from the North Atlantic, and subtropical air arrives
from the South Atlantic. Although the Arctic air dominates for much of
the year, its conjunction with warmer currents generally moderates
temperatures and generates considerable precipitation, clouds, and fog.
When the moderating influences are lacking, winter temperatures in
mountain valleys may drop to -40� C.
Spring arrives slowly in April, bringing mainly sunny days after a
period of alternating wintry and springlike conditions. Summer, which
extends from June to August, is generally less humid than winter.
Showers alternate with dry sunny weather that is generated when southern
winds prevail. Early autumn is generally sunny and warm before a period
of rainy, colder weather in November begins the transition into winter.
Winter, which may last one to three months, brings frequent snowstorms
but relatively low total precipitation.
The range of mean temperatures is 6� C in the northeast to 8� C in
the southwest, but individual readings in Poland's regions vary widely
by season. On the highest mountain peaks, the mean temperature is below
0� C. The Baltic coast, influenced by moderating west winds, has cooler
summers and warmer winters. The other temperature extreme is in the
southeast along the border with Ukraine, where the greatest seasonal
differences occur and winter temperatures average 4.5� C below those in
western Poland. The growing season is about forty days longer in the
southwest than in the northeast, where spring arrives latest.
Average annual precipitation for the whole country is 600
millimeters, but isolated mountain locations receive as much as 1,300
millimeters per year. The total is slightly higher in the southern
uplands than in the central plains. A few areas, notably along the
Vistula between Warsaw and the Baltic and in the far northwest, average
less than 500 millimeters. In winter about half the precipitation in the
lowlands and the entire amount in the mountains falls as snow. On the
average, precipitation in summer is twice that in winter, providing a
dependable supply of water for crops.
Poland
Poland - Environment
Poland
Poland suffered as heavily as any other East European country from
the environmental negligence inherent in the central planning approach
to resource development. Although some warnings reached the public
during the 1980s, the communist regimes typically had portrayed economic
activity in the capitalist countries as the true enemy of the
environment. Investigations after 1989 revealed that enormous damage had
been inflicted on water, air, and soil quality and on forests,
especially surrounding the industrial centers in Upper Silesia and the
Krak�w region. But because the economy had depended for over forty
years on unrestrained abuse of Poland's natural resources, environmental
planners in the early 1990s faced the prospect of severe economic
disruption if they abruptly curtailed the industrial practices causing
pollution.
Environmental Conditions and Crises
In 1991 Poland designated five official ecological disaster areas. Of
the five, the densely concentrated heavy industry belt of Upper Silesia
had suffered the most acute pollution. In that area, public health
indicators such as infant mortality, circulatory and respiratory
disease, lead content in children's blood, and incidence of cancer were
uniformly higher than in other parts of Poland and dramatically higher
than indicators for Western Europe. Experts believed that the full
extent of the region's environmental damage was still unknown in 1992.
The situation was exacerbated by overcrowding; 11 percent of Poland's
population lived in the region. With 600 persons per square kilometer,
Upper Silesia ranked among the most densely populated regions of Europe.
In 1991 the region's concentrated industrial activity contributed 40
percent of Poland's electrical power, more than 75 percent of its hard
coal, and 51 percent of its steel.
A variety of statistics reflect the effects of severe environmental
degradation in Upper Silesia. In 1990 the infant mortality rate was over
30 deaths per 1,000 births, nearly five times the levels in some
countries of Western Europe; some 12,000 hectares of agricultural land
had been declared permanently unfit for tillage because of industrial
waste deposition; and between 1921 and 1990 the average number of cloudy
days per year had increased from ten to 183. Average life expectancy in
southern Poland was four years less than elsewhere in the country.
Water and air pollution affect the entire country, however. A 1990
report found that 65 percent of Poland's river water was so contaminated
that it corroded equipment when used in industry. After absorbing
contaminants from the many cities on its banks, the Vistula River was a
major polluter of the Baltic Sea. River water could not be used for
irrigation. In 1990 about half of Poland's lakes had been damaged by
acid rain, and 95 percent of the country's river water was considered
undrinkable. Because Polish forests are dominated by conifers, which are
especially vulnerable to acid rain, nearly two-thirds of forestland had
sustained some damage from air pollution by 1990. In 1989 Polish experts
estimated total economic losses from environmental damage at over US$3.4
billion, including soil erosion, damage to resources and equipment from
air and water pollution, and public health costs.
In 1988 about 4.5 million hectares, or 14.3 percent of Poland's total
area, were legally protected in national and regional parks and
reserves. But all fourteen national parks were exposed to heavy air
pollution, and half of them received substantial agricultural,
municipal, and industrial runoff.
A special environmental problem was discovered when Polish
authorities began inspecting the military bases occupied by Soviet
troops for forty-six years. Uncontrolled fuel leakage, untreated sewage
release, noise pollution from air bases, and widespread destruction of
vegetation by heavy equipment were among the most serious conditions
observed when inspections began in 1990. The government of Prime
Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki was late in pursuing the issue with the
Soviet government, however, and in 1991 the Soviet Union continued its
longstanding refusal to pay fines and natural resource usage fees
required by Polish law. In 1992 the Poles dropped all demands for
compensation as part of the withdrawal protocol.
Environmental Groups
The burst of political activity in the late 1980s and the early 1990s
included establishment of over 2,000 organizations with environmental
agendas. A precedent for such groups was set in 1980, however, when the
Green Solidarity movement forced closure of an aluminum plant in Krak�w.
The diverse groups that appeared in the next decade achieved some
additional successes, but lack of cohesion and common goals deprived the
movement of political influence. No environmental group or party was
represented in the Polish legislative branch in 1992.
Among the objects of protest in the 1980s were Poland's lack of a
national plan for dealing with ecological disasters; construction of a
Czechoslovak coking plant near the Polish border; continued reliance on
high-sulfur and high-ash coal in electric power plants; and the severe
environmental damage caused by Soviet troops stationed in Poland. In
1986 the explosion and resulting fallout from the Soviet Union's
Chernobyl' nuclear power plant galvanized environmental activism, which
in Poland was dominated by the professional classes. But environmental
groups faced several obstacles. Volunteer recruitment, a critical aspect
of organizational development, was hindered by the necessity for many
Poles to work two jobs to survive. Refining practical operational
priorities proved difficult for organizations whose initial inspiration
came from broad statements of environmental ethics. And the agendas of
the many activist groups remained fragmented and dissimilar in 1992.
Meanwhile, the most influential political parties were split between
advocates of preserving jobs ahead of protecting the environment and
those who saw unchanged economic activity as the paramount danger to the
health of workers and society. Public attitudes toward environmental
problems also were divided. In a 1992 nationwide survey, only 1 percent
of Poles cited the environment as the country's most serious problem,
although 66 percent rated environmental issues "very serious."
By contrast, 72 percent cited economic issues as the country's most
serious problem.
Government Environmental Policy
Poland established a Ministry of Environmental Protection and Natural
Resources in 1985, but the new department exerted little authority.
Between 1987 and 1988, for example, government investment in
environmental protection increased by only 6 percent. In 1990 the
initial postcommunist environmental timetable was to achieve
"substantial" reduction of extreme environmental hazards in
three years and to reach the level of European Community (EC)
requirements in seven to ten years. In early 1991, the ministry drafted
a new state ecological policy, the core of which eliminated the
communist rationale of "social interest" in the arbitrary
consumption of natural resources. Instead, the new policy fixed
responsibility for the negative results of resource consumption at the
source. The Ministry of Environmental Protection and Natural Resources
officially identified the eighty enterprises causing the most pollution
and promised to shut them down if pollution were not reduced. The role
of nongovernmental environmental organizations in policy making was
recognized officially for the first time. In late 1991, a State
Environmental Protection Inspectorate was established, with broad powers
to regulate polluting industries. Penalties for environmental damage
also were increased at that time.
At the same time, government policy steered carefully away from
measures that would sacrifice economic development, and policy makers
debated the appropriate standards for comparing immediate economic
growth with the estimated longer term gains of beginning a rigorous
cleanup program. Accordingly, in 1990 the Ministry of Environmental
Protection and Natural Resources adopted a policy of
"ecodevelopment" emphasizing modernization and restructuring
measures that theoretically would curtail pollution while they
streamlined production operations. The policy included distribution of
information to the public to gain acceptance of economic sacrifice for
environmental improvement; linkage of environmental law to the new
market mechanism slowly being created; promotion of an awareness in
Western Europe of the transnational impact of Poland's air and water
pollution; and application of foreign capital and technology to
environmental cleanup problems. At the end of 1990, Western banks began
opening credit lines for Polish environmental protection, and plans for
some multinational ecological enterprises included Poland. In 1991 the
United States government agreed to forgive part of Poland's debt in
exchange for domestic investment in pollution control.
Poland
Poland - The Society
Poland
In the years following World War II, Poland, like other East European
countries, underwent a rapid, planned transition from a predominantly
agrarian to a predominantly industrial society. When the country came
under communist control in 1945, Polish society also was subjected to a
set of rigid ideological tenets. Communist dogma failed to change the
intellectual or spiritual outlook of most Poles, however, because
traditional institutions such as the Roman Catholic Church and the
family remained strong support structures for alternative viewpoints. On
the other hand, the institutions created by the communist regimes
fundamentally influenced the day-to-day functions of Polish society.
This influence was especially pervasive in areas such as health and
education, where state programs made services accessible to more of the
population, albeit in a homogenized and regimented form.
Among the permanent results of communist ideology was the
disappearance of the landed aristocracy, which had played an especially
large role in governance and in preserving Polish culture and national
consciousness, especially during the more than 100 years when Poland was
partitioned. The disruption of traditional social hierarchies and
barriers also brought substantially more upward mobility as the urban
population came into direct contact with the peasants. Within a decade
of the communist takeover, however, the initial benefits of this social
engineering had faded, and in 1956 the first of several waves of unrest
swept the country. Subsequent social and economic stagnation mobilized
intellectuals and workers to stage increasingly widespread and effective
protests. These protests eventually overthrew communism and ended its
suppression of social diversity. Nevertheless, the forty-four-year
postwar communist period left permanent marks on the Polish way of life
even after the state control structures crumbled in 1989.
World War II resulted in a marked homogenization of the Polish
population, which previously had been ethnically and religiously rather
diverse. Massive relocations of ethnic populations resulting from
boundary changes and the destruction of most of Poland's Jewish
population in the Holocaust meant that a country previously two-thirds
ethnically Polish and spiritually Roman Catholic entered the postwar era
with a population over 90 percent Catholic and over 98 percent
ethnically Polish.
Demographically, Poland in 1992 was a young country, more than 64
percent of whose population was under forty years of age. The country
also had one of Europe's highest birth rates. By 1980 nearly half of
employed Poles belonged to a socioeconomic group different from that of
their parents, showing the mobility of the younger generations across
traditional class lines. By 1980 less than one-quarter of working Poles
remained in agriculture, and about two-thirds were either manual or
white-collar workers in urban areas. About one-third of the postwar
intelligentsia came from worker families, while about one-quarter came
from peasant families. These numbers represented a drastic change from
the predominance of the aristocracy in the intelligentsia before World
War II.
Both by cultural tradition and by recent social policy, Poles were
relatively well educated. The 1990 literacy rate was 98 percent. At that
time, more than 17 percent of Poles had postsecondary education, and 4
percent had achieved advanced college degrees.
The end of communist rule in 1989 presented new challenges to Polish
society and to government policy makers. The concept of universal,
state-guaranteed protection from unemployment, sickness, and poverty was
challenged as Poland turned toward privatization and opened its economy
to market forces. Although society had retained a healthy skepticism
about the benefits of total socialization, postcommunist governments
could not devise replacement social programs fast enough to avoid bitter
social dissatisfaction when the security of the old system disappeared.
<>POPULATION
<>THE SOCIAL ORDER
<>HOUSING
<>RELIGION
<>EDUCATION
<>HEALTH AND WELFARE
Poland
Poland - Population
Poland
Between 1939 and 1949, the population of Poland underwent two major
changes. The deaths, emigration, and geopolitical adjustments resulting
from World War II reduced the 1939 population of about 35 million to
about 24 million by 1946. Only in the 1970s did Poland again approach
its prewar population level. In addition, the ethnic composition of the
country was drastically homogenized by the mass annihilation of Polish
Jews and the loss of much of the non-Polish Slavic population through
the westward shift of the borders of the Ukrainian and Belorussian
republics of the Soviet Union.
Languages
Beginning with the early postwar years, Polish has been the language
of all but a very few citizens. Grouped with Czech and Slovak in the
West Slavic subgroup of the Slavonic linguistic family, Polish uses a
Latin alphabet because the Roman Catholic Church has been dominant in
Poland since the tenth century. Documents written in Polish survive from
the fourteenth century; however, the literary language largely developed
during the sixteenth century in response to Western religious and
humanistic ideas and the availability of printed materials. In the
eighteenth century, the Enlightenment stimulated a second period of
advances in the literary language. When the Polish state fell at the end
of the eighteenth century, the language played an important role in
maintaining the Polish national identity.
Although modern Polish was homogenized by widespread education,
distribution of literature, and the flourishing of the mass media,
several dialects originating in tribal settlement patterns survived this
process in the late twentieth century. Among the most significant are
Greater Polish and Lesser Polish (upon a combination of which the
literary language was formed), Silesian, Mazovian, and Kashubian, which
is sometimes classified as a separate language.
Population Growth and Structure
In the immediate postwar period, Poland's birth rate surged upward
and many Poles were repatriated from military duty or imprisonment
abroad. This population increase was tempered, however, by continued
emigration of ethnic groups such as the Jews and non-Polish Slavs after
the war ended. The annual growth rate peaked in 1953 at more than 1.9
percent; between 1955 and 1960, it averaged 1.7 percent before dropping
to 0.9 percent in 1965. The growth rate then remained fairly steady
through 1980. In the early 1980s, however, Poland's growth rate of 1.0
percent placed it behind only Albania, Ireland, and Iceland among
European countries. The population increase in the early 1980s was
attributed to childbearing by women born in the postwar upswing as well
as to lower death rates.
Later in the 1980s, as many women passed their peak childbearing
years, projected growth rates again dropped. From 1985 through 1991, the
actual population increase was smaller every year. The actual increase
in 1991 was 122,000. Nevertheless, in 1988 one in five persons added to
the population of Europe outside the Soviet Union was a Pole. Experts
forecast that in the year 2000 Poland would be contributing virtually
all the natural growth in Europe's employed population. In 1990 the
shape of Poland's population pyramid was expected to remain relatively
constant; it was composed of a relatively small base of young people,
with a wider component of citizens over age sixty and a bulge in the
cohort born during the postwar upswing. In 1990 this group ranged in age
from thirty-five to forty-four. At the end of 1991, the total population
was estimated at 38.3 million; projected population in the year 2000 was
39.5 million.
In 1988 about 51 percent of Poland's population was female, a
statistic reflecting the fact that average life expectancy was about
nine years greater for women (66.5 years for men, 75.5 for women). The
ratio of men to women was significantly higher (as much as five to two)
in rural areas, from which many women migrated to escape poor conditions
on private farms. Over a period of years, a lower rural birth rate led
to a smaller agricultural work force. Already in 1981, only 55 percent
of the rural population was of working age, compared with 63 percent of
the urban population. (Working age was defined as eighteen to fiftynine
for women, eighteen to sixty-four for men.) In 1991 some 29.4 percent of
the overall population was below working age, and 13 percent was past
working age. The former figure had fallen since the mid-1980s, while the
latter rose in the same period. The 547,000 live births in Poland in
1991 equaled 14.3 births per 1,000 people. However, the 74 deaths versus
100 births recorded that year was a higher ratio than in any recent
year. (In the early 1980s, the ratio was less than 50 to 100.)
In the late 1980s, emigration from Poland was stimulated mainly by
poor economic conditions. The 1989 total of 26,000 �migr�s dropped to
18,500 in 1990, but the slow progress of economic reform caused the rate
to increase again in 1991. In this period, the group most likely to
emigrate was healthy men between the ages of twenty-six and thirty who
had completed high school or trade school. The majority in this group
came from regions of high unemployment and had experience working
abroad. In 1991 polls showed that as much as one-third of the Polish
population viewed emigration as at least a theoretical option to improve
their standard of living.
Population Density and Distribution
The most important change in postwar Poland's population distribution
was the intense urbanization that took place during the first two
decades of communist rule. The priorities of central economic planning
undoubtedly hastened this movement, but experts hypothesize that it
would have occurred after World War II in any case. In 1931 some 72.6
percent of the population was classified as rural, with nearly 60
percent relying directly on agriculture for their livelihood. By 1978
those figures had diminished to 42.5 and 22.5 percent, respectively. In
the next ten years, the share of rural population dropped by only 3.7
percent, however, indicating that the proportions had stabilized.
In 1989 Poland had twenty-four cities with populations of at least
150,000 people. Major urban centers are distributed rather evenly
through the country; the most concentrated urban region is the cluster
of industrial settlements in Katowice District. In 1990 overall
population density was 121 people per square kilometer, up from 115 per
square kilometer in 1981. The most densely populated places are the
cities of �d (over 3,000 people per square kilometer) and Warsaw (about
2,000 people per square kilometer). Urban areas, which contain over 60
percent of Poland's population, occupy about 6 percent of the country's
total area. In 1990 average population density in rural areas was
fifty-one people per square kilometer, a small increase over the 1950
figure of forty-seven people per square kilometer.
Updated population figures for Poland.
Poland
Poland - THE SOCIAL ORDER
Poland
The dislocations during and after World War II changed Poland's class
structure and ethnic composition. Important parts of the Polish middle
class--which between the world wars had become the foundation of
industrial and commercial activity--were annihilated or forced to
emigrate, and those that survived the war lost their social status with
the advent of state socialism. Nazi and Soviet occupation also decimated
the intelligentsia that had supplied expertise to the legal, medical,
and academic professions. Under the postwar communist regimes, leaders
of the ruling Polish United Worker's Party (Polska Zjednoczona Partia
Robotnicza--PZPR) formed a new elite class by combining workers,
peasants, and members of the intelligentsia in their ranks. Then in the
late 1970s, the intelligentsia began to carry greater weight in the
social structure by leading an intermittent, longterm protest movement.
That movement culminated in the overthrow of the communist elite and
reemergence of the dormant entrepreneurial segments of society.
Ethnic Groups
During most of its history, Poland was a multiethnic society that
included substantial numbers of Belarusians (prior to 1992 known as
Belorussians), Germans, Jews, and Ukrainians. This ethnic diversity was
reduced sharply by World War II and the migrations that followed it. The
Jewish population, which in the interwar period was over 10 percent of
Poland's total and over 30 percent of Warsaw's, was reduced by about 3
million in the Holocaust. Postwar resettlement and adjustment of borders
sent about 2 million Germans from Polish territory westward and awarded
the Polish territory inhabited by 500,000 Ukrainians, Belarusians, and
Lithuanians to the Soviet Union. These multiethnic �migr�s were
replaced by an estimated 3 million ethnic Poles repatriated from the
Soviet Union and by thousands of others who returned from emigration or
combat in the West. (Poland's communist governments, which consistently
emphasized ethnic homogeneity, had not differentiated ethnic groups in
official census statistics.) As a result of this process, in 1990 an
estimated 98 percent of Poland's population was ethnically Polish.
<>Jews
<>Germans
<>Ukrainians and Belarusians
<>Gypsies
<>The Intelligentsia
<>The Working Classes
<>Social Relationships
<>The Role of Women
Poland
Poland - Jews
Poland
Although an estimated 200,000 Polish Jews survived the Holocaust,
only about 10,000 remained in Poland in 1991, and that population was
mostly elderly. As the postcommunist era began, relations with the now
very small Jewish community retained an ambiguous but prominent place in
the consciousness of Polish society. Beginning in the late 1970s, public
interest in past Polish-Jewish relations increased significantly despite
the dwindling of the Jewish population. Social observers attributed this
partly to nostalgia for prewar times, when the Jews had made a dynamic
contribution to Poland's diverse urban cultural environment. Another
source of renewed interest was a need to finally understand the long and
tangled historical connection of the Poles and the Jews. That connection
was formed most prominently by the Holocaust, which had wrought havoc
upon both Poles and Jews, and by the role of antisemitic elements in
Polish society before and after World War II. In the early 1990s, these
issues still provoked deep emotional responses as well as intellectual
contemplation.
When communist rule ended, the phenomenon of "antisemitism
without Jews" came under renewed scrutiny. In the first national
elections of postcommunist Poland, candidates frequently exchanged
charges of antisemitism and, conversely, of undue Jewish influence in
policy making. In 1991 Solidarity leader Lech Walesa apologized
personally before the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, for antisemitic
statements by some of his supporters during the presidential campaign.
According to a 1992 survey, 40 percent of Poles estimated the current
Jewish population in Poland at above 750,000 people; 16 percent believed
the Jews were a threat to Poland's political development in the 1990s;
and 26 percent said the Jews exerted too much influence in Polish
society. On the other hand, 81 percent said that the memory of the
Holocaust should be preserved indefinitely to prevent a recurrence.
Extreme right-wing parties with antisemitic platforms gained no seats in
the parliamentary elections of 1991.
Poland
Poland - Germans
Poland
The German population of Poland is centered in the southern
industrial region of Silesia, but a small population remains in the
northeastern region that had been East Prussia in the nineteenth
century. As was the case with other ethnic minorities, only approximate
estimates of numbers were available in 1991. Definition and
quantification of the German population of Polish Silesia vary greatly
according to the time and the source of statistics. The communist
regimes of Poland counted only 2,500 Germans through 1989. In 1992
German minority organizations, whose activities increased markedly after
1990, claimed that over 300,000 Silesians, concentrated in Opole
District, were ethnic Germans. The official Polish estimate at that time, however, was 100,000
ethnic Germans.
The constant shifting of Silesia between Polish and German control
during several centuries created a unique ethnic amalgam and regional
self-consciousness. Whatever the original ethnic composition of the
region, the Silesians themselves developed a separate culture that
borrowed liberally from both Polish and German. The predominant spoken
language is a heavily Germanized dialect of Polish.
Although the Silesians retained close traditional ties with their
locality and their own group, in the early 1990s they could not ignore
the difference between their standard of living and that of nearby
Germany. Many non-German Silesians very likely declared themselves
ethnic Germans to receive preferential treatment from the German
government; this practice played a major role in the diversity of
minority population estimates.
Some Silesians were bitter over the resettlement policy of the
postwar communist governments and other forms of anti-German
discrimination. Immediately following the end of Polish communist rule,
a well-organized German faction in Silesia demanded that dual
citizenship and other privileges be guaranteed the German minority in
Poland by the forthcoming Polish-German friendship treaty. In this demand they were joined by German
citizens who had been expelled from the German territory awarded Poland
after World War II. Ratification of the Polish-German treaty of
friendship and cooperation in 1991 blunted the impact of radicals,
however, and promoted pragmatic local cooperation rather than
confrontation between Poles and Germans in Silesia.
Postcommunist Polish governments established no firm criteria for
proving German nationality; in most cases, oral declarations were
accepted as sufficient proof. Beginning in 1989, the Social Cultural
Association began propagating German culture in Silesia. By 1992 the
group had initiated German instruction in 260 schools, stocked libraries
with German materials, and arranged technical instruction in Germany for
Silesian health and education workers. The special ties with Germany
make Opole one of the most prosperous regions in Poland; the Silesian
Germans provide important resources to the local economy, and the
lifestyle of many Silesian communities resembles that of Germany more
than that of Poland. Although many non-German Silesians feared that the
spread of German economic and cultural influences would erase the unique
ethnic qualities of their region and the idea of German dominance
retained some negative historical associations, in the early 1990s
postcommunist aspirations for the prosperity promised by German
connections remained an important factor in public opinion on the German
ethnic issue.
A smaller concentration of Germans became active and visible for the
first time in 1990 in Olsztyn District in northeastern Poland, although
the resettlement of the 1950s and ongoing emigration had reduced the
German population there substantially between 1956 and 1980. In 1992
estimates of the group's size ranged from 5,000 to 12,000. Beginning in
1990, several German cultural associations appeared in the region with
the aims of preventing discrimination and preserving German culture.
Association members received transportation to and employment
opportunities in Germany, and the German government contributed money to
support association activities in the early 1990s.
Poland
Poland - Ukrainians and Belarusians
Poland
Before World War II, the Ukrainian population, concentrated in the
far southeast along the Carpathian Mountains, constituted 13.8 percent
of interwar Poland's total, making the Ukrainians by far the largest
ethnic minority. Postwar border changes and resettlement removed most of
that ethnic group, whose persistent demands for autonomy in the 1930s
had become a serious worry for the postwar communist government. In 1947
most remaining Ukrainians were resettled from their traditional centers
in Rzesz�w and Lublin districts in southeastern Poland to northern
territory gained from Germany in the peace settlement. State propaganda
designed to further isolate the Ukrainians reminded Poles of wartime
atrocities committed by Ukrainians. In 1991 some 130,000 Ukrainians
remained in the resettlement regions, while the rest of the Ukrainian
population was widely dispersed and assimilated.
Beginning in 1989, Ukrainians in Poland sought redress for the abuses
they had endured under communist regimes. The Union of Ukrainians in
Poland demanded that the postcommunist government condemn the postwar
deportation policy and compensate Ukrainians and their churches for
state confiscation of property in the resettlement period. In 1992 all
such claims awaited approval by parliament. Property claims by the Greek
Catholic Church aroused controversy for two reasons. First, the Polish
Catholic Church had occupied many former Greek Catholic churches and
refused to return or share them. Second, conflicting claims between
Greek Catholic Ukrainians and the Ukrainians of the Polish Autocephalous
Orthodox Church threatened the minority with a major rift along
religious lines.
In 1992 estimates of the Ukrainian population in Poland ranged from
200,000 to 700,000. Of that number, roughly one-third belonged to the
Polish Autocephalous Orthodox Church, a branch of the Greek Orthodox
Church. The remainder belonged to the Greek Catholic Church, which
recognizes the authority of the Vatican. Orthodox Ukrainians are
especially visible in Poland because they compose nearly the entire
population of the Polish Orthodox Church. Because of the importance of
religion in Polish society, the relations of the Roman Catholic Church
in Poland with the two major minority religions influence the status of
Ukrainian communities in areas other than religion. In the communist
era, the government attempted to minimize the danger of Ukrainian
nationalism by shifting its support as the two Ukrainian churches sought
recognition. The Ukrainian Social and Cultural Society, founded in 1956,
published a weekly newspaper in Ukrainian and supported several schools
in Warsaw, with the purpose of preventing the assimilation of Ukrainians
into Polish society.
The size of the Belarusian population also was disputed in the early
1990s. In 1991 the official figure was 250,000, but minority spokesmen
claimed as many as 500,000 people. Although concentrated in a smaller
area (nearly all live in the Bialystok District adjoining the Belarusian
border), the Belarusianminority has been less assertive of its national
identity than have been the Ukrainians. Bialystok is one of Poland's
least prosperous and most sparsely populated regions. Mainly composed of
peasants, the minority includes few educated citizens, and the group has
received little support from Belarus itself. Therefore, low national
self-awareness has led to easy assimilation into Polish society. The
Belarusian Social and Cultural Society, founded in 1956 as the
minority's official mouthpiece in Poland, remained under the control of
former communists in 1991 because of Belarusian distrust of Solidarity's
ties with the Polish Catholic Church. Since 1989, however, some new
ethnic organizations have appeared. A weekly newspaper is published in
Belarusian, and a few new student, political, and social organizations
have brought a modest revival of Belarusian ethnic community in the
early postcommunist years.
Poland
Poland - Gypsies
Poland
The Gypsies (Rom, in the preferred vernacular term), a major
sociopolitical issue in most other East European countries, are much
less numerous and less controversial in Poland. Estimates of the Gypsy
population in Poland range from 15,000 to 50,000. Czechoslovakia's Gypsy
population, by contrast, numbered 500,000 in the 1980s, when Poland
became a transit point on the illegal migration route from Romania to
Germany. Emigration of Polish Gypsies to Germany in the late 1980s
reduced Poland's Gypsy population by as much as 75 percent.
Nevertheless, negative stereotypes remain strong in Polish society, and
acts of violence and discrimination against this most visible minority
are common in Poland. In 1991 a mob destroyed a wealthy Gypsy
neighborhood in central Poland. The Polish governments has adopted no
comprehensive policy on Gypsies byt instead had treated violent acts
against them as isolated incidents.
Poland
Poland - The Intelligentsia
Poland
The Polish intelligentsia played a unique and vital role in several
phases of Polish history. During the partition period of the nineteenth
century, the intelligentsia was the chief repository ofnational
consciousness. Containing the last vestiges of the landed gentry that
had led the country during its heyday as an independent commonwealth,
the intelligentsia was the chief means by which new and progressive
ideas entered the fabric of partitioned Poland's society. As such, the
class became the chief repository of a romanticized, idealistic concept
of Polish nationhood. Well into the
twentieth century, the roughly 50 percent of the intelligentsia that had
roots in the landowning class maintained the aristocratic values of
their ancestors. Although those values conferred a distinctly higher
social status on the intelligentsia in everyday life, they also included
the cultural heritage that all Poles recognized.
In the first part of the twentieth century, the intelligentsia was
diversified and enriched as more middle- and lower-class Poles attained
education and upward mobility. At this point, the intelligentsia divided
philosophically into conservative idealizes of the past (whose
landholdings gave them a vested interest in maintaining the status quo)
and liberal reformers advocating development of capitalism. In the
interwar period, Poland's social structure was further complicated by
the rise of a vigorous, practical upper middle class. After the war,
however, socialism drastically reduced the influence of this
entrepreneurial class.
Facing a severe shortage of educated citizens, in 1945 the communists
expanded opportunities for political loyalists to advance through
education into the professions and the bureaucracy. Of the 300,000 college graduates produced by the education
system between 1945 and 1962, over 50 percent were from worker or
peasant families. The introduction of these groups sharply diversified
the class basis of the postwar intelligentsia. In the late 1960s,
however, the policy of preferential treatment in education ended. The
percentage of working-class university admissions dropped to below 25
percent. Because the chief means of entry into the professional classes
remained educational achievement, the drop in university admissions
drastically slowed mobility from the working classes into the
intelligentsia. In the postwar years, the intelligentsia diversified
into several categories of employment: highly educated professionals,
government and party officials, senior civil servants, writers and
academics, and toplevel economic managers.
Especially in the 1970s, many members of the intelligentsia
established careers in the ruling party or its bureaucracy, joining the
cause of the socialist state with varying degrees of commitment. By 1987
all but one of the forty-nine provincial PZPR first secretaries had at
least a bachelor's degree. The strong presence of the intelligentsia in
the party influenced the policy of the ruling elite away from standard
Soviet practice, flavoring it instead with pragmatic nationalism. Then, as that force exerted subtle
influence within the establishment, other elements of the intelligentsia
joined with worker and student groups to express open dissent from the
system. They objected to the system as a whole and decried the
increasingly stressful conditions it imposed on Polish society in the
1970s and 1980s. The most salient result of this class alliance was the
Solidarity movement, nominally a workers' movement that achieved broad
support in the intelligentsia and finally toppled the last communist
regime.
In the 1980s, the activist elements of the intelligentsia resumed the
traditional role as protectors of national ideals from outside political
interference. In this role, the Polish intelligentsia retained and
gradually spread the values it had inherited from its nineteenth-century
predecessors: admiration for Western society, disdain for contact with
and reliance on Russia and the Soviet Union, and reverence for the
prepartition commonwealth of the nobility and the romantic patriotism of
the partition era.
As it had after Poland regained its independence in 1918, however,
the intelligentsia reverted to its naturally fragmented state once the
common enemy fell. In the early 1990s, the official communist leadership
elite had disappeared (although in reality that group continued to
control powerful economic positions), and no comparably identifiable and
organized group had taken its place. In this atmosphere, a wide variety
of social and political agendas competed for attention in the
government, reflecting the diverse ideas proposed by the intelligentsia,
the source of most of Poland's reformist concepts in the early 1990s.
Poland
Poland - The Working Classes
Poland
In the years following World War II, the composition of the Polish
working classes changed significantly. Agriculture, which underwent
several major changes in government policy during this period,
consistently lost stature as an occupation and as a lifestyle in
competition with expanded urban industrial opportunities. The postwar
rural exodus left an aging farm population, split apart the traditional
multigenerational families upon which rural society had been based, and
fragmented landholdings into inefficient plots. In the same period, the
augmented Polish industrial work force struggled to achieve the social
gains promised in Marxist-Leninist ideology. In the early days, the
central planning system yielded impressive gains in the education level
and living standards of many industrial workers. Later in the communist
era, this group made less tangible gains in social status and began
actively opposing the regressive government policies that prevented its
further progress. In the early postcommunist era, industrial workers
faced high unemployment as privatization and the drive for efficiency
restructured their enterprises. By the early 1980s, the working
population reached a stable proportion of 40 percent in industry, 30
percent in agriculture, and 30 percent in the service sector (which,
like industry, had tripled in size in the postwar era).
Agricultural Workers
Although the communist leadership's economic agenda was the immediate
cause of large-scale shifts from agriculture to industry, prewar
conditions also contributed to this trend. Contrary to the
nineteenth-century romanticization of the Polish peasant class as a
homogeneous repository of national virtue, agricultural workers in the
interwar period were stratified economically. A few peasants had large
farms, many more farmed small plots, and fully 20 percent of peasants
did not own the land they farmed. In 1921 only 43 percent of peasants
owned their own house. The depression of the 1930s hit the peasants
especially hard because much of their income depended on world commodity
prices. By the late 1930s, Poland had several million superfluous
agricultural workers, but industry had not developed sufficiently to
offer alternative employment.
At the close of World War II, little had changed in the society of
rural Poland. At that time, Poland's peasants made up 60 percent of the
population. Although many villages were wrecked or diminished and
500,000 farms were destroyed, war dead included a much higher proportion
of urban Poles. After the war, the large estates owned by former
noblemen and rich peasants and worked by rural proletarians still
dominated the rural social structures. The first step of the postwar
communist regime was confiscation of the largest estates. Those lands
were redistributed to private owners, although to avoid alienating the
peasants, plots smaller than fifty hectares were allowed to remain with
their original owners. At this point, rapidly expanding local industry
began to offer peasants supplementary income, and industrial expansion
in urban centers relieved prewar overpopulation and starvation in many
rural areas. After the war, rural life increasingly was transformed by
electrification, improved roads, and statesupplied equipment and
materials. Nevertheless, on most Polish farms the fundamental
relationship of the peasant to the land remained as it was before World
War II.
Although Soviet-style collectivization remained a nominal state goal
until 1956, early attempts caused precipitous declines in production and
an estimated 1 million farmers to leave the land. As a result of the
decollectivization program of the late 1950s, only 6 percent of farms
remained collectivized. In the long term, the state's attempts at
collectivization fostered a permanent resistance among peasants to
direct state interference. In the next thirty years, the peasant family
farm, whose value system made distribution of farm products to the rest
of society clearly subordinate to immediate household needs, continued
to be the dominant form of agricultural organization. Improved
communications and agricultural education programs gradually broke the
isolation of rural existence, however; as more contact with the outside
world brought new values, it weakened the family cohesion and the
inherited patterns of life that were the foundations of the purely
domestic farm.
Immediately after the collectivization drive ended in 1956, mid-sized
farms (those between five and fifteen hectares) predominated in the
private sector, but in the next decades farms of that size were split
repeatedly. By 1986 nearly 60 percent of private farms were smaller than
five hectares. Furthermore, the holdings of individual farmers often
were scattered across considerable distances. In the late 1980s, state
efforts to stimulate reconcentration were stalled by peasant suspicion
and by ideological disagreements among communist policy makers over the
solution to agricultural problems. Prevented by government inertia and
distribution policies from obtaining tractors and other equipment, many
small landowners used horses for cultivation or simply ignored portions
of their land. Frequent reliance on nonagricultural employment for a
livelihood further reduced peasants' concentration on improving the use
of their rural plots.
In the mid-1980s, only 50 percent of Poland's rural population was
involved in agriculture. The other 50 percent commuted to jobs in towns.
Of the private farmers in the first group, 33 percent were full-time
farmers, 34 percent earned most of their income from agricultural
employment, and more than 21 percent earned most of their income from
nonagricultural sources. The remaining 11 percent worked for
institutions with land allotments smaller than 0.5 hectare. The large
group of landless rural laborers of the interwar years had virtually
disappeared by 1980.
In the postcommunist era, experts projected large numbers of peasants
would continue their split lifestyles unless major investments were made
to upgrade Poland's rural infrastructure. In the late 1980s, new housing
units and water mains were still extremely rare and sewage lines
virtually nonexistent in rural areas. Only half of Polish villages were
accessible by paved roads, and many poorer villages lacked a retail
store of any type. An important failure of the collectivization effort
had been the exclusion of peasants from the broad social welfare
benefits instituted by the socialist state for urban workers. Although
the peasantry received nominal coverage under the state medical system
beginning in 1972, rural education and health services remained far
behind those in the cities for the next twenty years.
The lack of rural amenities caused the most promising young Poles
from rural families to move to the cities. As the traditional rural
extended family began to collapse, the aging population that remained
behind further strained the inadequate rural social services. The
communist state modified its pension and inheritance policies in the
1970s to encourage older peasants to pass their rural plots to the next
generation, but the overall disparity in allocation of benefits
continued through the 1980s. In the early postcommunist era, however,
urban unemployment and housing shortages began to drive workers back to
rural areas. Experts predicted that as many as 1 million people might
return to rural areas if urban employment continued to fall.
Industrial Workers
Between 1947 and 1958, the number of agricultural workers moving to
industrial jobs increased by 10 percent each year. In those years, most
industrial jobs did not require even basic education. Therefore, over 40
percent of recruits from agriculture were basically illiterate in 1958.
From that time, however, the level of education among Polish industrial
workers rose steadily. By 1978 only 5 percent of workers lacked a
complete elementary education. A fundamental change in the social status
of workers was heralded by the first workers' councils, founded in the
late 1950s to voice opinions on industrial policy. Those increasingly
articulate leadership groups, dominated by the 5 percent of the work
force that had a secondary education at that time, led to the formidable
labor organizations that shook Poland's political structure in the
1980s.
In the 1980s, workers age thirty-five and younger were better
educated and more likely to come from urban families than their elders.
Also, unlike their elders, the young workers had been raised under a
communist regime and were accustomed to the social status conferred by
membership in workers' organizations. Many saw their laborer status as
an intermediate social step between their agricultural past and
anticipated advancement to whitecollar employment. Conversely,
association with the working class was an important qualification for
advancement into social leadership positions both during and after the
communist era. Labor's active role in the political and social life of
the 1980s revived the self-esteem and prestige of workers. On the other
hand, a 1985 study showed that 70 percent of workers did not wish their
children to pursue a manual occupation.
In the late 1980s, some 45 percent of industrial workers had second
jobs. Increasing numbers of moonlighting workers sharply stratified the
working class, as workers without supplementary income were less able to
maintain their living standard. Major inequities were inherent in the
wage system as well. In 1986 the best-paid workers earned nearly five
times the pay of the average Polish worker, while 33 percent of workers
received less than 65 percent of the average wage. Postcommunist reforms
brought new financial risk to industrial workers by lowering the upper
end of the pay scale. That change, combined with the scarcity of
supplementary jobs, pulled a significant new section of Polish workers
below the official poverty line in the early 1990s.
In 1992 workers in many industries, including coal and copper mining,
aviation, and automobiles, organized strikes to protest lower wages and
the displacement caused by economic reform. Outside the jurisdiction of
Solidarity, which advocated negotiation with the government, the strikes
escalated under the leadership of radical labor leaders. Coal miners,
who had enjoyed the highest pay and the best perquisites throughout the
communist era because of coal's importance as a hard-currency export,
played a central role in the strikes as they sought to protect their
privileges.
Poland
Poland - Social Relationships
Poland
In the forty-five years of their rule, the communists built a
monocentric society whose social and political fabric was dominated by a
new elite of loyal government functionaries. In the 1950s, social
institutions such as political groups, voluntary organizations, youth
and professional organizations, and community associations lost their
autonomy and were forced into a hierarchical state-controlled network.
Only the Polish Catholic Church retained some degree of independence
during this period. At the same time, however, smaller groups, initially
isolated and fragmented, developed informal, pragmatic networks for
economic supply, mediation of interests, and expression of
antiestablishment views. Such groups functioned both within
state-sanctioned institutions and among families, groups of friends, and
small communities. In this context, dojscie (informal access to
useful connections) was the means by which ordinary citizens remained
above subsistence level.
The family, the traditional center of Polish social life, assumed a
vital role in this informal system. In this respect, everyday urban life
assumed some characteristics of traditional rural life. For both
professional and working classes, extended families and circles of
friends helped when a family or individual was not self-sufficient.
Private exchange arrangements eased the chronic scarcities of the
official supply system. Especially important within the
family structure were parental support of grown children until they
became self-sufficient and care by the children for their aging parents
and grandparents. In the economic slump of the 1980s, urban food
shortages often were alleviated by exchanges with rural relatives.
The inventive and independent networking process formed a distinct
tier within Polish society. Seen by its participants as the repository
of Polish nationhood and tradition, the world of dojscie
increasingly contrasted with the inefficient, rigid, invasive, and
corrupt state system. The emergence of Solidarity was a first step
toward restoring the variety of social structures and independent
cultural activities present in interwar Poland. In 1980 the phenomenon
of public figures rising to tell the truth about Poland's problems began
to break the wall between private and public morality, although the
subsequent declaration of martial law temporarily dampened its effect.
The second tier involved illegal and quasi-legal actions as well as
the pragmatic rearrangement of social relationships. Especially in the
1980s, the relationships between work performed and official wages and
between job qualification and salary level (which for
"ideological" reasons was higher for many classes of unskilled
workers) were objects of general ridicule in Polish society. Under these
circumstances, Poles increasingly saw the second tier, rather than the
official economy, as the more rewarding investment of their initiative
and responsibility. By the 1980s, this allocation of energy led some
sociologists to argue that the second tier was necessary in order for
communist societies such as Poland's to function.
The end of communism brought no rapid change in social attitudes. In
the early postcommunist period, many Poles retained a deep-seated
cynicism toward a state long perceived as an untrustworthy privileged
elite. Direct and indirect stealing from such a state was at worst an
amoral act that could never match the hypocrisy and corruption of high
authorities who claimed to govern in the name of all the Polish people.
But society's habit of separating "us" from "them"
became a major obstacle to enlisting widespread public cooperation and
sacrifice for largescale economic and political reform. Between October
1990 and January 1992, public confidence in the national government
declined from 69 percent to 27 percent, according to a national poll.
Poland
Poland - The Role of Women
Poland
By the mid-1970s, nearly half the Polish work force was made up of
women. On a purely statistical basis, Poland, like the rest of the
Soviet alliance in Eastern Europe, offered women more opportunities for
higher education and employment, than did most West European countries.
Between 1975 and 1983, the total number of women with a higher education
doubled, to 681,000 graduates. Many professions, such as architecture,
engineering, and university teaching, employed a considerably higher
percentage of women in Poland than in the West, and over 60 percent of
medical students in 1980 were women. In many households in the 1980s,
women earned more than their husbands. Yet the socialist system that
yielded those statistics also uniformly excluded women from the highest
positions of economic and political power. In the mid-1980s, only 15
percent of graduates in technical subjects were women, while more than
70 percent of jobs in health, social security, finance, education, and
retail sales were filled by women. During the 1980s, very few women
occupied top positions in the PZPR (whose 1986 membership was 27 percent
women). Similar statistics reflected the power relationships in
Solidarity, the diplomatic corps, and the government. By definition,
women were excluded completely from the other great center of power, the
Catholic Church. In mid1992 , Poland elected its first woman prime
minister, Hanna Suchocka. Her coalition government included no other
women. In 1992 the head of the National Bank of Poland, a very powerful
position, was a woman, and Ewa Letowska, former commissioner of
citizens' rights, was prominently mentioned as a presidential candidate.
Some experts asserted that the male power structure protected its
dominance by limiting the opportunities for the advancement of Polish
women to those that filled an existing need in the male-dominated
society. Another factor in the role of women, however, was the high
priority that Polish society continued to give to their role within the
family and in raising children. In the 1980s, one in ten Polish mothers
was single, and many single mothers had never been married. In 1991 over
6 percent of Polish families consisted of a single mother caring for one
or more children. The extended family provided support for such
unconventional arrangements. During the 1980s, both the state (by
adjusting school schedules and providing nurseries and substantial paid
maternity leave) and the church (by its influential emphasis on the
sanctity of the family) successfully promoted the traditional role of
women in raising the next generation. In the early 1980s, a very small
women's liberation movement began at Warsaw University, but in the years
following it failed to expand its membership significantly. In 1990
women in Warsaw set a precedent by demonstrating against church-inspired
legislation making abortion illegal.
Even with the support of state institutions, however, during the
communist era working women with families often had the equivalent of
two full-time jobs because their husbands did not make major
contributions to household work. According to one study, working women
averaged 6.5 hours per day at their jobs and 4.3 hours per day on
household duties. In the times of scarcity in the 1980s, standing in
line to make purchases occupied a large part of the latter category.
Women without jobs, by contrast, spent an average of 8.1 hours per day
on household duties. The increased unemployment of the early 1990s
generally affected more women than men. According to official figures,
in 1992 forty women were jobless for every vacancy they were qualified
to fill, while the ratio for men was fourteen to one. Women made up 52.4
percent of the total unemployed, a higher percentage than their overall
share of the work force.
In 1992 women ran about 20 percent of Polish farms, a much higher
percentage than in Western countries. In most cases, such arrangements
reflected necessity rather than choice. Nearly 70 percent of these women
were single, and over 40 percent were over age sixty. In most cases,
grown children had left the farm for better opportunities and the
husband had died or become incapacitated.
The end of communist government brought a new debate about women's
role in Polish society. After 1989 many Poles began to associate women's
rights with the enforced equality of the discredited communist past. A
significant part of society saw the political transformation as an
appropriate time for women to return full-time to the home after
communism had forced them into the workplace and weakened the Polish
family.
The rights of women were central to the controversy over state
abortion law that escalated sharply in 1991 and 1992, although few women
had policy-making roles and no major women's groups took advocacy
positions. Some of the social policies of the postcommunist governments
complicated the situation of working mothers. A 1992 national study
revealed discrimination against women in hiring practices and payment of
unemployment benefits, and no law prohibited such sex discrimination.
Because childsupport payments were not indexed to the cost of living,
the payments many women received became nearly worthless in periods of
high inflation. In the communist system, daycare for the children of
working mothers had been cheap and widely available, but by 1992 more
than half the Polish daycare centers had closed. Striving to become
self-supporting, the remaining centers raised their prices sharply in
the reform period.
Poland
Poland - HOUSING
Poland
At the end of the communist era, housing was a major social problem.
Although the postwar era saw steady growth in housing quality and
quantity, that growth fell far short of demand in both geographic
distribution and total availability. In 1990 the disparity between
available dwellings and number of households requiring housing was
estimated at between 1.6 million and 1.8 million units. The causes of
this enduring shortage were complex. They included the failures of the
communist centralized approach to housing policy before 1989 and the
economic downturns that occurred in the 1980s and after the reform era
began in 1990.
Communist Housing Policy
As in most other economic and social areas, postwar Polish housing
policy followed the Soviet model. The principle behind that model was
that housing should be public property and a direct tool of the state's
social policy. Accordingly, the Soviet model eliminated private
ownership or construction of multifamily residential buildings. Except
for single-family units, the government had the legal power to take over
private houses and land required for building. Private construction
firms were turned into state enterprises that did contract building for
central state organizations. State housing policy disregarded supply and
demand in favor of administrative space allocation norms, standardized
design and construction practices, and central rent control. Maintaining
rents at a very low level was supposed to ensure that housing was
available to even the poorest citizens. However, housing policy was
subordinate to the requirements of central economic planning, so
resources for housing construction were directed to industrial areas
critical to fulfilling plans and advancing state policy. Materials
distribution for housing also was subject to delays or disruption caused
by the urgency of other types of construction projects. Although rural
and small-town housing nominally escaped direct control, materials
rationing and deliberate state hindrance of private construction limited
the availability of new housing in such areas.
Polish Housing in Practice
In practice the housing policy of Polish communist regimes was more
pragmatic than the Soviet model. In some regions, high housing demand
inspired locally controlled cooperatives that pooled state and private
resources. State housing construction actually was halted in the 1960s
to create demand for cooperative housing, for which rents were much
higher. Thereafter, however, the cooperatives gradually became
centralized national monopolies, and construction in the 1970s was
dominated again by large state enterprises. The monopoly status of the
builders and the cooperatives insulated those groups from market
competition and enabled them to pass along the costs of inefficient
operations to the tenant or to the state.
Under these conditions, housing construction was extremely wasteful
and inefficient. The economic crisis of 1980 combined with existing
weaknesses in industrial policy to begin a housing shortage that lasted
through most of the decade. Between 1978 and 1988, annual housing
completions dropped by nearly 45 percent, and investment in housing
dropped by nearly 20 percent. At the same time, the Polish birth rate
added pressure to the housing situation. By the late 1980s, the average
waiting time to buy a house was projected at between fifteen and twenty
years if construction continued at the same rate. The housing shortage
was a primary cause of social unrest; however, the structural flaws of
Polish building continued unchanged. Construction remained of low
quality, builders maintained the monopoly control granted by centralized
planning, labor productivity dropped, and distribution and transport
remained centralized and inefficient.
Housing also remained subordinate to industrial goals. In the 1980s,
this meant that new workplaces were the center of housing construction
activity, which produced dormitories for workers. By 1988 Poland ranked
last in Europe in housing with only 284 dwellings per 1,000 persons; 30
percent of Polish families did not have their own housing
accommodations; and the average number of persons per dwelling was 20
percent above the European average. In addition, the average usable area
per dwelling in Poland was 10 to 15 percent below the average for other
socialist countries and 30 percent below the average for Western Europe.
Private housing revived somewhat in the 1980s, although independent
cooperatives still faced critical materials shortages in the
construction stage. An easing of tax regulations and other economic
changes raised the profitability of private property in that period. In
1988 the percentage of housing construction projects in which
individuals invested had risen to nearly 34 percent from its 1978 level
of 26 percent. Although state investment also rose slightly in that
period, both increases were at the expense of cooperative investment,
which dropped by 10 percent. Nevertheless, in towns privately owned
properties remained insignificant until 1989, mainly because high
inflation in the 1980s devalued the long-term, low-interest loans
offered on state property. In 1989 the new government's anti-inflation
measures realigned such loans with present currency values and raised
interest rates, stimulating conversion of two-thirds of cooperative
flats into private property by early 1990. At the same time, the
monopolistic Central Cooperatives Association was split into numerous
genuine cooperatives, the state housing administration was abolished,
and new incentives were introduced to stimulate private building and
rentals.
Housing after 1989
In 1990 Poland's traditionally low rents rose drastically when
government subsidies of fuel, electricity, and housing maintenance
ended. The long-term goal of housing reform was to let rents rise to
market levels. A housing benefits program was to help the poorest groups
in society, and new rules were put in place for financing housing
purchases. In the transitional period that followed the end of communist
government, however, the gap between demand and supply grew. Rising
rental and purchase prices, the new obstacles created for housing
construction firms by competitive conditions, and the economic downturn
that began in 1990 also contributed to this gap. To function
efficiently, the housing industry also required more substantial
investment in modern technology, particularly in chronically wasteful
areas such as cement production and building assembly.
In 1989 and 1991, new housing legislation concentrated on privatizing
the ownership of housing units. Of the 2.7 million cooperative
apartments in Poland, 57 percent were still tenantoccupied rather than
owner-occupied in 1991. An additional 1.5 million apartments were owned
by enterprises, which continued the uneconomical communist system of
subsidizing as much as 80 percent of the property upkeep for their
tenant workers. Beginning in 1989, private owners of multifamily houses
could receive subsidies for maintenance, for which they had paid in full
under the old system. The 1991 legislation set financial and legal
conditions under which renters of cooperative-owned and enterprise-owned
housing could assume ownership, creating individual property units from
the larger units formerly administered by a central agency.
Poland
Poland - RELIGION
Poland
World War II essentially transformed Poland into a state dominated by
a single religion. According to a 1991 government survey, Roman
Catholicism was professed by 96 percent of the population. The practice
of Judaism declined more dramatically than any other religion after the
war, but the numbers of adherents of Greek Orthodox, Protestant, and
other groups also fell significantly. Although the claim of religious
affiliation signified different levels of participation for different
segments of society (80.6 percent of professed Catholics described
themselves as attending mass regularly), the history of Roman
Catholicism in Poland formed a uniquely solid link between nationality
and religious belief. As a result of that identity, Poland was the only
country where the advent of communism had very little effect on the
individual citizen's practice of organized religion. During the
communist era, the Catholic Church enjoyed varying levels of autonomy,
but the church remained the primary source of moral values, as well as
an important political force. Of the 4 percent of Poles who were not
Roman Catholic, half belonged to one of forty-two other denominations in
1991, and the rest professed no religion. The largest of the nonCatholic
faiths was the Polish Autocephalous Orthodox Church. Although Poland
returned to its tradition of religious tolerance after the communist
era, jurisdictional issues complicated relations between the Orthodox
and Roman Catholic churches.
<>The Polish Catholic Church and the State
<>The Polish Catholic Church and the People
<>Other Churches
Poland
Poland - The Polish Catholic Church and the State
Poland
Throughout the 1800s and 1900s, the Catholic Church was not only a
spiritual institution but also a social and political force. The
dynamics of church-state relations in Poland after the communist era
were shaped by the multifaceted identity the church had assumed during
many decades when conventional social and political institutions were
suppressed. That identity, called by one scholar a "civil
religion," combined religious and political symbols in Poles'
conception of their national history and destiny. Important aspects of
this social and political role remained intact after 1989, fueling a
controversial new drive for church activism.
Church and State Before 1945
The first impetus for an expanded church role was the social
repression Poles experienced during the era of the third partition, from
1795 to 1918. In this period, the partitioning nations severely limited
freedom of organization, education, and publication in Polish territory.
With the exception of the post-1867 Austrianoccupied sector, public use
of the Polish language was also forbidden. These restrictions left
religious practice as the only means of national self-expression and the
preservation of social bonds among lay Catholics. From that situation
came a strong new sense of national consciousness that combined
nineteenth-century literary, philosophical, and religious trends within
the formal structure of the church. In 1925 the newly independent Polish
state signed a concordat that prescribed separate roles for church and
state and guaranteed the church free exercise of religious, moral,
educational, and economic activities.
Although Poland enjoyed fourteen years of independence between the
signing of the concordat and the Nazi invasion, the special role of the
church continued and intensified when postwar communist rule again
regimented other forms of self-expression. During the communist era, the
church provided a necessary alternative to an unpopular state authority,
even for the least religious Poles. Between 1945 and 1989, relations
between the Polish Catholic Church and the communist regimes followed a
regular pattern: when the state felt strong and self-sufficient, it
imposed harsh restrictions on church activities; in times of political
crisis, however, the state offered conciliatory measures to the church
in order to gain popular support.
The Early Communist Decades
The Polish Catholic Church suffered enormous losses during the Nazi
occupation of Poland in World War II. Its leadership was scattered or
exterminated, its schools were closed, and its property was destroyed.
Ironically, in the war years this destruction fostered the church's
conversion from an aloof hierarchy with feudal overtones to a flexible,
socially active institution capable of dealing with the adversity of the
postwar years. In the first two postwar years, the church enjoyed
considerable autonomy. In 1947, however, consolidation of the East
European nations under the hegemony of the Stalinist Soviet Union led to
the closing of Polish seminaries and confiscation of church property in
the name of the state. The state abolished the concordat and assumed
legal supremacy over all religious organizations in 1948.
In the decades that followed, the church adapted to the new
constraints, pragmatically reaching compromise agreements with the state
and avoiding open confrontation over most issues. Between 1948 and 1981,
the church was led by Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski, an expert on Catholic
social doctrine whose commanding personality augmented the power of the
church hierarchy as a direct conduit from the Vatican to the people of
Poland. As a general policy in the early communist decades, Wyszynski
avoided fruitless direct campaigning against communist oppression.
Instead, he stressed the church's role as advocate of Christian
morality. Nevertheless, the cardinal's criticism of PZPR party leader
Boleslaw Bierut earned Wyszynski three years under house arrest
(1953-56), as well as international stature as a spokesman against
communism. During this period, a total of 1,000 priests and eight
bishops were imprisoned, and convents were raided by the police in the
communist drive to destroy completely the authority of the church in
Polish society.
Wyszynski was released in 1956 as a result of severe social unrest
that forced a change in party leadership. The release was followed by a
church-state agreement significantly relaxing restrictions in such areas
as religious teaching and jurisdiction over church property. This
agreement marked a general softening of state religious policy at the
end of the period of hard-line Stalinism. Ten years later, the church's
lavish celebration of the millennium of Polish Christianity strengthened
the identification of Polish national consciousness with the church and,
in the process, the state's respect for the church as representative of
national opinion.
Relations in the 1970s and 1980s
When the "reform" regime of Edward Gierek came to power in
1970, it took conciliatory measures to enlist church support. The 1970s
were a time of bargaining and maneuvering between a state increasingly
threatened by social unrest and a church that was increasingly sure of
its leadership role but still intent on husbanding its political
capital. Between 1971 and 1974, the church demanded the constitutional
right to organize religious life and culture in Poland, using education
institutions, religious groups, and the mass media. Major protest
documents were issued in 1973 and 1976 against the weakening or
withdrawal of state guarantees of such a right.
In 1976 church support for workers' food price riots began a new
phase of political activism that would endure until the end of communist
rule. In late 1977, a meeting of Gierek and Wyszynski, prompted by
continuing social unrest, promised a new reconciliation, but the church
continued its harsh criticism of state interference in religious
affairs. In 1978 the selection of Cardinal Karol Wojtyla of Krak�w as
pope opened vital new lines of communication between Polish Catholics
and the outside world and gave the Poles a symbol of hope in a period of
economic and political decay. In 1979 the triumphal visit of Pope John
Paul II to Poland boosted the Polish cultural self-image and turned
international attention to Poland's political and spiritual struggles.
The next year, the church lent vital moral support to the Solidarity
labor movement while counseling restraint from violence and extreme
positions. In 1981 the government requested that the church help it to
establish a dialog with worker factions. Needing church approval to gain
support among the people, the government revived the Joint Episcopal and
Government Commission, through which the church gradually regained legal
status in the early 1980s. In 1981 the Catholic University of Lublin
reopened its Department of Social Sciences, and in 1983 clubs of the
Catholic intelligentsia reopened in sixty cities. Twenty-three new
church-oriented periodicals appeared in the 1980s, reaching a total
printing of more than 1.2 million copies in 1989. Nevertheless, state
censorship, paper rationing, and restriction of building permits
provoked serious conflicts with the Polish government in the last decade
of communist rule.
Wyszynski died in 1981. He was replaced as primate by the less
dynamic Cardinal J�zef Glemp, who attempted to continue the dual policy
of conciliation and advancement of religious rights. By 1983 several
activist bishops and priests had broken with an official church policy
they saw as too conciliatory toward the regime. In a 1984 meeting with
Prime Minister Wojciech Jaruzelski, Glemp again attempted to obtain
official recognition of the church's legal status as well as freedom for
imprisoned dissidents. Later that year, the murder of dissident priest
Jerzy Popieluszko by Polish security agents fueled a new confrontation
between church and state. The Jaruzelski government, which had met with
Glemp seeking the legitimacy that would come from renewed diplomatic
relations with the Vatican, abandoned its conciliatory tone and returned
to the pre-1970 demand that the church limit itself to purely spiritual
matters and censure politically active priests. During 1985 and 1986,
the church hierarchy replied with renewed demands for the release of
political prisoners and for constitutional guarantees of free assembly.
By the end of 1986, 500 political prisoners had received amnesty, and
Pope John Paul II's second visit to Poland included a meeting with
Jaruzelski--signals that relations were again improving.
The last two years of communist rule brought intensified bargaining
as social unrest continued to weaken the government's position. The
church demanded that the government open dialogs with opposition
organizations, arguing that social and economic problems could not be
solved without considering all views. When national strikes hit Poland
in mid-1988, the church attempted to arbitrate between labor
organizations and the government and to prevent labor from adopting
radical positions. The Polish Episcopate, the administrative body of the
Polish Catholic Church, took part in the talks that began in September
1988 between Solidarity representatives and the Ministry of Internal
Affairs. Those talks ultimately led to restoration of Solidarity's legal
status. In early 1989, round table discussions between church and state
representatives yielded a new law on church-state relations passed by
the Sejm (the lower legislative house) in May 1989. The religious
freedom guaranteed by that law allowed the church to resume officially
its role as intermediary between the state and society. The law also set
the stage for organized activity by the Catholic laity never permitted
in the communist era. The Vatican resumed full diplomatic relations with
the Polish government two months later.
Church and State after 1989
The approach of the Polish Catholic Church to the Polish state
changed drastically after 1989. The church's influential role in
promoting opposition views, its close relationship with Solidarity, and
its mediation between factions in the tumultuous 1980s brought it
enhanced political power in the postcommunist system. In 1989 virtually
every significant public organization in Poland saw the church as a
partner in its activities and decisions. One result of this
identification was that when the Sejm began deliberations on a new
constitution in 1990, the Episcopate requested that the document
virtually abolish the separation of church and state. Such a change of
constitutional philosophy would put the authority of the state behind
such religious guarantees as the right to religious education and the
right to life beginning at conception (hence a ban on abortion).
Throughout the communist era, the separation of church and state had
been the basis of the church's refusal to acknowledge the authority of
atheistic political regimes over ecclesiastical activities. In
justifying its new approach to the separation doctrine, the Episcopate
explained that the communist regimes had discredited the doctrine as a
constitutional foundation for postcommunist governance by using the
separation of church and state to defend their totalitarian control of
society against church interference.
As a political matter, however, the unleashing of stronger church
influence in public life began to alienate parts of the population
within two years of the passage of the bill that restored freedom of
religion. Catholic intellectuals, who had shared opposition sympathies
with the church in the communist era, also had opposed the autocratic
rule of Cardinal Wyszynski. Many people feared that compromise between
the church and the communist state might yield an alliance that in
effect would establish an official state church. Once the common
opponent, the communist system, disappeared in 1989, these fears revived
and spread to other parts of Polish society.
In the period that followed, critical issues were the reintroduction
of religious instruction in public schools--which happened nationwide at
church insistence, without parliamentary discussion, in 1990--and legal
prohibition of abortion. Almost immediately after the last communist
regime fell, the church began to exert pressure for repeal of the
liberal communist-era abortion law in effect since 1956. Between 1990
and 1992, church pressure brought three progressively tighter
restrictions on birth control and abortion, although surveys showed that
about 60 percent of Poles backed freedom of individual choice on that
issue. By 1991, the proper boundary of church intervention in social
policy making was a divisive social and political issue. At that point,
only 58 percent of citizens polled rated the church the most-respected
institution in Polish public life-- second behind the army. By contrast,
one year before 90 percent of citizens polled had rated the church as
most respected.
The church responded to the conditions of the reform era in other
ways as well. It campaigned vigorously (but unsuccessfully) to prevent
dissemination of pornographic materials, which became quite abundant in
all East European nations after 1989 and were viewed as a moral threat.
The church strongly defended aid for the poor, some aspects of which
were suspended in the period of austerity that accompanied Poland's
drive toward capitalism, although some policy makers saw welfare
programs as remnants of the communist state. Following the issuance of a
papal encyclical on the condition of the poor, Cardinal Glemp stressed
the moral dangers of the free market.
After 1989 the church had to cut its highly professional publication
operations drastically. In 1992 the church discussed improving access to
the lay community, however, by publishing a mass-circulation newspaper
and establishing a Catholic press agency. Glemp also considered
decentralization of the church hierarchy and establishment of more
dioceses to reach the faithful more directly.
Poland
Poland - The Polish Catholic Church and the People
Poland
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, more than 90 percent of Polish
children were baptized in the Catholic Church, showing that the younger
generation shared loyalty to traditional religion. Surveys of young
people in the 1980s showed an increase in professed religious belief
over the decade, from 74 percent to 96 percent. Also, the number of men
preparing for the priesthood rose from 6,285 to 8,835 between 1980 and
1986. The church's influence extended far beyond the limits of a
traditional predominant religion, however. Especially in rural areas and
among the less-educated urban population, religion permeated everyday
life, and church attendance was higher in the communist era than it had
been before World War II. As other forms of social affiliation were
repressed or reorganized, churches continued as the de facto arbiters of
a wide range of moral and ethical problems in their communities, a role
they had assumed initially during the war. Although church affiliation
was less prevalent among the educated elite, over 60 percent of that
group (which included most of the nominally atheistic communist ruling
class) professed belief in Catholicism in 1978.
Experts point to certain characteristics of Polish Catholicism to
explain its unique resilience in a population bombarded for decades with
state-sponsored atheistic propaganda. Polish Catholic religiosity
focuses more strongly on the Virgin Mary and the saints than on the
direct relationship of the individual to God or on abstract religious
doctrine. The most important pilgrimage destination for Polish Roman
Catholics is the image of the Virgin (called the Black Madonna) at Jasna
G�ra Monastery in Czestochowa. The image is believed to have rescued
Poland miraculously from invasions by the Tatars and the Swedes, and
some Solidarity leaders wore replicas of the icon.
Especially for less-educated Poles, Mary represents a tangible yet
mystical connection with God much preferable to contemplation of
abstract theological doctrine. During the communist era, this more
immediate and anthropocentric religiosity seemed uniquely resistant to
replacement by the intellectual doctrine of atheism. On the other hand,
in the early 1990s, once the specter of state-sponsored atheism had
disappeared, this immediacy promoted individual expression of beliefs in
ways that questioned the church's authority over secular social ethics.
Thus, the official church that had protected the spiritual interests of
all Poles under communism risked separation from the everyday religious
practice that retained great meaning for the average Polish Catholic.
Poland
Poland - Other Churches
Poland
A total of forty-two non-Catholic church groups existed in Poland in
1989, accounting for about 2 percent of the population. In the communist
era, the legal status of these communities was severely restricted. In
March 1988, the Polish Ecumenical Council, which represented the major
non-Catholic groups, began participating in a commission with government
representatives to restore unrestricted freedom of religion. The 1989
law on freedom of conscience and creed redefined the state's
relationship to all religions, conferring equal status on the Roman
Catholic and the minority churches.
The Greek Catholic Church
The Greek Catholic Church (also called the Uniate Church) was
established in 1596 by the Union of Brest-Litovsk. That agreement
brought several million Eastern Orthodox Belorussians and Ukrainians
under the authority of the Roman Catholic Church, although they
preserved Orthodox religious rites. From the outset, many in the
Orthodox Church strongly opposed Latinization and what they perceived as
the compromise of tradition, and conflict between the Greek Catholic
Church and both the Polish Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church
flared periodically into the early 1990s. In Poland the tense relations
between proponents of the Latin and the Greek Catholic rites had relaxed
significantly in the 1980s, although serious issues remained unsolved.
Among the foremost of those issues was Catholic occupation of Greek
Catholic Church property confiscated by the state in the late 1940s.
In 1947 the resettlement of the Ukrainian population from
southeastern Poland substantially reduced the practice of Greek
Catholicism in Poland. In 1949 Pope Pius XII appointed Wyszynski as the
papal delegate to the Greek Catholic congregations of Poland. In 1956
Wyszynski named sixteen Ukrainian priests as the clerical body of the
Greek Catholic Church, and a vicar general was also named and installed
in Przemysl. In 1981 Glemp named two vicars general for Warsaw and
Legnica to improve the church's ministry to the dispersed Ukrainian
Greek Catholic communities. Beginning at that time, church
administration was divided into northern and southern districts. In 1989
the total membership of the Greek Catholic Church in Poland was
estimated at 300,000, with eighty-five centers of worship and fifty-five
priests. Twelve candidates were preparing for the Greek Catholic
priesthood at the Catholic University of Lublin in 1989; five
monasteries and three orders of nuns were active.
The Evangelical Church of the Augsburg Confession
The largest Protestant church in Poland, the Evangelical Church of
the Augsburg Confession, or Old Lutheran Church, had about 90,000
members in six dioceses in 1989, figures substantially reduced by
postwar resettlement of the German minority that made up a large part of
the church's membership. Services were conducted in Polish. The
membership was concentrated in the Cieszyn Diocese, on the Czechoslovak
border southwest of Krak�w. Of the original twentysix parishes founded
in German communities of Silesia and Pomerania, nineteen remained in
1985. Despite its name, the church was not a formal member of the
Germany-based Evangelical Church of the Augsburg Confession.
The Old Catholic Churches
The Polish National Catholic Church, one of a number of socalled Old
Catholic churches worldwide, had about 50,000 members in 1989, organized
in dioceses centered in Katowice, Warsaw, Krak�w, and Wroc aw. The
church claims to retain all genuine Roman Catholic doctrine, while
rejecting mainstream Roman Catholic tenets such as the infallibility of
the pope and the immaculate conception and assumption of Mary. The
thrust of the Polish National Catholic Church's beliefs is a return to
"original" doctrine untainted by the addition of any new
belief. The church belongs to the Union of Utrecht, which include Old
Catholic churches from many countries and is overseen from the
Netherlands by the archbishop of Utrecht.
The Mariavite Catholic Church of Poland is a schismatic Old Catholic
group excluded from the Union of Utrecht because of unorthodox beliefs.
In 1989 its membership in Poland was about 25,000, divided into three
dioceses administered from Plock. About thirty priests were active in
1989.
The Polish Ecumenical Council
Founded in 1946 to promote interchurch cooperation, the Polish
Ecumenical Council includes nearly all churches except the Polish
Catholic Church. In 1989 member churches included the Orthodox,
Lutheran, Methodist, Baptist, Reformed (Calvinist), Old Catholic, and
Evangelical churches of Poland. Cooperation with the Polish Catholic
Church began in 1974 when the council established a Combined Ecumenical
Commission to deal with the analogous ecumenical commission of the
Polish Catholic Bishops' Conference. In 1977 the council named a
subcommittee for discussion of individual theological questions; by 1980
bilateral dialogs had begun among members sharing similar doctrine.
Given Poland's history of religious tolerance, the restoration of
religious freedom in 1989 was expected to expand the tentative
ecumenical contacts achieved during the communist era.
Poland
Poland - EDUCATION
Poland
Throughout the modern history of Poland, education has played a
central role in Polish society. Together with the church, formal and
informal education helped to preserve national identity and prepare
society for future independence during the partition period. In the
communist era, education was the chief mode of restructuring society and
improving the social mobility of hitherto unprivileged workers. The
postcommunist era brought an extensive debate over the goals of
restructuring the system and the role of the church in secular
education.
The Education Tradition
The education of Polish society was a goal of rulers as early as the
twelfth century, when monks were brought from France and Silesia to
teach agricultural methods to Polish peasants. Krak�w University,
founded in 1364 by Kazimierz the Great, became one of Europe's great
early universities and a center of intellectual tolerance. Through the
eighteenth century, Poland was a refuge for academic figures persecuted
elsewhere in Europe for unorthodox ideas. The dissident schools founded
by these refugees became centers of avant-garde thought, especially in
the natural sciences. The Renaissance and Enlightenment periods in
Western Europe brought advanced educational theories to Poland. In 1773
King Stanislaw August established his Commission on National Education,
the world's first state ministry of education. This body set up a
uniform national education system emphasizing mathematics, natural
sciences, and language study. The commission also stressed standardizing
elementary education, integrating trade and agricultural skills into the
elementary school curriculum, and improving textbooks at all levels.
Eras of Repression
Partition challenged the work of the Commission on National Education
because Germany, Austria, and Russia sought to destroy Polish national
consciousness by Germanizing and Russifying the education system. During
the 123-year partition, pockets of resistance continued teaching and
publishing in Polish, and some innovations such as vocational training
schools appeared. In general, the Austrian sector had the least
developed education system, whereas the least disruption in educational
progress occurred in the Prussian sector.
Between 1918 and 1939, the newly independent Poland faced the task of
reconstructing a national education system from the three separate
systems imposed during partition. Although national secondary education
was established in the 1920s, the economic crisis of the 1930s
drastically decreased school attendance. Among the educational
accomplishments of the interwar period were establishment of state
universities in Warsaw, Wilno (Vilnius), and Poznan (available only to
the upper classes), numerous specialized secondary schools, and the
Polish Academy of Learning.
Between 1939 and 1944, the Nazi occupation sought to annihilate the
national Polish culture once again. All secondary and higher schools
were closed to Poles, and elementary school curricula were stripped of
all national content during this period. In response, an extensive
underground teaching movement developed under the leadership of the
Polish Teachers' Association and the Committee for Public Education. An
estimated 100,000 secondary students attended classes in the underground
system during the Nazi occupation.
Under communist regimes, the massive task of postwar education
reconstruction emphasized opening institutions of secondary and higher
education to the Polish masses and reducing illiteracy. The number of
Poles unable to read and write had been estimated at 3 million in 1945.
In harmony with the principles of Marxism-Leninism, wider availability
of education would democratize the higher professional and technical
positions previously dominated by the gentry-based intelligentsia and
the wealthier bourgeoisie. Because sweeping industrialization goals also
required additional workers with at least minimum skills, the vocational
school system was substantially expanded. At least in the first postwar
decade, most Poles welcomed the social mobility that these policies
offered. On the other hand, Poles generally opposed Marxist revision of
Polish history and the emphasis on Russian language and area studies to
the detriment of things Polish--practices especially stringent in the
first postwar decade, when Stalinist doctrine was transferred wholesale
from the Soviet Union and dominated pedagogical practice. During this
period, all levels of Polish education were plagued by shortages of
buildings and teachers. Capital investment lagged far behind the
grandiose goals of centralized planning.
Education reform was an important demand of widespread Polish
demonstrations against Stalinism in 1956. Under the new PZPR first
secretary, Wladyslaw Gomulka, government education policy rejected the
dogmatic programs of Stalinism and in their place began the first period
of (fragmentary) postwar education reform. Religious instruction was
restored, at the option of parents; by 1957 over 95 percent of schools
had resumed offering such instruction. In the vocational program,
agricultural training schools were added, and technical courses were
restructured to afford greater contact with actual industrial
operations. By 1961, however, state doctrine followed the generally
conservative turn of Polish politics by again describing the goal of
education as preparing workers to build the socialist state.
The Law on the Development of Education Systems, passed in 1961,
established four formal principles that reiterated the goals of the
pre-1956 system and endured through the rest of the communist era. The
education system was to prepare qualified employees for industry, to
develop proper attitudes of citizenship in the Polish People's Republic,
to propagate the values of the working classes everywhere, and to
instill respect for work and national values. Education was specifically
described as a function of the state, and schools were to be secular in
nature. Religious institutions could sponsor schools under strict
limitations, however, and the church was permitted to establish a
network of separate religious education centers to compensate for this
restriction. In 1968 the return of strict communist dogma to school
curricula was an important stimulus for a national wave of student
demonstrations. Although the Gierek regime sought broad education reform
when it took power in 1970, the uneven progress of reform programs in
the 1970s led to further unrest and diminished the role of education in
state control of society.
In the communist era, two levels of education management existed. At
the central level, the Ministry of National Education was the chief
organ of state administration. That agency prescribed course content,
textbooks, principles of school operation, standards for admissions and
scholarship awards, examination procedures, and interschool relations
throughout the country. At the local level, superintendents established
personnel policy, hired and trained personnel, and oversaw other local
institutions having educational functions. The daily functioning of each
individual school was administered by a headmaster and a pedagogical
council.
The Drive for Education Reform
In the Solidarity movement of 1980, student and teacher organizations
demanded a complete restructuring of the centralized system and autonomy
for local educational jurisdictions and institutions. In response, the
Jaruzelski government issued sympathetic statements and appointed
committees, but few meaningful changes ensued in the 1980s. Although an
education crisis was recognized widely and experts advised that
education could not be viewed in isolation from Poland's other social
problems, the PZPR continued making cosmetic changes in the system until
the party was voted out of office in 1989. The political events of that
year were the catalyst for fundamental change in the Polish education
system.
The round table discussions of early 1989 between the government and
opposition leaders established a special commission on education
questions, which was dominated by the Solidarity view that political
dogma should be removed from education and the heavily bureaucratized
state monopoly of education should end. That view also required autonomy
for local school administrations and comprehensive upgrading of material
support. Accordingly, the Office of Innovation and Independent Schools
was established in 1990 to create the legislative basis for government
support of private schools established by individuals and civic
organizations. In a compromise with communists remaining in parliament,
state subsidies were set at 50 percent of the state's per-student cost.
The new private schools featured smaller classes of ten to fifteen
students, higher teacher salaries, and complete freedom for educational
innovation. Tuition was to be high, from 40,000 to 50,000 zloty per
month, with scholarships available for poorer students with high grades.
In the first eighteen months, about 250 new private schools appeared,
100 of which were affiliated with the Catholic Church. In 1990 the total
enrollment of 15,000 reflected parental caution toward the new system,
but the figure rose steadily in 1992. The Ministry of National Education
viewed the alternative schools as a stimulus for reform of the public
school system.
In 1990 Minister of National Education Henryk Samsonowicz established
interim national minimum requirements while offering teachers maximum
flexibility in choosing methodology. The drafts of new education laws to
replace the 1961 law called for the "autonomy of schools as
societies of students, teachers, and parents," with final
responsibility for instructional content and methods. Controversy over
the laws centered not on their emphasis on autonomy and democracy, but
on the relative status of interest groups within the proposed system.
Disagreements on such issues postponed the effective date of the new
Polish education laws until September 1991.
The most controversial aspect of the new law was the status of
religious education in public schools. A 1991 directive from the
Ministry of National Education required that every student receive a
grade in religion or ethics. For many Poles, this meant an invasion of
the constitutional right to keep silent about religious convictions as
well as recognition of a church education authority rivaling secular
authority. Many other Poles, however, considered separation of the
church from education to be a continuation of communist policies and a
weakening of the national moral fabric.
Structure of the Education System
Poland's postcommunist education legislation left intact the public
structures established by the 1961 education law. In that system, the
first stage was kindergarten, attended by children between three and
seven years of age. City kindergarten schools were open from seven to
eleven hours per day and designed their programs to accommodate the
schedules of working parents. Schools in rural areas were open from five
to eight hours, depending on the season and on agricultural
requirements. The level of education and auxiliary services was
generally much lower in rural schools, and kindergarten attendance there
was roughly half that in the cities. Some primary schools also had
kindergarten sections, whose graduates continued to the next level in
the same institution. The cost of kindergarten education was shared by
the government and parents. Under the communist system, the cost of
kindergarten education had been paid wholly by the parents. In 1992 the
23,900 kindergartens in operation included 11,000 separate kindergartens
and 12,900 kindergarten sections.
Eight years of primary school were obligatory in both the communist
and the postcommunist systems. Children entered this phase at age seven
and remained until they completed the program or until they turned
seventeen. Foreignlanguage instruction was widely available. Some
special schools were available for students gifted in the arts or
sports, and special courses were designed for physically or mentally
handicapped students.
Poland's acute shortage of classroom space required double shifts and
large classes (thirty to forty students) in most primary schools. Some
schools provided after-school programs for students in grades one to
three whose parents both worked; older students, however, were released
at the end of the school day, regardless of their home situation. In
1992 some 5.3 million children were in primary school; new enrollments
dropped 2.9 percent from the previous year.
In 1991 over 95 percent of primary-school graduates continued to some
form of secondary education. Admission to the secondary level was by
examination and overall primary-school records. In general, the students
with the highest primary achievement went into a college preparatory
track, those with the lowest into a trade-school track. Of pupils
completing primary school in 1991, about 43 percent went to three-year
trade schools (specializing in various trades, from hairdressing to
agriculture), 25 percent to four-year vocational lycea and to technical
schools, and 26 percent to college preparatory schools. The last
category grew by 3.2 percent between 1990 and 1991, while the other two
fell slightly. Of the three categories, only the first provides a trade
immediately upon graduation. Students in the other two categories
require further education at a university or at a twoyear postsecondary
schools to prepare them for employment. Some college preparatory schools
combine a variety of nontechnical subjects in their curricula; others
specialize in humanities, mathematics and physical sciences, biology and
chemistry, sports, or classical subjects. In 1987 these schools enrolled
more than twice as many girls as boys; about 11 percent of
secondary-school students received scholarships. Students passing final
exams in the college preparatory program are permitted to take
university entrance exams.
Most technical programs are five years in length. Such programs are
offered in economics, art, music, theater production, and teacher
training (a six-year track). Many students live at secondary technical
schools because some districts have only one such school. The government
and parents share board and room expenses; tuition is free. The Polish
Catholic Church also operates fourteen high schools, whose curricula
were state-mandated until 1989.
To enroll at the university level, students have to pass entrance
exams. Institutions at this level include full universities (of which
Poland had twelve in 1990), polytechnical schools, academies, and
specialized colleges. In 1988 the largest of these were Warsaw
University (23,300 students), Marie CurieSklodowska University in Lublin
(12,900), Adam Mickewiecz University at Poznan (12,100), the Warsaw
Technical School (12,000), and the Silesian University at Katowice
(11,400).
The polytechnical schools offer theoretical and applied training in
such fields as electronics, engineering, computer science, and
construction. Academies specialize in medicine, fine arts, economics,
agriculture, sports, or theology; thirty-four academies were in
operation in 1990. In that year, twenty-nine specialized colleges were
training students in pedagogy, oceanography, and art. College enrollment
increased each year between 1989 and 1992. In 1992 some 430,000 persons
attended college, 330,000 as full-time students; initial enrollment for
the 1991-92 school year was 17.7 percent higher than for the previous
year.
As a rule, students pursue postgraduate degrees as members of an
academic team working under a single professor. Continued progress
through the academic ranks depends on regular evaluation of scholarly
activity and publications, and failure to meet requirements means
removal from the program. Polish postgraduate studies programs, which
culminate in doctoral degrees, suffer from lack of material support, low
salaries, and low demand for individuals with advanced degrees in the
job market. In the late 1980s, these factors made the dropout rate very
high and forced cancellation of several programs. Between 1982 and 1992,
Poland suffered a serious "brain drain" in higher education
and the sciences as more than 15,000 scientists emigrated or changed
their profession.
Poland
Poland - HEALTH AND WELFARE
Poland
The fall of centralized state planning and the onset of massive
economic and social reform put new strains on Poland's health and
welfare systems, whose nominally full and equal coverage had been
increasingly faulty in the 1980s. In the last decade of communist rule,
national health care suffered from poor material support, inaccessible
medical personnel and facilities, and poor organization. At the same
time, critical national health indicators for the 1970s and 1980s showed
many negative trends. Likewise, access to social services, nominally
equal for all workers, was limited by the availability of welfare funds
in individual enterprises during the communist era. Because no national
standards existed, some enterprises offered their employees no social
services at all, while others offered a wide range. By 1989 the material
position of low-income families and pensioners was especially desperate.
The economic "shock therapy" begun in 1990 by the Balcerowicz
Plan further reduced the level of guaranteed health and welfare
services, to which a large part of Polish society had become accustomed
under communist regimes.
Health Conditions
In the two decades after World War II, the health of Poland's people
improved overall, as antibiotics became available and the standard of
living rose in most areas. In the 1970s and 1980s, however, alarming
trends appeared in certain national health statistics. Between 1970 and
1986, the mortality rate rose from 8.1 to 10.1 persons per 1,000, and
from 8.8 to 10.9 males per 1,000. The increase was sharpest among males
between the ages of forty-five and fifty-four. For the same period,
working days lost because of illness or accidents increased by 45
percent. Between 1988 and 1991, the incidence of newborns requiring
intensive care rose from 2.9 to 4.5 percent. Experts listed the major
contributing factors as high levels of air and water pollution,
unsatisfactory working conditions, overcrowded housing, psychological
depression because of deteriorating economic conditions, poorly balanced
diets, alcoholism, and deterioration of health services, especially in
prenatal and postnatal care.
<>The Health Care System
<>AIDS, Narcotics and Alcoholism
<>The Welfare System
Poland
Poland - The Health Care System
Poland
The constitution of 1952 guaranteed universal free health care. In
the last two decades of the communist era, however, such care became
progressively less dependable for those without informal support
networks or enough money to buy health care outside the official system.
As early as 1970, Polish governments recognized the need to reform the
cumbersome, inefficient national health care system, but vested
interests in the central planning system prevented meaningful change.
From the beginning, administration of the system was inefficient. The
structure of the medical profession did not supply enough general
practitioners, and medical personnel such as dentists and nurses were in
short supply. Treatment facilities were too few and crowded, preventive
medicine received little attention, and the quality of care was
generally much poorer in rural areas. As in other communist countries,
the finest medical facilities were reserved for the party elite.
In the postcommunist reform period, constriction of the state budget
and fragmentary privatization of medical practices made the availability
of health care unpredictable for many Poles. After inheriting a
deteriorating health care system, Polish policy makers placed their
near-term hopes on reducing bureaucracy, encouraging self-government in
the medical profession, shifting resources to more efficient
departments, and streamlining admissions and diagnosis procedures.
In 1992 Poland had fifty-seven hospital beds per 10,000 citizens,
about half the ratio of beds available in France and Germany. The ratio
had been declining since the 1960s; in 1991 alone, however, over 2,500
beds and nearly 100 clinics and dispensaries were eliminated in the
drive for consolidation and efficiency. Already in the mid-1980s, about
50 percent of the medicines officially available could not be obtained
by the average Pole, and the average hospital had been in service
sixtyfive years. Because the reform budgets of the early 1990s included
gradual cuts in the funding of the Ministry of Health and Social
Welfare, additional targeted cuts of 10 to 20 percent were expected in
clinics and hospital beds by 1994. The long-term goal of Polish health
policy was a complete conversion of state budget-supported socialized
medicine to a privately administered health system supported by a
universal obligatory health insurance fee. Under such a system, fees
would be shared equally by workers and enterprises. Before introduction
of that system, which was not expected until at least 1995, interim
funding was to depend heavily on a patchwork of voluntary contributions
and local and national health-care taxes. Even after 1995, however,
planners projected that the state budget would continue contributing to
the national health care fund until the insurance system became
self-sufficient. The state would now contribute directly, however,
bypassing the old health care bureaucracy.
Poland
Poland - AIDS, Narcotics and Alcoholism
Poland
In 1991 Poland's overall mortality rate increased to 10.6 deaths per
1,000 persons, from the 1990 figure of 10.2 per 1,000. In the same
period, infant mortality remained constant at 15.9 per 1,000. About 50
percent of the 405,000 deaths in 1991 were attributed to circulatory
diseases, and another 20 percent were caused by malignant tumors.
Poland's communist regimes partially or completely ignored a number of
major health problems, including acquired immune deficiency syndrome
(AIDS), drug addiction, and alcoholism. Only with the open discussion
that began in 1989 did the extent of these problems become clear.
Solutions, on the other hand, were often blocked in the postcommunist
years by popular distrust of state authority, controversy between church
and state, and lack of resources.
AIDS
AIDS emerged as an issue in Poland later than in the West-- partly
because of communist suppression of statistics, partly because the
epidemic apparently reached Poland later. In 1991 the government
officially estimated that 2,000 Poles had been infected with the human
immunodeficiency virus (HIV), whereas an independent health expert put
the figure at 100,000. This statistical discrepancy reflected Poland's
late start in testing the groups at highest risk of infection. Narcotics
addicts were endangered particularly because the drug in widest use in
Poland was administered and distributed by syringe, one of the most
potent means of HIV transmission. Early efforts to control the spread of
HIV were hampered by public ignorance and superstition; in 1992 about 70
percent of Poles believed they could not be infected, while many
believed that water and mosquitoes were carriers. The total lack of sex
education programs in the schools (the Polish Catholic Church forced
their removal after the communist era) and the disinclination of
political and religious leaders to address the issue publicly further
hindered prevention efforts.
Twice in 1991, World Health Organization (WHO) teams evaluated the
Polish situation and proposed a program to combat the spread of AIDS.
The teams advised that, to prevent the disease from spreading from
high-risk groups to society at large, information on the epidemic be
given maximum dissemination to certain less visible groups that were
likely victims of the second phase of the disease. The most urgent
target groups were the prostitute community--whose numbers in 1992 were
estimated to be as high as 180,000--and their potential customers. At
that point, however, a comprehensive information program was impossible
because the country lacked trained workers and money for training
programs. Other obstacles were lack of modern diagnostic technology and
poor hygiene in public health facilities. In 1991 WHO allocated a small
fund for a three-year education and prevention program in Poland.
Narcotics
As in the case of AIDS victims, communist regimes denied the
existence of drug addicts. The first private drug treatment center
opened in 1970, and in the 1970s health and legal professionals
discussed the drug problem guardedly. Not until the 1980s were
organizations founded to combat drug addiction, and they were harassed
and limited by government agencies until 1989. In 1992 between 4,000 and
5,000 Poles dependent on narcotics were being treated at facilities of
the national health service or social organizations. The Ministry of
Health and Social Welfare estimated that 200,000 to 250,000 persons were
taking drugs at that time, however. In 1991 some 190 deaths were
attributed to drug overdoses. Addicts under treatment were predominantly
from the working class and the intelligentsia, male, and younger than
thirty years of age (nearly half were under twenty-four). The most
commonly abused substance, kompot, was a powerful and
physically devastating drug readily produced from the poppy plants grown
widely in Poland. The drug was injected intravenously. Kompot
moved through society via informal networks operating independently of
the international drug market.
In the period from 1986 to 1992, drug abuse in Poland remained stable
despite declining standards of living, rising unemployment, and a rising
overall crime rate. As barriers to the West fell, however, amphetamine
manufacture and trafficking introduced a new threat. By 1992,
amphetamines from Poland were considered as serious a threat in Germany
and Scandinavia as imported cocaine and heroine; at that time, an
estimated 20 percent of amphetamines in Western Europe originated in
Polish laboratories. The confiscation of 150 kilograms of cocaine in
Poland in 1991 also indicated that domestic narcotics production was
diversifying, and local authorities feared that Colombian drug cartels
were investing in that activity. To counter criminal drug producers, who
also were involved in other types of crime, Poland established a
National Drug Bureau in 1991. Because kompot remained much
cheaper and more accessible in the early 1990s, however, the Polish
market for amphetamines remained very small. Meanwhile, a 1990 law made
illegal the cultivation of poppies without a government permit, and a
new, morphine-free poppy species was introduced in 1991 to enable
farmers to continue poppy cultivation.
In 1992 nineteen of Poland's drug rehabilitation centers were
operated by the Young People's Movement to Combat Drug Addiction (known
by its Polish acronym, MONAR). Although hundreds of people were cured in
such centers in the 1980s, the severe treatment methods of MONAR's
two-year program caused controversy in the Polish health community. For
that reason, in 1990 the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare began
opening clinics that emphasized preparing individuals for life after
treatment.
Alcoholism
The older generations of Poles escaped narcotics addiction, but
alcoholism is a problem in all generations. Alcohol consumption is an
integral part of Polish social tradition, and nondrinkers are relatively
rare. Per capita consumption increased significantly after World War II,
however, and consumption remained above the European average throughout
the communist period. Children often began drinking when still in
primary school. Government programs nominally discouraged excessive
drinking, but the importance of revenue from the Polish alcohol industry
restricted their activity. Throughout the 1980s, the percentage of
strong alcoholic beverages in overall consumption rose steadily, putting
Poland near the top among nations in that statistic. In 1977 an
estimated 4.3 million Poles consumed the equivalent of more than 48
liters of pure alcohol per person per year; of that number, about 1
million were believed to be clinically alcohol-dependent. In 1980 the
average male Pole over sixteen years of age consumed the equivalent of
16.6 liters of pure alcohol per year.
Poland
Poland - The Welfare System
Poland
The communist central planning system made a wide variety of payments
to subsidize citizens in certain categories and encourage or discourage
the activities of citizens in other categories. By the mid-1980s, the
planning labyrinth created by such payments was such a fiscal burden
that severe cuts were made in some payments. Like the health system,
Poland's welfare system underwent substantial decentralization and
restructuring, and all parts of the system suffered from limited funding
in the transition period that began in 1989. Although a higher
percentage of the population needed welfare services because of high
unemployment in that period, the need to reduce the government's budget
deficit caused drastic cuts in many services. Eventual reversal of this
trend depends upon the speed with which Poland's economy rebounds from
its transition crisis and upon the efficiency of the new welfare
bureaucracies.
Structural Change
Until 1989 social policy making was centralized in the Planning
Commission of the Council of Ministers. The postcommunist reforms placed
social policy responsibility in the Ministry of Labor and Social Policy
and the Ministry of Health and Welfare, with the aim of liberating
social policy from its communist-era linkage with economic policy
considerations. The social welfare policy of the postcommunist
governments was planned in two phases. The first stage included
short-term measures to offset the income losses of certain groups
resulting from government antiinflation policy. These measures varied
from the setting up of soup kitchens and partial payment of heating
bills to reorganization of the social assistance system. The second,
long-term policy aims at rebuilding the institutions of the system to
conform with the future market economy envisioned by planners. Communal
and regional agencies are to assume previously centralized functions,
and authority is to be shared with private social agencies and
charities.
Welfare Benefits
In the late 1980s, Poland spent about 22 percent of its gross
national product (GNP) on social benefits in the form of monetary
payments or services. At that time, over 5 million Poles received
retirement or disability pensions, and about 100,000 were added yearly
in the latter category. In the years of labor shortage, government
incentives encouraged pensioners to continue to work past retirement age
(sixty-five for men, sixty for women). In the early 1980s, the number of
invalids receiving benefits increased from 2.5 million to 3.6 million,
straining the welfare system. The communist system also paid benefits to
single mothers with preschool children, sickness benefits for workers,
income supplements and nonrepayable loans to the poor, and education
grants to nearly 75 percent of students, in addition to providing
nominally free health care, cultural and physical education facilities.
By the mid-1980s, however, all the free, state-funded services were
being considered for privatization, fees, or rationing.
In the first postcommunist years, social support programs for the
unemployed underwent important changes. The initial postcommunist policy
guaranteed unemployment benefits and retraining regardless of the reason
for a person's unemployed status. Benefits were to be paid indefinitely
and were based on previous pay or on the national minimum wage for those
who had never worked. Benefits included old-age, disability, and
survivors' pensions and compensation for work injuries, sickness,
maternity, and family-related expenses. Although the system covered both
industry and agriculture, enterprises in the industrial sector paid much
higher surcharges (usually 45 percent of the worker's salary) to the
benefit fund than did either the agriculture or housing sectors.
In 1991 and early 1992, a series of laws drastically reduced the
coverage of the unemployment program. Under the modified policies,
benefits no longer went to those who had never been employed; a
twelve-month limit was placed on all payments; and benefit levels were
lowered by pegging them to income the previous quarter rather than to
the last salary received. This reform immediately disqualified 27
percent of previous beneficiaries, and that percentage was expected to
rise in ensuing years.
In 1992 the Warsaw welfare office divided its benefit payments among
4,500 recipients of permanent benefits, 8,500 recipients of temporary
benefits, and 25,500 recipients of housing assistance. The public
assistance law entitled one person per family to permanent benefits at
the official minimum subsistence level. Throughout Poland, the demand
for welfare assistance grew steadily between 1990 and 1992, well beyond
the financial and organizational capabilities of the state system. The
shortage affected a wide range of social categories: the homeless and
unemployed, AIDS victims, families of alcoholics, and the elderly.
According to a 1991 study, 18 percent of Polish children lived in
poverty. Thus, the postcommunist conversion of a state-sponsored and
state-controlled economy reverberated strongly in the "social
security" that communism had promised but very often failed to
deliver in the 1980s.
Poland
Poland - The Economy
Poland
POLAND'S ECONOMIC GROWTH was favored by relatively rich natural
resources for both agriculture and industry. Eastern Europe's largest
producer of food, Poland based its sizeable and varied industrial sector
on ample coal supplies that made it the world's fourth largest coal
producer in the 1970s. The most productive industries, such as equipment
manufacturing and food processing, were built on the country's coal and
soil resources, respectively, and energy supply still depended almost
entirely on coal in the early 1990s.
After World War II, Poland's new communist rulers reorganized the
economy on the model of state socialism established by Joseph V. Stalin
in the Soviet Union. The result was the predominance of heavy industry,
large enterprises, a topheavy centralized bureaucracy controlling every
aspect of production. Considerations such as consumer demand and worker
job satisfaction, familiar in Western capitalist systems, were ignored.
Isolated from the processes of the marketplace, pricing and production
levels were set to advance the master plans of the ruling party. The
socioeconomic disproportions that resulted from this isolation were a
burdensome legacy to the reform governments in the early postcommunist
era.
Poland's abundant agricultural resources remained largely in private
hands during the communist period, but the state strongly influenced
that sector through taxes, controls on materials, and limits on the size
of private plots. Many small industries and crafts also remained outside
direct state control.
The Polish economy also was isolated from the international economy
by the postwar nationalization of foreign trade. Reforms in the 1970s
and 1980s gradually gave individual enterprises more direct control over
their foreign trade activities, bypassing much of the state planning
machinery. But until 1990 Polish trade policy remained severely limited
by its obligations to the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon), which was dominated by the Soviet Union. Although price
supports helped Poland's balance of trade within the system, they also
encouraged inefficient and low-quality production that discouraged trade
with the rest of the world.
Failure of central state planning to yield economic growth inspired
social unrest and official policy reform in the 1970s and the early
1980s, but no real change occurred until the installation of a
noncommunist government in mid-1989. With massive public support, the
first noncommunist government imposed a shocktherapy reform program in
1990. This program included privatization of all parts of the Polish
economy and a rapid shift from the unrealistic state planning system to
a Westernstyle market economy. The momentum of the early reform days
flagged in the next two years, however. In 1992 signs of economic
progress were very uneven. Consumer goods became much more available,
but the continued existence of inefficient state enterprises lowered
productivity significantly, unemployment rose, and inflation became a
serious threat after initially being reduced to virtually zero.
In its efforts to westernize its economy after 1989, Poland relied
heavily on expertise and financial support from international financial
institutions. Although its substantial hard-currency debt was partially
forgiven in 1991, the remains of the communist management system
hindered efficient use of foreign capital and discouraged the foreign
investment that Poland vigorously sought. Thus, by 1992 what was
initially planned as a brief period of painful economic adjustment had
become a much longer ordeal that had brought mixed results.
<>NATURAL RESOURCES
<>THE ECONOMY UNDER COMMUNISM
<>THE CENTRALLY PLANNED ECONOMY
<>AFTER THE FALL OF COMMUNISM
<>
STRUCTURE OF THE ECONOMY
<>
FOREIGN TRADE
Poland
Poland - NATURAL RESOURCES
Poland
Poland's rapid postwar industrialization was supported by a
combination of readily available natural resources, especially
economically important minerals. After the era of communist economics
and politics ended in 1989, however, industrial policy makers
contemplated major changes in the balance of resource consumption.
Minerals and Fuels
Coal is Poland's most important mineral resource. In 1980 total
reserves were estimated at 130 billion tons. The largest coal deposits
are located in Upper Silesia in the southwestern part of the country,
where large-scale mining began in the nineteenth century. Silesian
deposits, generally of high quality and easily accessible, accounted for
about 75 percent of the country's hard coal resources and 97 percent of
its extraction in the 1980s. The Lublin region of eastern Poland was
exploited in the 1980s as part of an expansion program to supplement
Silesian hard coal for industry and export. But development of this
relatively poor, geologically difficult, and very expensive field ended
in 1990. A number of unprofitable Upper Silesian mines also were to be
closed in the early 1990s.
Poland also has significant quantities of lignite in the district of
Zielona G�ra in the west and in two districts located in the central
part of the country between the Vistula and the Oder rivers. This
low-quality fuel has been used on a large scale for the production of
electricity, despite its very damaging effect on the environment. Plans
called for gradual reduction of lignite extraction and use in the 1990s.
Natural gas is extracted mostly in Upper Silesia, Lower Silesia, and
in the southeastern part of the country. Production expanded in the
1960s and 1970s, then declined in the next decade. In 1989 domestic
production covered 43 percent of the country's total requirement.
A major offshore oilfield was discovered in the Baltic Sea in 1985.
Including that field and the older fields in the Carpathian Mountains in
southeastern Poland, total oil reserves were estimated at 100 million
tons in 1990. Poland remained heavily dependent on the Soviet Union for
petroleum throughout the 1980s.
Large reserves of sulfur at Tarnobrzeg and Stasz�w in the
south-central region make that material Poland's most important
nonmetallic export mineral. Favorable geological conditions have
supported large-scale operations in three mines yielding about 5 million
tons annually. About 3 million tons of sulfuric acid, along with several
other chemicals, are produced each year.
Poland has limited deposits of some nonferrous metal ores. The most
significant is copper, which is extracted in large quantities at ten
mines in Lower Silesia in southwestern Poland. Copper production
expanded greatly after discovery of major new deposits in the 1960s and
1970s. In 1990 annual copper ore output was about 26 million tons, and
51 percent of electrolytic copper was exported. In 1982 Poland had the
world's fifth-largest deposits of lead and zinc (which occur in
association). The annual output of lead and zinc ores was about 5
million tons, supporting annual production of 164 thousand tons of zinc
and 78,000 tons of lead. In 1990 about 76 percent of Poland's zinc and
nearly all its lead were used by domestic industry.
Although Poland had some fairly large iron ore deposits, this ore
requires enrichment before processing. Until the 1970s, the main source
of iron ore was the district of Czestochowa; but output there declined
sharply in the early 1980s, and other deposits were of poor quality or
provided such small quantities that exploitation was unprofitable. The
country depended on iron imports from the Soviet Union and Sweden to
support the rapid expansion of the steel industry that was a high
priority in the communist era.
Rich deposits of salt provide an important raw material for the
chemical industry. Salt mining, which began in the Middle Ages, was
concentrated in the Wieliczka-Bochnia area near Krak�w until the middle
of the twentieth century; then the major saltmining operations moved to
a large deposit running northwest from �d in central Poland. Salt is
extracted in two ways: by removing it in solid form and by dissolving it
underground, then pumping brine to the surface. Annual output declined
from 6.2 million tons in 1987 and 1988 to 4.7 million tons in 1989.
Other mineral resources include bauxite, barite, gypsum, limestone, and
silver (a byproduct of processing other metals).
Agricultural Resources
Poland's climate features moderate temperatures and adequate rainfall
that enable cultivation of most temperate-zone crops, including all the
major grains, several industrial crops, and several varieties of fruit.
Crops are distributed according to the substantial regional variations
in soil and length of growing season. The sandy soils of the central
plains are most suitable for rye, the richer soil in the south favors
wheat and barley, and the poorer soil of the north is used for oats. All
parts of Poland favor potato cultivation; sugar beets, the most
important industrial crop, grow mainly in the west and southeast.
Labor Force
At the end of 1991, about 30.7 percent of Poland's estimated
population of 38.3 million lived in urban centers with populations of
100,000 or more. The priority given urbanization and industrialization
in postwar Poland caused the urban working class to grow dramatically
and the rural working class to shrink proportionately in the first
decade of communist rule. This process slowed considerably over the next
three decades.
In 1989 nearly 22 million Poles were of working age: 11.3 million men
between the ages of eighteen and sixty-four years and 10.6 million women
between ages eighteen and fifty-nine. The population was relatively well
educated. In 1988 about 1.8 million people had a postsecondary
education, another 7.0 million had a secondary education, and 6.7
million had a basic trade education.
In 1989 the total labor force of 18.4 million included 36.8 percent
employed in manufacturing, mining, and construction; 25.7 percent in
agriculture, forestry, and fishing; and 7.1 percent in transport and
communications. About 12 million workers, or 70 percent of the work
force, worked in the state sector in 1990.
The communist system was marked by major inequality of labor
allocation. In spite of considerable overstaffing in both production and
administrative units, labor shortages were a perennial problem in other
areas of the economy. Unemployment began to grow in January 1990, partly
as the result of the reform policies of the postcommunist governments
and partly because of the collapse of markets in the Soviet Union and
the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), which were Poland's most
important trading partners in Comecon. At the end of 1991, unemployment
had reached 11.4 percent. Unemployment benefits, an unemployment
insurance system, and some retraining were introduced in early 1990.
Wage increases in the state sector were controlled by a very steep
tax on wages that exceeded prescribed levels. In the private sector, the
labor market operated without such restrictions, however. Wages
generally were low in the first reform years. In 1991 the average
monthly wage was 2,301,200 zloty, not including agricultural labor and
positions in education, health and social services, culture, law and
order, national defense, and public administration. At that time,
however, rents were low, electricity, gas, and fuels remained partly
subsidized, and medical services were free.
In 1992 two nationwide labor unions existed. The Solidarity labor
union (Solidarnosc) was internationally known for the decade of strikes
and efforts to achieve reform that finally thrust it into a central
political role in 1989. The National Coalition of Labor Unions,
originally established by the communist government after the suppression
of Solidarity in the early 1980s, became independent of state control in
1990 and began to compete with Solidarity for members.
Poland
Poland - THE ECONOMY UNDER COMMUNISM
Poland
After World War II, a centrally planned socialist system was
transplanted to Poland from the Soviet Union without any consideration
for the differences in the level of development of the country, or its
size, resource endowment, or cultural, social, and political traditions.
The inadequacies of that system left Poland in an economic crisis in the
late 1980s.
System Structure
The new system was able to mobilize resources, but it could not
ensure their efficient use. High but uneven rates of growth of the net
material product (NMP), also called "national income" in
Marxist terminology, were recorded over a rather long period. However,
these gains were made at the expense of large investment outlays.
Lacking support from foreign capital, these outlays could be financed
only by severe restriction of consumption and a very high ratio of
accumulation (forced saving) in the NMP.
During the communist period, the same cycle of errors occurred in
Poland as in the other state-planned economies. The political and
economic system enabled planners to select any rate of accumulation and
investment; but, in the absence of direct warning signals from the
system, accumulation often exceeded the optimum rate. Investment often
covered an excessively broad front and had an over-extended gestation
period; disappointingly low growth rates resulted from diminishing
capital returns and from the lowering of worker incentives by excessive
regulation of wages and constriction of consumption. Planners reacted to
these conditions by further increasing the rate of accumulation and the
volume of investment.
Investment funds mobilized in this wasteful way then were allocated
without regard to consumer preference. Planners directed money to
projects expected to speed growth in the economy. Again, considerable
waste resulted from overinvestment in some branches and underinvestment
in others. To achieve the required labor increases outside agriculture,
planners manipulated participation ratios, especially of women, and made
large-scale transfers of labor from rural areas. Shortages of capital
and labor became prevalent despite government efforts to maintain
equitable distribution.
An example of inefficient state planning was the unpaid exchange of
technical documentation and blueprints among Comecon members on the
basis of the Sofia Agreement of 1949. The countries of origin had no
incentive to make improvements before making plans available to other
members of Comecon, even when improved technology was known to be
available. For this reason, new factories often were obsolete by the
time of completion. In turn, the machines and equipment these factories
produced froze industry at an obsolete technological level.
The institutional framework of the centrally planned economy was able
to insulate it to some extent from the impact of world economic trends.
As a result, domestic industry was not exposed to foreign competition
that would force improvements in efficiency or to foreign innovations
that would make such improvements possible. Above all, the isolation of
the system kept domestic prices totally unrelated to world prices.
Prices were determined administratively on the basis of costs plus a
fixed percentage of planned profit. Because every increase in production
costs was absorbed by prices, the system provided no incentive for
enterprises to reduce costs. On the contrary, higher costs resulted in a
higher absolute value of profit, from which the enterprise hierarchy
financed its bonuses and various amenities. When the price was fixed
below the level of costs, the government provided subsidies, ensuring
the enterprise its planned rate of profit. Enterprises producing the
same types of goods belonged to administrative groups, called
associations in the 1980s. Each of these groups was supervised by one of
the industrial ministries. The ministry and the association controlled
and coordinated the activities of all state enterprises and defended the
interests of a given industry. The enterprises belonging to a given
industrial group were not allowed to compete among themselves, and the
profit gained by the most efficient was transferred to finance losses
incurred by the least efficient. This practice further reduced
incentives to seek profits and avoid losses.
In this artificial atmosphere, prices could not be related to market
demand; and without a genuine price mechanism, resources could not be
allocated efficiently. Much capital was wasted on enterprises of
inappropriate size, location, and technology. Furthermore, planners
could not identify which enterprises contributed to national income and
which actually reduced it by using up more resources than the value
added by their activities. The inability to make such distinctions was
particularly harmful to the selection of products for export and
decisions concerning import substitution, i.e., what should be produced
within the country rather than imported.
Development Strategy
In the postwar years, all East European countries including Poland
adopted a fundamentally similar inward-looking development strategy
following the Soviet model of accelerated industrialization and
collectivization of agriculture. Planners attempted to enforce
excessively high rates of growth and to achieve a relatively high degree
of self-sufficiency. Strong autarkic tendencies were modified only by
the shifting import requirements of the Soviet Union and by
specialization agreements within Comecon; those agreements were limited,
however, by their insulation from the factors of real profitability and
comparative advantage.
In 1945 the Polish economy was completely disorganized and urgently
needed reestablishment of its prewar industrial base. The initial
central planning organization that began work in Poland in late 1945
stressed socialist rather than communist economic goals: relative
decentralization, increased consumer goods production to raise the
standard of living, and moderate investment in production facilities. In
1949, however, that approach was scrapped in favor of the completely
centralized Soviet planning model. During the 1950s, planners followed
Stalin's requirements for a higher growth rate in heavy industry than
the overall industrial rate and a higher growth rate in the steel
industry than that of heavy industry as a whole. This approach neglected
the other economic sectors: agriculture, infrastructure, housing,
services, and consumer goods. The sectors that were emphasized were all
capital-, fuel-, and material-intensive. Materials shortages had
developed already in the Comecon group by the 1960s. In response, Poland
was required to expand its extraction of coal, copper, and sulfur, as
well as its production of steel and other basic industrial materials
without considering costs.
Stalinist planning also forcibly redirected foreign economic
relations. Poland's extensive interwar commercial links with Western
Europe were reduced, and some important prewar markets were lost as
trade with the Soviet Union expanded rapidly. For Poland this trade was
based mainly on export of coal and manufactured goods primarily from the
rapidly growing heavy industries. In return, Poland became dependent on
the supply of Soviet oil, natural gas, iron ore, and some other raw
materials. This arrangement meant that Poland's industrial structure
adjusted to Soviet needs and specifications, yielding many products that
could be sold only to the Soviet Union or its allies. Thus exports
became heavily dependent on markets in Comecon.
Poland
Poland - THE CENTRALLY PLANNED ECONOMY
Poland
This development strategy brought about a specific pattern of
economic growth in Poland. As in the other centrally planned economies,
rates of growth depended on increases in the quantity of inputs rather
than on improvements in productivity. Material production remained high
as long as greater quantities of inputs were available. This pattern of
growth priorities and the emerging industrial structure left no
possibility of raising wages significantly. Wages had been reduced
during the first industrialization drive of the early 1950s. For this
reason, the Polish standard of living lagged behind that of Western
Europe as the continent recovered from World War II. Already in the
first postwar decade, awareness of this disparity began to cause social
unrest, a situation that became a tradition during the next thirty-five
years.
Establishing the Planning Formula
Centralized planning ranged from broad, long-range statements of
fundamental future development to guidance on the operation of specific
enterprises. The basic planning unit for transformation of the Polish
economy was the five-year plan, the first of which began in 1956. Within
that framework, current production goals were established in an annual
operational plan, called the National Economic Plan. As the years
passed, these plans contained more and more specific detail; because
requirements and supplies could not be forecast in advance, plans were
inconsistent and constantly needed revision.
The Soviet system had already encountered difficulties, however, in
the overly ambitious Six-Year Plan of 1950-55. Maladjustments,
shortages, and bottlenecks appeared in the implementation of that plan,
which was intended to create the infrastructure for the industrial
future: heavy industry, mining, and power generation. In 1956, after
workers' riots in Poznan, a general uprising was averted only by a
change in the leadership of the communist party, the Polish United
Workers' Party (Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza--PZPR). The new
government of Wladyslaw Gomulka promised modification of the system and
changes in the development strategy. Consumer goods received a larger
share of the national product, and some quantities of grain and food
were imported from the West. State control was mitigated by giving
limited policy input to enterprises, and the rate of investment was
reduced. Although a lively debate occurred on socalled "market
socialism," actual systemic reforms were limited and short-lived.
Among the reform measures of 1956, the only significant lasting change
was the decollectivization of agriculture.
Retrenchment and Adjustment in the 1960s
By the early 1960s, economic directives again came only from the
center, and heavy industry once more received disproportionate
investment. At that point, the government began a new industrialization
drive, which was again far too ambitious. Rates of investment were
excessive, the number of unfinished industrial projects increased, and
the time required for project completion was considerably extended.
Structural distortions increased, and the rates of growth in
high-priority sectors were adversely affected by the slower than
expected growth in lowpriority sectors. Bottlenecks and shortages
increased inefficiency. By the late 1960s, the economy was clearly
stagnant, consumer goods were extremely scarce, and planners sought new
approaches to avoid repetition of the social upheavals of 1956. At this
point, suppression of consumption to its previous levels had become
politically dangerous, making a high rate of accumulation problematic at
a time when demand for investment funds was growing rapidly. Because of
these factors, additional investment funds were allocated to the
neglected infrastructure and to the production of consumer goods.
Modernization efforts stressed technological restructuring rather
than fundamental systemic reforms. However, a policy of "selective
development," introduced in 1968, required another acceleration of
investments at the expense of consumption. Selective development and a
new system of selectively applied financial incentives ended in the
worker riots of December 1970 and a second forced change in the
communist leadership in Poland. Meanwhile, no funds were invested in
remedying the environmental crisis already being caused by excessive
reliance on "dirty" lignite in the drive for heavy
industrialization.
These conditions necessitated a switch from an "extensive"
growth pattern (unlimited inputs) to an "intensive" pattern of
growth that would ensure high rates of growth through improvements in
productivity rather than in the amount of inputs. The new emphasis
helped drive another reorganization of industry in the early 1970s.
State enterprises were combined into a number of huge conglomerates
called Big Economic Organizations. They were expected to increase
efficiency by economies of scale. Wage increases were tied to net
increases in the value of outputs as an incentive to labor productivity.
In practice, however, central planners could now control a smaller
number of industrial units and regulate their activities more intensely.
The system was never implemented fully, and no improvement in efficiency
resulted. The failure of the 1973 reform demonstrated that the
technological level of industrial products was still too low to permit
significant increases in efficiency.
Reliance on Technology in the 1970s
In the early 1970s, East-West detente, the accumulation of
petrodollars in Western banks, and a recession in the West created an
opportunity for Eastern Europe to import technology and capital from the
West to restructure and modernize its industrial base. Poland was
relatively late in introducing this so-called "new development
strategy," but it eventually went further in this direction than
its Comecon allies. The share of trade with Comecon declined, and trade
with other countries increased quite dramatically during the first half
of the 1970s.
The technology import strategy was based on the assumption that, with
the help of Western loans, a large-scale influx of advanced equipment,
licenses, and other forms of technology transfer would automatically
result in efficient production of modern, high- quality manufactured
goods suitable for export to the West. Under those conditions, repayment
of debts would not be difficult. Expansion of exports encountered
considerable difficulties, however, partly because of the oil crisis and
stagflation in the West, but mainly because the central planners
remained unable to effect the required changes in the structure of
production. The investment drive, financed by foreign borrowing,
exceeded the possibilities of the economy. Removed from direct contact
with the foreign markets, centralized selection of exportables was
ineffective in expanding the markets for Polish goods. At the same time,
the dependence of the economy on imported Western materials, components,
and machines inevitably increased. By the middle of the 1970s, large
trade deficits had been incurred with the Western countries. The
negative balance of payments in convertible currencies increased from
US$100 million in 1970 to US$3 billion in 1975. During the same period,
the gross convertible currency debt increased from US$1.2 billion to
US$8.4 billion. Unable to expand exports to the West at the necessary
pace, Polish planners began centralized restriction of imports. This
policy in turn had an adverse effect on domestic production, including
the production of exportables.
Reform Failure in the 1980s
By 1980 it had become clear that the large-scale import of capital
and technology from the West could not substitute for economic reform.
On the contrary, systemic reforms were needed to ensure satisfactory
absorption and diffusion of imported technology. Significant expansion
of profitable exports to the world markets was impossible for an
inflexible and overly centralized economic system. On the other hand,
without an increase in exports, reducing or even servicing Poland's
rapidly increasing international debt was extremely difficult.
Meanwhile, the enormous investment drive of the early 1970s had
destabilized the economy and developed strong inflationary pressure.
Rates of NMP growth dropped throughout the second half of the decade,
and the first absolute decline took place in 1979. Although planners
should have been adjusting the level of aggregate demand to the
declining aggregate supply, they found this task politically and
administratively difficult. The authorities also feared major price
revisions, especially after workers' riots forced withdrawal of a
revision introduced in 1976. In the late 1970s, some prices were
increased gradually whereas other increases were concealed by
designating them for new, higher quality, or luxury items. The rest of
the inflationary gap was suppressed by fixing prices administratively.
By the late 1970s, the shortage of consumer goods was acute. Nominal
income increases continued as a "money illusion" to minimize
social discontent and provide a work incentive. This strategy increased
the "inflationary overhang," the accumulated and unusable
purchasing power in the hands of the population. At the same time,
suppressed inflation spurred maladjustments and inequities in the
production processes, further reducing the supply of goods. The
deteriorating situation in the consumer goods market resulted in a
series of watershed events: a wave of strikes that led to the formation
of the Solidarity union in August 1980, a third enforced change in the
communist leadership in September 1980, and the imposition of martial
law in December 1981.
Between 1978 and 1982, the NMP of Poland declined by 24 percent, and
industrial production declined by 13.4 percent. The decline in
production was followed by prolonged stagnation. Recognizing a strong
grass-roots resistance to the existing system, the new government of
Stanislaw Kania, who had replaced Edward Gierek, established the
Commission for Economic Reform in late 1980. This body presented a
weakened version of drastic reforms recommended by the independent
Polish Economic Society, an advisory board of economists formed earlier
in 1980. Implemented hastily in mid-1981, the reforms nominally removed
the PZPR from day-to-day economic management and gave the enterprises
responsibility for their own financial condition and for planning. These
decentralizing reforms were distorted by the constraints of martial law
that had been imposed nationally in December 1981, however, and they
failed to improve the economic situation. Internally inconsistent and
insufficiently far-reaching, the reforms reduced central administrative
control without establishing any of the fundamentals of an alternative
market system. Thus, in effect, the economy operated from 1981 to 1989
in a systemic vacuum.
After 1985 the foreign trade situation further complicated Poland's
economic crisis. The relative importance of Comecon trade declined
yearly, necessitating expanded trade with the West, particularly the
European Community (EC). This shift was a policy change for which
neither the communist regime nor the economic system was prepared in the
late 1980s.
Poland
Poland - AFTER THE FALL OF COMMUNISM
Poland
In 1989 the NMP declined by 0.2 percent to a level 1 percent below
the 1978 figure, and industrial production also declined slightly.
Despite price controls, inflation increased from 25.3 percent in 1987 to
343.8 percent in 1989. As the scarcity of goods rose sharply, lines in
front of stores lengthened and social unrest grew. Shortages of
materials and fuels, unreliable supply, and administrative disarray
caused frequent shutdowns of industrial production lines.
Disequilibrium also increased rapidly in the external economy. The
balance of payments deficit in hard currency (denominations exchanged on
the world market) increased from US$392 million in 1987 to US$1,922
million in 1989, and the national debt grew from US$39.2 billion to
US$40.8 billion during that period. In the last years of communist rule,
hard-currency deficits were exacerbated by the priority still given to
economic relations within Comecon. In its Comecon transactions between
1987 and 1989, Poland converted a current account deficit of 424 million
transferable rubles (the artificial currency used in Comecon
transactions but unrecognized outside the trading bloc) to a positive
balance of 1,104 million transferable rubles as its ruble debt declined
from 5.8 billion to 0.6 billion. These transactions meant that Poland
was ignoring the catastrophic condition of its domestic economy to help
alleviate the general shortages within Comecon by supporting a net
outflow of capital (more exports than imports), most of which went to
the Soviet Union.
In 1989 new policies in the Soviet Union made clear that Soviet
retaliation against liberalization in Poland was no longer a real
possibility. Under a new set of international conditions, the long
history of riots and strikes by workers and students, criticism by the
intellectual classes, and general lack of cooperation by society with
the economic programs of successive communist governments ended in the
collapse of the communist regime of Wojciech Jaruzelski in May 1989. The
proximate cause of its fall, however, was deepening economic crisis.
Although the crisis was a very effective political weapon for Polish
noncommunist parties, the underlying structural defects of the national
economy became a legacy of persistently intractable problems for the
noncommunist governments that followed Jaruzelski.
<>Marketization and Stabilization
<>
Macroeconomic Indicators for 1990-91
<>
The Privatization Process
Poland
Poland - Marketization and Stabilization
Poland
The first noncommunist government in Eastern Europe was formed in
Poland by Tadeusz Mazowiecki after Solidarity won an overwhelming
victory in the parliamentary election of June 1989. The government came
to office on September 12 and within one month announced an ambitious
program of economic reforms. The objective was not to improve the
socialist system, as had been the case in previous reforms, but to
accomplish a rapid and complete transformation from the Soviet-type
economy into a capitalist system and to reintegrate the Polish economy
into the world economy.
Under the best of circumstances, accomplishing such a transformation
would be an enormous task. But, like other Comecon countries, Poland had
an inefficient industrial structure that was fuel- and
material-intensive and a foreign trade mechanism incompatible with
expansion of exports to the West. The inherited system did not support
greater supply of consumer goods, nor was it any longer appropriate for
trade with Poland's Comecon partners, all of which were now
restructuring their economies according to national requirements and
resources. Without fundamental restructuring, the economy faced further
declines in production, high unemployment, and strong inflationary
pressure. Therefore, the first postcommunist Polish governments pursued
economic reform with great urgency, although they had limited success.
Required Short-Term Changes
Modernization was a fundamental requirement. Because a considerable
part of Poland's capital stock was obsolete or in poor condition, a very
large share of the country's industrial products was of poor quality.
The system lacked a well-developed modern infrastructure, particularly
in financial institutions, transportation and telecommunications, and
housing. Without major improvement of infrastructure, the economy's
overall efficiency could not be raised significantly. Reform was further
hampered by a shortage of well-trained managers and enterprise staff who
understood the workings of the modern freeenterprise economy and could
function efficiently in such a system. Expenditures necessary to meet
these needs were restricted or delayed, however, by simultaneous
requirements to reduce inflation and the balance of payments
disequilibrium.
The Shock Strategy
The gravity of the economic crisis and the immediate threat of
hyperinflation caused the Mazowiecki government to choose a "shock
strategy." Called the Balcerowicz Plan after its chief architect,
Minister of Finance Leszek Balcerowicz, the program received approval
and financial support from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). On
January 1, 1990, a program for marketization was introduced together
with harsh stabilization measures, a restructuring program, and a social
program to protect the poorest members of the society. The program
included liberalizing controls on almost all prices, eliminating most
subsidies, and abolishing administrative allocation of resources in
favor of trade, free establishment of private businesses, liberalization
of the system of international economic relations, and introduction of
internal currency convertibility with a currency devaluation of 32
percent.
At the same time, a very strict income policy was introduced.
Although prices were allowed to rise suddenly to equalize supply and
demand, nominal wage increases were limited to a fraction of the overall
price increase of the previous month. Very heavy tax penalties were
imposed on state enterprises whose wages exceeded these ceilings. This
policy reduced real incomes and the real value of accumulated balances
that, combined with inadequate supplies of goods and services, had
caused prolonged inflationary pressure. Together with the lifting of
restrictions on private economic activity, import policy reform and
internal convertibility, the wage-and-price policy reestablished market
equilibrium.
Initial Results
Within one month, stores were well stocked, and the long lines in
front of them had disappeared. Individual budgets rather than the
availability of goods became the primary determinant of buying patterns.
A large number of street vendors appeared, contributing to the supply of
consumer goods and competing with established stores. This new type of
enterprise often was the starting point for launching more established
business units.
Besides income policy, the new government used highly restrictive
monetary and fiscal policies to reduce aggregate demand. The reorganized
central bank drastically limited the quantity of money by imposing a
positive real rate of interest, introducing and subsequently increasing
obligatory reserve ratios for the commercial banks, and imposing caps on
credits. The budgetary deficit in 1989 had been equal to 11 percent of
expenditures. In 1990 this deficit was converted into a surplus of 1.3
percent of expenditures. The surplus then began to decline, however, in
the second half of the year, and by the spring of 1991 negative economic
factors had again created a large deficit. The government eliminated
most enterprise subsidies from its budget and introduced specific tax
reductions to force state enterprises to depend on their revenues. In
the many cases where the government action threatened their operations,
state enterprises gained time by developing a system of interenterprise
credits, selling some extra equipment and materials, and obtaining
extensions for the payment of taxes and debts.
Long-Term Requirements
These rapidly introduced short-term policies quickly and
fundamentally changed the workings of the Polish economy. Establishment
of a full market system has other requirements, however, that take more
time and are more problematic. The new Polish economy required a
reorganized legal and institutional framework. Financial institutions,
capital and labor markets, the taxation system, and contract laws
required revision. Establishing systems for protection of consumers and
of the environment was another priority. For these institutional
changes, legislation had to be prepared, considered, and enacted by the
government; then key personnel had to be trained to gradually bring the
system to full efficiency. Because many flaws in new legislation or
regulations were only detectable after implementation, policy making
took on an unstable, trial-and- error quality. Reform and stabilization
measures did not meet expectations, and the country's economic situation
deteriorated in 1990-91.
Poland
Poland - Macroeconomic Indicators for 1990-91
Poland
Postcommunist economic reform initially brought both positive and
negative results in the key areas of prices, productivity, inflation,
and wages. In general, early indicators showed that the adjustment to a
market economy would require more time and greater social discomfort
than was anticipated in 1989.
Price Increases
Sudden liberalization of prices brought an average price increase of
79.6 percent in the program's first month. The high prices were intended
to eliminate some major distortions in pricing and begin to adjust
demand to the existing limited supply. Price liberalization stopped
hyperinflation but, unexpectedly, inflation remained high.
Annual price increases were 250 percent in 1990 and 70.3 percent in
1991. Except for the first quarter, however, average quarterly price
increases in 1990 were considerably smaller than the equivalent
increases in 1989, when the administrative system of price determination
and controls still dominated. The average quarterly price increases were
lower in 1991 than in 1990.
Impact on Productivity and Wages
Experts predicted that the highly restrictive stabilization policy
would suppress production, but the extent of the decline exceeded all
projections. Industrial output declined by 24 percent in 1990 and by
another 12 percent in 1991. In 1990 all branches of industry registered
a substantial decline. In 1991 only the food industry showed a modest
increase in output. In agriculture the situation was somewhat better.
Gross agricultural production declined by 2.2 percent in 1990 and by 2.4
percent in 1991. In both years, however, the grain harvest was a very
robust 28 million tons.
Gross domestic product (GDP) declined by 12 percent in 1990 and by 8
percent in 1991. Gross fixed investment, after declining by 2.4 percent
in 1989, decreased by 10.6 percent in 1990 and by 7.5 percent in 1991.
Consumption declined by 11.7 percent in 1990 but increased by 3.7
percent in 1991. The decline in investment meant that no significant
modernization and restructuring could take place, which in turn
jeopardized future growth. The number of unemployed people reached 1.1
million or 6.1 percent of the labor force, at the end of 1990 and 2.2
million people, or 11.4 percent, at the end of 1991.
Real personal incomes decreased by 22.3 percent in 1990, but they
increased by 12.7 percent in January-September 1991. Real wages,
excluding agriculture and jobs financed directly from the state budget,
declined by 29.2 percent in 1990 and increased by 2.0 percent in 1991.
The average real value of pensions decreased by 14 percent in 1990, then
increased by 15 percent in 1991.
Statistical Distortions
Comparative statistics for this period, which generally caused
overstatement of the 1990 decline, must be understood in their context.
Two factors contributed to this faulty estimate. First, 1989 figures
provided the basis for evaluating the economy's 1990 performance.
Traditionally, output statistics in centrally planned economies were
inflated to show success in every case. Also, the 1989 figures did not
reflect the lowquality , unprofitable goods produced by subsidized state
enterprises. Unprofitable production was shown as a statistical increase
in NMP even as it reduced national income in the real world.
Furthermore, until 1989 personal income and real wage calculations used
the artificial official price index, so they were not a true measure of
consumer purchasing power.
On the other hand, official statistics for 1990 and 1991 reflected a
downward bias. Revenues and incomes deliberately were underestimated in
order to avoid higher taxes. Because of these distortions, decentralized
economic activity in the state sector and rapid growth in the private
sector clearly required new methods of collecting and presenting
statistics. In 1992, however, the Central Statistical Office in Poland
had not yet removed the distortions of the previous system from its
statistical formats. Unemployment statistics also failed to keep pace
with the actual economic situation. The rapid expansion of private
enterprise in 1990 provided jobs for many people who had registered for
benefits established at the beginning of the reform period. Meanwhile,
legislation was slow to reform the accounting system. Even after
statistical adjustment, however, the first three years of economic
reform brought Poland genuine, deep decline in industrial production, in
GDP, and in real personal incomes and wages.
Agricultural Imbalances
A serious political problem developed in the agricultural sector
during this period. Reduced domestic demand for food, the loss of
Comecon markets, a rapid increase in imports, and relatively good
harvests led to oversupply of agricultural products. Agricultural prices
lagged behind the prices of goods and services purchased by Polish
farmers. As a result, incomes fell farther than incomes in other sectors
in 1990 and 1991. This situation made farmers one of the most
dissatisfied groups in Poland; although traditionally not politically
active, farmers demonstrated en masse to improve their situation. In
1992 they demanded that government policy include higher tariffs,
guaranteed minimum prices, and cheap credits to protect them from
economic hardship.
Causes of Decline
No single factor was responsible for Poland's large-scale decline in
production and incomes in 1990 and 1991. The very restrictive
stabilization policy caused some of the decline in economic indicators
as well as increased unemployment. But when some fiscal and monetary
restrictions were eased and real incomes increased late in 1990,
inflation again increased. A similar succession of events in 1991
indicated that under prevailing conditions any increase in aggregate
demand would lead to an increase in prices (hence inflation) rather than
to an increase in output that would match the demand generated by higher
wages.
An important reason for the unresponsiveness of supply was the
inherited industrial structure, especially the poor condition of capital
stock and shortages of various components and materials only available
on the import market. But other factors also played a role. In many
cases, enterprise managers failed to make responses and decisions
appropriate to reform goals. The reform of 1981 had called for election
of most managers by the workers' councils of their enterprises. Under
the communist system, the political leverage of this relationship meant
that managers sought to satisfy the councils by raising wages and
avoiding layoffs through whatever strategy was available. Beginning in
January 1990, however, the enterprises suddenly found themselves in a
buyer's market instead of the traditional seller's market. Substantial
and rapid adjustments within the enterprises were needed to cope with a
decline in the domestic demand caused by a drastic reduction in personal
incomes, cuts in government expenditures, and rapidly increasing
imports. At the same time, the sudden elimination of the formerly secure
Comecon markets, especially those in the Soviet Union and East Germany,
made establishment of new markets in the West a condition of survival
for many enterprises.
Few managers were prepared by training or experience to deal with
this new requirement. No consulting or foreign trade brokerage firms
were available to provide assistance, and the banking system that
succeeded the old structure under the National Bank of Poland (Narodowy
Bank Polski--NBP) had no experience in this respect. Although the
elimination of price distortions and the introduction of an economically
meaningful rate of exchange finally made profit and loss projections
meaningful, the system of internal accounting within the enterprises
still required considerable adjustment in 1992. At that point, however,
major changes in the product mix and improvements in quality were
unlikely because anti-inflationary macroeconomic policy had caused a
scarcity of investment funds for modernization and restructuring.
Another inhibiting factor was the persistent concentration of the
postcommunist Polish industrial structure, which in 1992 was still
dominated by huge state-owned enterprises. In many cases, one enterprise
monopolized an entire group of products. Antimonopoly legislation and an
antimonopoly office established in 1990 had limited effect in the early
postcommunist years. Some large enterprises were split, and some
monopolistic practices were stopped. Rapidly increasing imports provided
new competition, but imports also reduced the market for domestic
products and created an adverse trade balance despite a surprisingly
strong performance by Polish hard-currency exports.
Closing bankrupt or unprofitable state- or municipally owned
enterprises proved especially difficult when the livelihood of entire
communities or regions was based on one or two such plants. Powerful
workers' councils lobbied for continuation of the status quo. In 1992
thousands of bankrupt state enterprises survived on loans from other
enterprises or from banks, which were not capable of enforcing repayment
under the financial conditions of the time.
Poland
Poland - The Privatization Process
Poland
Transformation of more fundamental aspects of the economy have
proceeded much more slowly than did the reforms undertaken in 1990 and
1991. The most important feature of the longer-term transformation is
the privatization of the means of production. The end of the communist
system brought an immediate and dynamic growth in new privately owned
businesses, most of which were small retailing, trade, and construction
enterprises. In 1990 about 516,000 new businesses were established,
while 154,000 were liquidated, a net increase of 362,000. Another
100,000 small businesses formerly owned by local government agencies
were sold to private investors in the initial rush to privatization. By
September 1991, an additional 1.4 million one-person businesses and
41,450 new companies had been registered since the beginning of the
year. Overall, in 1990 and 1991 about 80 percent of Polish shops went
into private hands, and over 40 percent of imports went through private
traders.
Legal and administrative preparations for privatization of
state-owned enterprises took much longer than expected. The "small
privatization" of shops, restaurants and other service
establishments was a relatively simple process, but privatization of
large enterprises proved much more difficult. By October 1991, some 227
larger enterprises had been converted into stock exchange-listed
companies, and twenty of them had been privatized by offering them for
public or private sale. Some of these transactions involved foreign
capital. To speed the process, the government of Prime Minister Jan
Bielecki, which came to power in early 1990, had made capital vouchers
available without charge to all adult citizens. The vouchers were to be
exchangeable for shares in mutual investment funds. At first these funds
were to be managed under contract with foreign and domestic management
firms. Voucher holders would be allocated 27 percent of shares of the
enterprises selected for "mass privatization" and would be
able to purchase any 33 percent share of the privatized enterprises sold
by auction. Because of their configuration, the vouchers were expected
to give their holders effective control of these enterprises. Various
technical problems delayed implementation of this program, as did the
change of government at the beginning of 1992. At that point, vouchers
for fewer than ten major enterprises were being traded.
Already in 1990, the private sector had emerged as the most dynamic
part of the economy. The economy's overall GDP declined in 1990 by 12
percent, but it increased by 17 percent in the private sector. Total
industrial production dropped by 23 percent, but the private sector
production increased by 8 percent. At the end of 1991, the private
sector provided about 38 percent of employment; it was responsible for
22.1 percent of total industrial production, 43.9 percent of
construction output, 70 percent of retail sales, and 16.3 percent of
transportation services. Surprising growth occurred in private foreign
trade activity, which accounted for 28 percent of foreign transactions
in the first three quarters of 1991.
By early 1992, some form of privatization had occurred in 17.4
percent of state enterprises. At that point, plans called for conversion
of half of Poland's state enterprises to private ownership by 1995. The
rate of privatization had already slowed in 1992, however, partly
because of reduced government outlays and continual alteration of
program goals. Enterprises were restructured in several ways:
medium-sized firms typically were liquidated, and large enterprises were
transformed into stock companies and limited liability companies.
Poland
Poland - STRUCTURE OF THE ECONOMY
Poland
Although Poland possessed abundant supplies of some natural
resources, the structure and administration of the centrally planned
system had long caused misallocation of those resources and of
investment funds among the economic sectors. In addition, the cutoff of
critical industrial inputs from the Soviet Union required major
restructuring and rebalancing of all sectors.
Fuels and Energy
Poland's fuel and energy profile is dominated by coal, the only fuel
in abundant domestic supply. Because of lopsided and uneconomical
dependence on this single fuel, the fuels and energy sector of the
economy was a primary target for reorganization and streamlining in the
early 1990s. In 1989 production of coke and extraction and refining of
gas and oil accounted for 4.9 percent of Poland's total industrial base.
Electrical power generation accounted for 2.9 percent. However, these
statistics were downward biased by the very low, heavily subsidized
prices of the products of those industries. Higher, market-established
prices of fuels and electricity were expected to induce more economical
fuel consumption, as were modern fuel-saving technologies in industry,
construction, and transportation and gradual elimination of the most
heavily fuel-intensive industries. By 1991 official policy had
recognized that making such changes was less expensive than continuing
the cycle of higher energy demand and production characteristic of the
centrally planned economy.
Coal
In 1992 coal continued to play a central role in the Polish economy,
both in support of domestic industry and as an export commodity. In 1990
about 90 percent of the country's energy production was based on hard
coal and lignite. The two largest mines extracted over six million tons
each in 1991, but the average mine produced between one million and
three million tons. Compared with coal mines in Western Europe, Polish
mining was quite inefficient because of isolation from technical
advances made in the 1980s and, more recently, lack of investment funds
for modernization.
Because the communist regimes ignored profitability in establishing
quantitative output targets, coal output was expanded irrespective of
costs, and inefficient mines were heavily subsidized. At the same time,
the extensive type of mineral exploitation called for by central
planning caused a very high ratio of waste (about 24 percent of output)
as well as heavy environmental damage. Under the new planning system, a
lower annual output is expected, but production operations are to be
justified by profitability.
At the end of the 1980s, some eighty-four shaft mines and four large
open-cast lignite mines were in operation. Plans for the 1990s call for
closing many of those mines. In 1991 annual coal output declined from
the 193 million tons mined in 1988 to 140 million tons, and output was
expected to remain at the lower level in 1992. During the same period,
extraction of lignite declined from 73 million tons to 69 million, with
70 million tons the maximum annual output expected for the next few
years. In 1989 about 16 percent of Poland's coal and 19 percent of its
coke were exported. In 1990 these shares increased to 19 percent and
26.6 percent, respectively, because a recession reduced domestic demand
for coal.
The postcommunist governments abolished centralized allocation of
coal and partially liberalized prices. By 1992 a relatively free coal
market had been created, and subsidies were gradually reduced. This
process also abolished the central administrations for coal mining and
for electricity generation that had ensured state monopoly of those
industries and perpetuated wasteful resource management. The reform
program made both coal mines and power generation plants autonomous
state enterprises fully competitive among themselves. To offset the loss
of subsidies, price increases of as much as 13 percent were
contemplated, although the planned rise of 5 percent had already aroused
strong objections from industrial customers. The 1991 economic
restructuring program of the Bielecki government envisaged establishment
of ten independent and competing coalmining companies, several
wholesalers, and one export agency. Following the World Bank's advice, a
holding company for lignite mines was also considered.
By the end of 1991, however, the Polish coal industry was in serious
economic trouble. Fifty-six of sixty-seven mines ended 1991 showing
losses, and only seven showed profits sufficient to cover all
obligations. In 1991 government subsidies dropped from their 1990 total
of 9.1 billion zloty to 5.9 billion zloty, but individual mines still
received as much as 2.2 billion. Liquidation, already accomplished at
six mines by 1992, cost between 0.6 and 1.5 billion zloty per mine, not
counting the economic cost of added unemployment (coal mining in Poland
is much more labor intensive than in the West). An alternative solution,
combining individual mines into complexes, had been attempted in the
1970s efficiency campaign but did not have the expected impact. In
mid-1992, mines and power plants had large coal surpluses that seemingly
could not be alleviated by domestic consumption. At that point, the
disparity between low domestic demand and continuing supply threatened
to raise unemployment by forcing more mines to close.
Oil and Gas
After rising sharply in the early 1970s, domestic oil production
dropped and remained at about 350,000 tons per year into the 1980s
because no new deposits were discovered. Domestic oil had never
accounted for more than 5 percent of total consumption, but even this
figure had dropped sharply by 1980. Under these circumstances, the
Soviet Union supplied between 80 percent and 100 percent of Poland's
imported oil, with some purchases from the Middle East when market
conditions permitted. Poland received Soviet oil through the Druzhba
Pipeline, which remained the chief source of imported oil in early 1992.
The line supplied the major refinery at Plock. Oil arriving by ship from
other sources was processed at a refinery near Gdansk. In 1992, however, the pattern of Polish oil imports changed
markedly. Because the Druzhba Pipeline was considered subject to
political pressure and delivery taxes by the countries through which it
passed, and because Russian crude oil was high in environmentally
undesirable sulfur, Poland cut imports from that source from 63 percent
in 1991 to 36 percent in 1992. The gap was to be filled by North Sea
(British and Norwegian) oil imports, which rose from 19.5 to 26 percent
in 1991, and by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC)
imports, which rose from 17.5 to 38 percent in 1992. To accommodate more
North Sea oil, the transloading capacity of the North Harbor facility at
Gdansk was doubled in 1992.
Domestic natural gas provided a much higher percentage of national
consumption than did domestic oil. Although pipeline imports of gas from
the Soviet Union rose sharply in the 1970s and early 1980s, reaching 5.3
billion cubic meters in 1981, domestic output remained slightly ahead of
that figure. Domestic natural gas exploration was pursued vigorously in
the 1980s, but equipment shortages hampered the effort. By 1991,
however, Polish experts declared the country potentially self-sufficient
in natural gas; in 1990 and 1991, large-scale agreements with United
States firms brought about new exploration in Silesia and made possible
extraction of gas from Poland's many intact coal seams. New domestic gas
sources opened the prospect of reducing reliance on coal and saving the
hard currency spent on the 7 billion cubic meters of gas imported
(mostly from the former Soviet Union) in 1991. No natural gas was
imported from the West in 1991, nor did plans for 1992 call for such
imports. At the end of 1991, a new agreement with Russia maintained both
oil and gas deliveries from that country at approximately their previous
levels. (Some 5 million tons of oil were delivered from Russia in 1991.)
At the same time, plans called for linkage of Polish and German gas
lines as early as 1993, making Poland's gas supply more flexible.
Power Generation
In 1989 the electric power generation industry comprised seventy
enterprises. Between 1980 and 1991, the industry's power production
increased from 122 billion kilowatt hours to 135 billion kilowatt hours.
By 1990 a large proportion of obsolete or aging generation machines and
equipment required replacement. Modernization was especially critical to
achieve efficient utilization of fuels and to reduce transmission losses
through the national power grid. A wide range of technical improvements
and higher energy prices were expected to reduce losses and waste in
1992, making possible a subsequent reduction in annual power generation
to 128 billion kilowatt hours. Estimates of energy price increases
necessary to achieve conservation ranged as high as five times the
subsidized levels of the late 1980s. Meanwhile, obstacles to energy
conservation included the lack of meters to measure consumption,
widespread use of central heating without charges proportional to
consumption, and the high cost of new generating equipment, such as
boilers, needed to upgrade generation efficiency.
During the communist period, hydroelectric power stations were not
expanded because of the easy availability of the lignite burned in
conventional thermoelectric plants. All hydroelectric stations existing
in 1992 were built before World War II. Plans in the 1980s called for
construction of three nuclear power stations. The first, at Zarnowiec in
south-central Poland, was scheduled to open in 1991 and be at full
production in 1993. After long years of construction and controversy,
however, doubts about the safety of the station's Soviet-made equipment
(similar to that used at Chernobyl') caused the first postcommunist
government to abandon the project. Some 86 percent of participants in a
1990 referendum voted against completion. A second station had been
started near Klempicz in west-central Poland, but work on it was stopped
in 1989. The third station never passed the planning stage, and in 1992
Poland remained without any nuclear power capacity. It had, however,
joined its Comecon partners in investing in large nuclear stations in
Ukraine, from which Poland received power in the 1980s.
The World Bank's advice on restructuring Poland's power industry
included reorganization into four or five companies with seventeen
regional subsidiaries responsible for power distribution. All these
companies initially would be state owned but eventually would be
privatized.
<> Industry
<>
Agriculture
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Fishing and Forestry
<>
Banking and Finance
Poland
Poland - Industry
Poland
The range of products manufactured in Polish plants increased greatly
in the postwar years, mostly through construction of new facilities in
the period of accelerated industrialization. By the 1980s, heavy
industry produced processed metals (mainly iron, steel, zinc, lead, and
copper) and derivative products; chemicals; a wide variety of
transportation equipment, including ships and motor vehicles; electrical
and nonelectrical machines and equipment; and electronic and computer
equipment. The most important light industry was textiles.
Under the central planning system, statistics on production by
individual industries and on their relative shares in total industrial
production through the communist period were distorted by administrative
price fixing and unequal distribution of industrial subsidies. In
general, however, between 1960 and 1989 the relative importance of food
processing declined steadily while that of the engineering and chemical
industries grew steadily. The share of light industry declined early in
the period but then increased under the stimulus of expanded Soviet
export markets. The relative importance of the metallurgical, mineral,
and wood and paper industries remained basically unchanged. Within the
engineering group, the machine building, transport equipment, and
electrotechnical and electronic industries increased in relative
importance between 1960 and 1989.
The engineering and chemical industries received a considerable
injection of Western technology, including patents and licenses, under
the technology import program of the 1970s. In the late 1980s and early
1990s, however, economic crisis, recession, and postcommunist reform
measures brought a drastic decline in output in those industries. For
example, output of the artificial fertilizer industry dropped 32 percent
between 1989 and 1990, mostly because rising fertilizer prices reduced
domestic demand. A sharper drop was prevented by quadrupling fertilizer
exports. In 1991 output of nitrogenous fertilizers remained stable, but
output of phosphoric fertilizers again dropped sharply.
Some existing manufacturing facilities could support expansion of
production, but others required modernization before they could be
exploited efficiently to meet Poland's new economic priorities. Other
facilities offered no possibility of expansion or modernization and were
simply closed. In the Polish steel industry, which was second only to
that of the Soviet Union in Comecon, only two plants had been built
between 1945 and 1982. The Lenin Iron and Steel Plant at Nowa Huta, the
largest in the country, was built near Kielce in 1954 with aid from the
Soviet Union. Although some plants were modernized in the intervening
years, most of the prewar Polish steel plants featured low productivity,
low-quality metal, and poor working conditions, as well as very high
pollution levels.
With the help of foreign experts, the Bielecki government undertook a
number of sectoral studies. The objective was to draw attention to the
existing obstacles to growth and to increase international
competitiveness of industrial enterprises in various sectors. Four major
restructuring programs were prepared in cooperation with United Nations
experts. They included improving the management and modernization of the
agricultural machinery industry, restructuring the production of
fertilizers, improving management and technology in the pharmaceutical
industry, and increasing the degree of automation in various branches of
industry.
Light Industry
On behalf of the World Bank, United States experts assessed Polish
light industry in early 1991. They found the critical difference between
Polish and West European manufacturing systems to be computerization;
the high degree of computerization utilized by the latter systems
enabled them to use short production series and make quick design
changes. In textiles, Polish machinery was geared to produce
intermediate-quality yarn that could not be made into exportable
products. Polish finishing machinery was also outmoded. Although textile
enterprises had been privatized quite early, they nevertheless remained
too labor-intensive and used materials inefficiently, according to the
report. On the other hand, Polish combed woolens and linen products were
rated as potentially competitive in the European market.
Automotive Industry
In 1992 the Polish automotive industry was expecting to modernize
through a series of joint ventures with Western firms. In 1992 Fiat
Corporation, the pioneer of Western automobile production in Eastern
Europe since 1973, invested in Polish production of a new model at its
Bielsko-Biala plant. Fiat was to arrange for export of a large part of
the output of that model. Also in 1992, General Motors Europe, the
European branch of the United States automotive giant, was expected to
begin assembling cars in Warsaw by agreement with the Warsaw-based
Passenger Car Plant. Volvo of Sweden planned to produce buses, trucks,
and tractors at a plant near Wroclaw following the signing of a joint
venture agreement in early 1992.
Construction Machinery
The construction machinery industry, which expanded during the 1970s
on the basis of Western licenses, traditionally exported a large
proportion of its output to the Soviet Union, with which some joint
ventures were established. Under license, with Western firms, Polish
machinery plants produced mobile cranes, heavy truck axles, hydraulic
equipment, truck-mounted concrete mixers, and other construction
machinery. In the 1980s, reduced Western investments in Poland curtailed
demand for these products. In the 1990s, the highly centralized,
bureaucratic construction machine industry was reorganized into a large
number of small- and medium-sized private firms. The reorganization
targeted expansion of the housing construction industry, which received
high priority in reform planning. The second goal of this reorganization
was to revive demand for the relatively modern and sophisticated
construction machines that the Polish industry was able to produce.
Shipbuilding
Polish shipbuilding expanded rapidly in the 1960s and 1970s, spurred
by the Soviet drive to become a maritime superpower. In the 1980s, the
industry included six shipyards, twenty-one equipment factories, and
three research and development centers, altogether employing about
57,000 people. In that decade, Poland became the fifth largest producer
of ships in the world, exporting most of its products to the Soviet
Union. Some 1,000 plants all over the country supplied materials to the
shipbuilding industry. At the end of the 1980s, however, the industry
suffered greatly from drastic reduction in orders from the Soviet Union
and other customers, the loss of government subsidies in the midst of
production, and a rapid rise in domestic material costs for ships
already contracted. Nevertheless, the shipbuilding firms were able to
attract many Western licenses, and they retained a highly skilled labor
force. If modernized and restructured, the industry had the potential to
significantly accelerate its production of modern ships, including
fishing vessels, factory ships, trawlers, car ferries, container
vessels, roll on-roll off ships, and tankers. The wellequipped Gdynia
Shipyard was capable of building very large bulk cargo ships, but it
operated at only 30 percent of capacity in 1991. Large new contracts
were expected to more than double that level of production by 1994,
however. In 1992 it seemed probable that the shipyard's very high debt
would be eased by a two-step transition, first into a partnership with
the State Treasury and ultimately into a private enterprise. In 1991 the
Ministry of Industry completed a restructuring program for the entire
shipbuilding industry in cooperation with Western experts.
Poland
Poland - Agriculture
Poland
Of Poland's 18,727,000 hectares of agricultural land (about 60
percent of the country's total area), 14,413,000 hectares were used for
crop cultivation, 265,000 for orchards, and about 4,048,500 for meadows
and pastures in 1989. In most areas, soil and climatic conditions
favored a mixed type of farming. In 1990 the most important crops were
grains, of which the highest yields came from wheat, rye, barley, and
oats. Other major crops were potatoes, sugar beets, fodder crops, flax,
hops, tobacco, and fruits. Cultivation of corn expanded during the 1980s but
remained limited. The northern and east-central regions of the country
mainly offered poorer sandy soils suitable for rye and potatoes. The
richer soils of the central and southern parts of the country, excluding
higher elevations, made those regions the centers of wheat, sugar beet,
hops, and tobacco production. The more accessible land at higher
elevations was used to cultivate oats or was left as meadow and
pastureland. In 1989 almost half of Poland's arable land was used for
the cultivation of the four major grains, another 13 percent grew
potatoes. All regions of Poland raised dairy cows, beef cattle, pigs,
and poultry, and cultivated fruit, usually as an integral part of mixed
farming.
In 1989 Poland was the second largest producer of rye and potatoes in
the world. The latter were used as vegetables, fodder for pigs, and
production of industrial starch and alcohol. The country occupied sixth
place in the world in sugar beet, milk, and pig production. The quantity
and quality of agricultural land ensured self-sufficiency and
considerable quantities of various agricultural products and processed
foodstuffs available for export. In 1990 Poland exported 26 percent of
the bacon it produced, as well as 63 percent of the ham, 16 percent of
the tinned meat, 10 percent of the poultry, 17 percent of the sugar, and
67 percent of the frozen fruits and vegetables.
Organization under State Planning
Beginning with decollectivization in 1956, Poland was the only member
of Comecon where the private sector predominated in agriculture. The
state maintained indirect control, however, through the state agencies
that distributed needed input materials and purchased agricultural
produce. Compulsory delivery quotas were maintained for farms until the
beginning of the 1970s. The state also retained significant influence on
the process of cultivation, restrictions on the size of farms, and
limitations on the buying and selling of land. Until the beginning of
the 1980s, the allocation system for fertilizers, machines, building
materials, fuels, and other inputs discriminated severely against
private farmers. As a result of these policies, private farms remained
inefficiently small and labor-intensive.
Private and State Farms
In 1987 about 2.7 million private farms were in operation. About 57
percent of them were smaller than five hectares. Of the remaining farms,
25 percent were between five and ten hectares and 11 percent were
between ten and fifteen hectares. Only 7 percent of private farms were
larger than fifteen hectares. Whereas the majority of the private farms
were below optimum size, the majority of state farms were excessively
large. Only 12 percent of the latter farms were below 200 hectares, and
60 percent were larger than 1,000 hectares.
In 1989 the private sector cultivated 76.2 percent of arable land and
provided 79 percent of gross agricultural production. State farms, the
main institutional form in state ownership, cultivated 18.8 percent of
the total arable land and produced 17.0 percent of gross output.
Cooperative farms, the dominant form of state agricultural organization
in other East European economies, were not important in Poland. In 1989
they cultivated only 3.8 percent of arable land and contributed 3.9
percent of gross production.
In the 1980s, grain yields and meat output per hectare were higher in
the socialist sector than in the private sector. An important factor in
this difference was the more intensive use of fertilizers in state
farms. On the other hand, the milk yield per cow was higher in the
private sector. From the standpoint of overall performance, the private
sector was less materialand capital-intensive, and gross production per
hectare and the value of product per unit of cost were higher in that
sector. Besides being more efficient, private farms were also more
flexible in adjusting production to obtain a higher product value.
Postcommunist Restructuring
Because of the predominance of private farms in communist Poland,
privatization of agriculture was not a major necessity during the reform
period, as it was in the other postcommunist countries. Excessively
large state farms were to be split into more efficient units and sold;
some state farms would be converted into modern agrobusinesses operating
as limited stock companies; and a certain number were to be retained as
state experimental farms. In all cases, however, rapid modernization and
improvement in agrotechnology were urgent requirements.
The streamlining of agriculture faced serious obstacles in the early
1990s, notably because of the existing agrarian structure. Private farm
size had to increase to provide farmers a satisfactory level of income
and investment. Drastic reduction in the agricultural labor force also
was needed. Because unemployment outside agriculture rose in 1991 and
1992, however, only gradual reductions were possible. A satisfactory
social safety net and retraining programs for displaced agricultural
workers were prerequisites for further reductions in labor. Experts
estimated that unemployment on former state farms would reach 70 to 80
percent, meaning about 400,000 lost jobs, once the farms were privatized
and streamlined.
Considerable investment is needed to provide adequate agricultural
infrastructure, including road improvement, telecommunications, water
supply, housing, and amenities. Especially important is establishment of
a well-developed, competitive network of suppliers of materials and
equipment necessary for modern agricultural production. Equally
necessary are commercial firms to purchase agricultural products and
provide transportation and storage facilities. In particular, expansion
and modernization of the food-processing industry are necessary to
strengthen and stabilize demand for agricultural products. The first
postcommunist governments prepared agricultural modernization programs,
and some financial help was obtained from the World Bank and Western
governments for this purpose. Modernization was expected to require
several decades, however.
By 1992 nearly all the 3,000 remaining state farms had substantial
unpaid bank loans and other liabilities. For this reason, and because
the government had not devised usable privatization plans at that point,
the Farm Ownership Agency of the State Treasury was authorized to take
over all the state farms in 1992. The agency was authorized to lease
state farm lands to either Polish or foreign renters, as a temporary
measure to ensure continued productivity.
Poland
Poland - Fishing and Forestry
Poland
The fishing and forestry industries were important producers for both
domestic consumption and the export market during the communist era. For
both industries, however, the resource base had begun to shrink
noticeably by the end of the 1980s.
Fishing
The fresh-water fishing industry is concentrated in the numerous
lakes of northern Poland. Fishing fleets also operate along the
528-kilometer Baltic coast and in the North Sea and the North Atlantic.
The deep-sea fleet, developed in the 1970s to serve the new official
emphasis on fish as a cheap source of protein, had grown to 101
trawler-factory ships and ten supply and service vessels by 1982.
Besides fishing in the North Atlantic, Polish fleets fished off Africa,
South America, Alaska, Australia, and New Zealand. Activity in the more
distant fisheries involved much higher expenses, however, especially for
fuel. In the 1980s, the Baltic fishery, which provided about 25 percent
of the total catch, was plagued by shortages of supplies and storage
facilities. At the same time, pollution in the lakes caused fresh-water
catches to decline rapidly. In 1990 Poland exported about 123,000 tons
of fish and fish products.
Forestry
Large forested areas are located in the western, northeastern, and
southeastern parts of Poland, but the only remaining stands of old
forest are in the northeast. Conifers dominate in the far north, the
northeast, and at higher elevations, and deciduous species dominate
elsewhere. Under the communist regimes, 82 percent of forested land was
state-owned, with the remainder held by individual farmers or groups of
farmers. The 8,679,000 hectares of forest supported total commercial
lumber production of 22,675 cubic decameters in 1989. Already in the
early 1980s, however, cutting rates exceeded replacement rates, and
heavy demand for wood products prevented meaningful reduction of
exploitation. A long-term afforestation program was initiated in the
communist era to increase total forest cover to 30 percent of Poland's
land surface. This increase would amount to slightly more than 1 percent
more than the cover remaining in the 1980s. Poland's forests support the
export of significant quantities of lumber, paper, and wood furniture.
Poland
Poland - Banking and Finance
Poland
In the reform programs of the early 1990s, major restructuring of
Poland's financial infrastructure was a top priority in order to achieve
more efficient movement of money through the domestic economy and to
provide a secure environment for the foreign investment that was
expected to carry Poland through its postcommunist economic slump.
The State Banking System
A highly concentrated state banking monopoly was a typical feature of
East European economies in the communist period. In Poland the monopoly
was composed of the National Bank of Poland (Narodowy Bank Polski--NBP),
which had replaced the prewar Western-style Bank of Poland in 1945; the
Commercial Bank (Bank Handlowy--BH), which had a monopoly in financing
foreign trade; the Polish Savings Office, which controlled transactions
with private international transfers; and about 1,600 small regional and
specialized cooperative banks that jointly formed the Bank of Food
Economy. To encourage private savings, a specialized savings bank, the
General Savings Office, was established in 1987 by detaching designated
departments from the NBP. In 1988 nine state-owned commercial banks were
formed from regional branches of the NBP, and a state Export Development
Bank was established.
Legislation was introduced in 1989 to allow private individuals, both
Poles and foreigners, to form banks as limited stock companies. Between
1989 and 1991, a total of seventy licenses was issued to private banks,
including seven banks funded by foreign capital, two cooperative banks,
and three branches of foreign banks. In October 1991, privatization of
the Export Development Bank began, and the nine state commercial banks
(which until that time still operated as they had under the old NBP)
were transformed into limited stock companies. The State Treasury owned
and operated the banks for an intermediate period while they prepared
for privatization.
Banking Reform, 1990-92
A fundamental reorganization of the banking sector took place between
1990 and 1992. The NBP lost all its central planning functions,
including holding the accounts of state enterprises, making transfers
among them, crediting their operations, and exercising financial control
of their activities. The NBP thus became only a central bank, and state
enterprises competed with other businesses for the scarce credits
available from commercial banks. In its new form, the NBP exercised a
considerable degree of autonomy in monetary policy and performed the
same functions as the central banks in West European countries or the
Federal Reserve System in the United States.
Nevertheless, the entire Polish banking system remained inefficient
in the early 1990s because of backward banking technology and a very
serious shortage of trained personnel in all branches. Considerable
technical and financial aid from the World Bank, the IMF, and the
central banks of Western countries was expected to improve the situation
eventually.
Insurance and Securities Reform
In July 1990, the insurance system was reorganized. Abolished were
the monopoly State Insurance Company, which had been responsible for all
domestic insurance, and the Insurance and Reinsurance Company, which had
been responsible for all foreign transactions. Domestic and
foreign-owned private limited stock and mutual insurance companies were
then allowed to begin operating. At the same time, procedures were
introduced to maintain adequate financial reserves and legal protection
for people and assets insured. At the end of 1991, twenty-two insurance
companies were operating in Poland, six of which were foreign-owned.
In early 1991, important legislation was introduced to regulate
securities transactions and establish a stock exchange in Warsaw. At the
same time, a securities commission was formed for consumer protection. A
year later, the shares of eleven Polish companies were being traded
weekly on the new exchange. Restructuring the financial market not only
was necessary for increasing the overall efficiency of the economy and
accelerating privatization but also was a precondition for the rapid
influx of Western capital critical to economic development.
New Financial Institutions
Several specialized financial institutions were established with
direct or indirect help from the Polish government, international
organizations, and foreign experts to facilitate economic restructuring.
They include the Agency for Industrial Development, the Polish
Development Bank, the Export Finance Insurance Corporation, the
Enterprise Consulting Foundation, the Employment Fund, and a growing
number of consulting firms. These institutions are expected to provide
credit guarantees, help to establish new businesses, purchase a certain
quantity of shares of the companies being converted to private
enterprise, and facilitate leasing, financial restructuring, and
bankruptcy processes. Some of the new institutions received designated
funds from international financial organizations. The European Bank for
Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) established a Joint Investment
Fund in cooperation with the Polish Development Bank.
Foreign Loans and Money Supply
In April 1991, representatives of the seventeen major West European
creditor governments collectively known as the Paris Club agreed to a
two-phase, 50 percent reduction of Poland's debt on government loans.
The United States made a similar reduction of 70 percent. Terms for
servicing of the debt were rearranged, with payments to escalate
gradually from US$0.5 billion in 1992-93 to US$1.5 billion later in the
decade. Negotiations with Western commercial banks, the so-called London
Club, continued in 1992. The hard currency debt was reduced from US$48.5
billion at the end of 1990 to US$44.3 billion in August 1991, partly
because of the debt relief of US$1.6 billion effected by the United
States and partly as the revaluation of the dollar against other Western
currencies reduced the debt in those currencies.
In 1991 the total money supply in Poland, counting both zlotys and
convertible currency, increased by 83.9 trillion zlotys. Of this amount,
over 90 percent belonged to private individuals or private enterprises,
and about 6 percent belonged to state enterprises. The increase in the
money supply came mainly from higher bank debts owed by economic units
and the government. A midyear alteration of the exchange rate between
the zloty and the United States dollar also played a major role. Foreign
currency held in Polish bank accounts increased by 13.2 percent in 1991
because more accounts were opened in 1991. Although money in personal
savings accounts grew by 250 percent in 1991, money held by enterprises
in bank accounts grew by only 12.4 percent in the same period. Estimated
total foreign currency resources declined by over 3 percent in 1991 to
US$5.3 billion.
Poland
Poland - FOREIGN TRADE
Poland
In the early 1990s, internal and external economic conditions forced
a major reappraisal of Poland's export and import policies. The
once-profitable export markets of the Soviet Union were a much less
reliable source of income after that empire disintegrated and hard
currency became the predominant medium of exchange among its former
members. In this situation, increased trade with much more demanding
Western partners became the primary goal of Polish trade policy.
The Foreign Trade Mechanism
Centrally planned economies typically minimized trade with free-trade
markets because their central bureaucratic systems could not adjust
quickly to changing situations in foreign markets. The high degree of
self-sufficiency that was a declared economic objective of Comecon made
trade with the West a difficult undertaking for an economy such as
Poland's. On the other hand, the basically bilateral barter agreements
that characterized trade within Comecon often had made expansion of
trade within the organization problematic.
State monopoly of foreign trade was an integral part of centrally
planned economic systems. Even after some decentralization of this field
in Poland during the 1980s, the Ministry of Foreign Economic Relations
maintained direct or indirect control of all foreign trade activities.
Originally, trading activities in the communist system were conducted
exclusively by the specialized foreign trade organizations (FTOs), which
isolated domestic producers of exportables and domestic buyers of
imported goods from the world market. Then, in the late 1980s, some
state and cooperative production enterprises received licenses from the
Ministry of Foreign Economic Relations to become directly involved in
foreign trade, and by 1988 the number of economic units authorized to
conduct foreign trade had nearly tripled. Nonetheless, many enterprises
still preferred the risk-free, conventional approach to foreign trade
through an FTO, relying on guaranteed Comecon markets and avoiding
marketing efforts and quality control requirements.
Prior to 1990, the Polish foreign trade system included the following
elements: a required license or concession to conduct any foreign
transactions; allocation of quotas by planners for the import and export
of most basic raw materials and intermediate goods; state allocation and
control of exchange and transfer of most foreign currencies; an
arbitrary rate of currency exchange lacking all relation to real
economic conditions; and artificial leveling of domestic and foreign
prices by transfers within a special account of the state budget. Even
among Comecon countries, Poland's foreign trade had particularly low
value. Its share of total world exports, 0.6 percent in 1985, dropped to
0.4 percent in 1989. The share of imports dropped even lower, from 0.5
to 0.3 percent, in the same period.
In early 1990, Poland entered a painful process of massive
transformation for which reintegration into the world economy was a
primary objective. The first postcommunist government dismantled the
existing foreign trade mechanism and replaced it with a mechanism
compatible with an open market economy. This change eliminated license
and concession requirements for the conduct of foreign trade activities,
eliminated quotas except in trade with the Soviet Union, introduced
internal convertibility of the zloty and free exchange of foreign
currencies, and accepted the rate of exchange as the main instrument of
adjustment of exports and imports, supported by a liberal tariff system.
Postcommunist Policy Adjustments
In early 1990 the Mazowiecki government planned to maintain Poland's
high export volume to the Soviet Union for an indefinite period. The
goal of this plan was to ensure a long-term position for Poland in that
important market and to protect domestic industry from a further decline
in production and increased unemployment. Subsequently, however, an
export limit became necessary to avoid accumulating an excessive surplus
of useless transferable rubles. In 1992, after the Soviet Union split
into a number of independent states, the Polish government had no
indication whether existing balances would ever be exchanged into
convertible currencies, or under what conditions that might happen.
In December 1991, Poland reached agreement on associate membership in
the European Community (EC). Having taken this intermediate step, the
Polish government set the goal of full EC membership by the year 2000.
Among the provisions of associate membership were gradual removal of EC
tariffs and quotas on Polish food exports; immediate removal of EC
tariffs on most industrial goods imported from Poland and full
membership for Poland in the EC free trade area for industrial goods in
1999; EC financial aid to restructure the Polish economy; and agreements
on labor transfer, rights of settlement, cultural cooperation, and other
issues. The agreement, which required ratification by the Polish
government, all twelve member nations of the EC, and the European
Parliament, went into interim operation as those bodies considered its
merits. Both houses of the Polish parliament ratified the agreement in
July 1992.
The End of the Soviet Era
In 1990 Poland's trade balance with the Soviet Union was almost 4.4
billion transferable rubles. At that point, some Polish exporters took
the risk of continuing their exports to traditional Soviet markets,
hoping that they would eventually be paid either by the importers in the
Soviet Union, who were very anxious to get Polish goods, or by the
Polish government. In the first quarter of 1991, the value of these
exports was about US$130 million. Only about US$20 million was received,
however, because the Soviet government was prepared to pay only for
imported foodstuffs, which received highest priority in its import
policy. The Soviet government refused to pay the bill for Soviet
importers who had purchased machines, pharmaceuticals, electronics,
textiles, and clothing from Poland.
The sudden collapse of Comecon in 1990 increased short-term obstacles
and accelerated changes in the geographic direction of trade. The share
of Poland's trade occupied by the Comecon group declined to 22.3 percent
in 1990 and 14.4 percent in 1991. On the export side, its share declined
to 21.4 and 9.8 in the respective years.
The Role of Currency Exchange
In this situation, expanded exports to the West provided the only
alternative for the many enterprises whose survival depended on foreign
trade. The government's stabilization policy had an impact that promised
expansion of exports to hard-currency markets. In 1991 drastic
limitation of domestic demand, devaluation of the zloty by 32 percent,
and liberalization of access to foreign trade by private entrepreneurs
resulted in significant expansion of export earnings in convertible
currencies. In 1990 the volume of hard-currency exports increased by
40.9 percent to over $US12 billion, while hard-currency imports
increased by 6.3 percent, securing a positive trade balance of $US2.6
billion.
The level of exports earning hard currency in 1990 was particularly
impressive in comparison with the generally sluggish growth of that
category in the late 1980s. In the last years of the communist era, fuel
exports declined steadily, and metallurgical exports decreased in three
of the last five communist years. Construction work in countries paying
in hard currency declined in the first three years of the period,
whereas exports from the wood and paper, engineering, and chemical
industries behaved unevenly.
In 1990, by contrast, hard-currency exports increased in most sectors
of the economy. The largest increases in that category were achieved in
agricultural, metallurgical, and chemical products. In general, the
share of manufactured products in Poland's export mix declined sharply
with the sudden shift away from Comecon trade. In 1990 the largest major
categories of manufactured exports were, respectively, machines and
transport equipment, miscellaneous manufactured goods, and chemicals;
their share of total exports was 42.4 percent, compared with 67.3
percent for the same categories in 1985. Growth in exports of food, raw
materials, and fuels accounted for the difference.
Although the share of engineering products among exports declined,
that group was the most important single earner of hard currency in
1990, followed by metallurgical, chemical, and food products. In 1992
all those industries possessed considerable capacity to expand their
productivity, given appropriate investment in modernization and
efficient marketing. However, both modernization and marketing depended
heavily on cooperation with Western firms. Despite the remarkable
increase in hardcurrency exports in 1990, their overall impact on the
national economy was limited by the strong effect of reduced
transferableruble exports on the priority sectors. In 1990 Polish light
industry led the general decline in ruble exports.
At the beginning of 1991, however, the growth rate of hardcurrency
exports declined, and imports increased very rapidly. Inflation remained
high, and the advantage created by the 1990 devaluation slowly eroded.
Another devaluation, this time 17 percent, was effected in May 1991. At
the same time, the zloty was pegged to a combination of hard currencies
instead of to the dollar alone. In October the fixed exchange rate was
replaced by an adjustable rate that would be devalued automatically by
1.8 percent every month as a partial hedge against inflation. The final
import figure for 1991 was 87.4 percent higher than that for 1990. In
1991 exports in convertible currencies were a little over US$14.6
billion and imports were nearly US$15.5 billion, creating a
hard-currency trade deficit of about US$900 million.
Figures for the first five months of 1992 showed a reversal of the
previous year's imbalance. The hard-currency trade surplus of US$340
million reported for that period was attributed to a combination of
commodity turnover and cancellation of interest payments in Poland's
debt reduction agreement with the Paris Club.
For years under the old system, Poland dispersed small amounts of its
export and import trade to a large number of nonComecon countries on all
continents. Experts considered such dispersion a policy weakness because
marginal suppliers and buyers usually trade at less favorable terms than
high-volume partners, making the former expendable in hard times. This
factor became even more important in the first postcommunist years; in
1990 Poland's fifteen top import customers absorbed only 81.3 percent of
exports, while the fifteen top suppliers contributed 86.2 percent of
Polish imports. Poland's traditional partners in the former Soviet Union
and Germany (before and after their respective realignments) retained
disproportionately high shares in both categories in 1990.
Foreign Investment
By the end of 1991, Poland had obtained US$2.5 billion from the World
Bank and other international financial organizations and US$3.5 billion
in bilateral credits and guarantees of credit from Western governments.
In 1992, however, the limited absorptive capacity of the country still
restricted the amounts of foreign cash and credit that could be used.
Only US$428 million was utilized in 1990, about US$800 million in 1991.
A significant increase was expected in 1992.
Poland's net balance of payments deficit, calculated as the
difference between credits used and the amount paid to service the
national debt, was more than US$1.3 billion in 1989, US$312 million in
1990, and US$449 million in 1991. In the long run, even investment
credits and continued growth of exports could not maintain a balance of
payments equilibrium without a substantial inflow of direct foreign
investments.
Cooperative enterprises with foreign firms also offered access to
advanced technology, better export trade, improved management and
training, and attractive job opportunities for younger members of the
work force. The first year of postcommunist rule brought an initial
surge of investment in which permits for formation of foreign companies
more than doubled. A number of United States, British, French, Swiss,
Swedish, Dutch, and Japanese firms started Polish enterprises.
Significantly, the share of permits issued to German firms dropped from
60 percent in 1989 to 40 percent in 1990, and that figure was expected
to remain at about 30 percent after 1991.
Despite the adoption of very liberal investment legislation in the
middle of 1991, however, the year did not bring the anticipated
investment increases. In 1991 and 1992, major inhibiting factors were
real and perceived political instability, conflicting and slow changes
in economic policy, a faulty system for taxation of foreign enterprises,
and a steep decline in the GNP. In spite of the increase in registered
foreign direct investment projects between 1989 and 1991, the registered
foreign capital involved in these projects was only US$353 million in
1990 and US$670 million in 1991. The actual investment amounts were not
more than 40 percent of those amounts. At the end of 1991, some 4,800
partnerships operated with foreign participation. Of these, 43 percent
were in industry, 24 percent in trade, and 6.6 percent in agriculture;
about two-thirds of foreign ventures were concentrated in the economic
centers of Warsaw, Poznan, Gdansk, Szczecin, Katowice, and �d --meaning
that foreign investment was not benefiting many of Poland's less
prosperous regions. Altogether, the foreign partnerships generated less
than 1 percent of Poland's total national income in 1991.
Poland
Poland - Government
Poland
THE UNEXPECTED SPEED with which communist governance ended in Poland
put the country's anticommunist opposition in charge of the search for
appropriate new political institutions. The subsequent hectic experiment
in democracy yielded mixed results between 1989 and 1992, when the
restored Republic of Poland was still attempting to find its political
bearings. In 1989 round table talks between the opposition and the
communist government spawned a flurry of legislation and constitutional
amendments that merged democratic reforms with institutions and laws
inherited from four decades of communist rule.
At that point, the young democracy's centers of power had not yet
been able to define their span of control and their relationship to one
another. Institutional ambiguity was exacerbated by the outcome of the
long-awaited parliamentary elections of October 1991, which seated
twenty-nine political parties in the powerful lower house, the Sejm. To
form a coalition government from such diverse parties, of which none
held more than 14 percent of the total seats, was a daunting task in
itself. The greater challenge, however, lay in creating a political
culture of negotiation and compromise that would make stable democracy
feasible over the long term.
A key element in the development of any Western-style democracy is
the unrestricted dissemination of accurate information and diverse
opinion. In this respect, Poland underwent a less abrupt transition than
other postcommunist states. A prolific, independent press had evolved
from modest beginnings in the early 1970s, surviving the setback of
martial law, and expanding its activities as government censorship
diminished after the mid-1980s. Following the Round Table Agreement of
early 1989, the press gave voice to an ever-widening spectrum of
political and social opinion. But the end of generous state subsidies in
favor of a profit- and competition-based system bankrupted hundreds of
Polish publishing enterprises. Radio and television adjusted less
rapidly to the changed political environment and remained under closer
government control than the print media.
Despite a constantly changing constellation of political parties and
coalitions that produced five prime ministers in three years, Warsaw
maintained a consistent and successful foreign policy during the
transition period. By mid-1992, Poland had achieved many of its
long-range policy goals, including sovereignty over its foreign affairs;
a Russian commitment for complete withdrawal of Soviet/Russian combat
forces from Polish territory; bilateral friendship treaties with most of
its neighbors; German recognition of the permanent Oder-Neisse border;
associate membership in the European Community (EC); and observer status
in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). At that point, Warsaw
already had travelled a considerable distance on its "path back to
Europe." The West responded to Poland's democratizing and
marketizing reforms by granting trade concessions, debt relief, and a
range of economic and technical assistance.
<>
POLITICAL SETTING
<>
THE CONSTITUTION
<>
GOVERNMENT STRUCTURE
<>
POLITICAL PARTIES
<>POLITICS AND THE MEDIA
<>
FOREIGN RELATIONS
Poland
Poland - POLITICAL SETTING
Poland
In August 1980, faced with an increasingly severe economic crisis and
social unrest that had been building throughout the 1970s, the communist
government reluctantly conceded legal status to an independent labor
federation, Solidarity (Solidarnosc). After monopolizing power for
thirty-five years without genuine sanction from Polish society, the
communist Polish United Workers' Party (Polska Zjednoczona Partia
Robotnicza--PZPR) found itself in contention with an alternative source
of political power that had a valid claim to represent the country's
working people. Under the threat of general strikes and facing economic
and political chaos, the regime grudgingly reached a series of limited
compromises with Solidarity in 1980 and early 1981.
After the government's initial concessions, however, Solidarity
militants insisted on substantially broader concessions. In response,
PZPR hard-liners used the memories of the Soviet Union's violent
reaction to Czechoslovakia's moderate political reforms in 1968 to
justify the imposition of martial law in December 1981. Solidarity was
declared illegal. General Wojciech Jaruzelski, earlier that year named
prime minister and then first secretary of the PZPR, appointed trusted
military men to key government positions and de-emphasized communist
ideology. Through the rest of the decade, the government sought in vain
to recover a degree of legitimacy with the people and to overcome the
country's severe economic problems. The overtures of the Jaruzelski
government failed, however, to win the support of the Polish people. In
a key 1987 national referendum, voters refused to support the
government's package of painful reforms needed to halt the economic
slide. Eventually, the government came to realize that improvement of
the economic situation was not possible without the explicit support of
the Solidarity opposition. At that point, the government had no choice
but to enter negotiations with Solidarity.
<>
The Round Table Agreement
<>
The Mazowiecki Government
<>
Popular Election of a President
<>
The Bielecki Government
<> Parliamentary Elections of October 1991
<>
The Olszewski Government
<>
The Pawlak Interlude
<>
The Suchocka Government
Poland
Poland - The Round Table Agreement
Poland
When the government convened round table talks with the opposition in
early 1989, it was prepared to make certain concessions, including the
legalization of Solidarity. It had no intention, however, of granting
Solidarity the status of an equal partner. The fifty-seven negotiators
at the talks included representatives from the ruling PZPR, Solidarity,
and various PZPR-sanctioned quasi-parties and mass organizations, such
as the United Peasant Party, the Democratic Party, the Christian Social
Union, the Association of Polish Catholics, and the All-Polish Alliance
of Trade Unions. The talks were organized into
three working groups, which examined the economy, social policy, and the
status of trade unions. A spirit of cooperation and compromise
characterized the two-month negotiations.
The document signed by the participants on April 6, 1989, laid the
groundwork for a pluralistic society that in theory would enjoy freedom
of association, freedom of speech, an independent judiciary, and
independent trade unions. The Round Table Agreement legalized Solidarity
as a labor union; restored the pre-World War II Senate as the upper
house of parliament and granted it veto powers over the decisions of the
Sejm; promised partially free Sejm elections; replaced the State Council
with the new executive office of president of Poland; and called for the
creation of an independent judiciary of tenured judges appointed by the
president from a list submitted by the parliament.
Although election to the Senate was to be completely free and open,
the PZPR and its traditionally subservient partners, the United Peasant
Party and the Democratic Party, were assured of 60 percent of the seats
in the 460-member Sejm; and religious organizations long associated with
the regime were promised 5 percent of the seats. The remaining 161 seats
were open to opposition and independent candidates who had obtained at
least 3,000 nominating signatures. The agreement allowed a national
slate of incumbents, including Prime Minister Mieczyslaw Rakowski, to
run unopposed and be reelected with a simple majority of the ballots
cast. But because voters exercised their option not to endorse
candidates and crossed names off the ballot, only two of thirty-five
unopposed national candidates received a majority. At the same time,
only three of the government's candidates for contested seats received
50 percent of the votes cast. Consequently, a second round of voting was
necessary to fill the seats originally reserved for the PZPR coalition.
With only days to organize, Solidarity waged an intense and effective
national campaign. A network of ad hoc citizens' committees posted lists
of Solidarity candidates, mobilized supporters, and in June executed an
electoral coup. Solidarity candidates won all 161 Sejm seats open to
them and ninety-nine of 100 seats in the Senate. This impressive
electoral performance soon convinced the PZPR-allied parties in the Sejm
to side with Solidarity and to form the first postcommunist coalition
government in Eastern Europe.
The erosion of the old PZPR-led coalition was evident in the July 19
parliamentary voting for the new office of president of Poland.
Thirty-one members of the coalition refused to support General
Jaruzelski, the unopposed candidate for the post. The Solidarity
leadership, however, believed that Jaruzelski was the best candidate for
the presidency. Seemingly, he could best ensure that the PZPR would
honor the concessions it had made in the Round Table Agreement. Also, he
was the candidate least likely to alarm Moscow. Through careful polling,
Solidarity was able to engineer a one-vote margin of victory for
Jaruzelski.
Poland
Poland - The Mazowiecki Government
Poland
Although Jaruzelski had won the presidency, Solidarity was not
willing to concede the leadership of the new government to the PZPR.
Jaruzelski's choice for the position of prime minister, General Czeslaw
Kiszczak, had won respect for his flexibility as the primary government
representative during the round table talks. Kiszczak received the
necessary simple majority of Sejm seats by the narrowest of margins. But
repeated failures to form a coalition government forced the PZPR to face
the reality of its diminished power. After consulting with Moscow,
Jaruzelski nominated Tadeusz Mazowiecki, a respected intellectual and
longtime Solidarity adviser, to become the first noncommunist Polish
prime minister since 1944.
The coalition government gave representation to all of the primary
political forces extant in August 1989. To secure Mazowiecki's
nomination, Solidarity leader Lech Walesa had assured Jaruzelski that
the PZPR would continue to control the key ministries of national
defense and internal affairs. While entrusting fourteen ministries to
Solidarity, Mazowiecki allocated four ministries to the United Peasant
Party and three to the Democratic Party. A tone of reconciliation
characterized the new administration. Determined not to engage in an
anticommunist witch hunt, Mazowiecki pursued an evolutionary program of
democratic reform.
Poland
Poland - Popular Election of a President
Poland
Although Walesa had handpicked Mazowiecki to be prime minister and
had played a key role in persuading the population to grant the young
government a grace period, tensions between the two men emerged in early
1990. Perhaps regretting his decision not to seek the office of prime
minister himself, Walesa began to criticize the Mazowiecki government.
After the formal dissolution of the PZPR in January 1990, Walesa argued
that the time had come to discard the concessions from the Round Table
Agreement that prolonged the influence of the old regime. Sensing the depth of public discontent over
falling living standards and rising unemployment, he leveled ever
harsher criticism at Mazowiecki. In return, the Mazowiecki circle
accused Walesa of destructive sloganeering. The acrimonious relations
between the two camps led to the emergence of the first post-Solidarity
political groupings. The pro-Walesa Center Alliance (Porozumienie
Centrum) called for accelerating the pace of reform and purging former
communist appointees as rapidly as possible. The Mazowiecki forces set
up the Citizens' Movement for Democratic Action.
The split grew more serious following President Jaruzelski's
announcement that he would retire before the expiration of his term in
1995. With the support of both noncommunist factions, parliament enacted
legislation to make possible the direct election of the president. Both
Walesa and Mazowiecki ran for the office in the fall of 1990, together
with four other candidates of widely varying political associations and
experience.
The campaign was bitter and divisive. Despite the heated rhetoric of
the campaign, the candidates differed relatively little on substantive
issues. Their disagreements stemmed mostly from the different leadership
styles of the men. Wounded by attacks on his intelligence, Walesa
revealed a streak of antiSemitism with remarks about the Jewish roots of
the ruling clique in Warsaw. Meanwhile, falling living standards increased
voters' disenchantment with the government's economic program. An
uninspiring public speaker and a poor campaign organizer, Mazowiecki
could not rally support during the short time remaining before the
election.
Many voters apathetic toward the two front runners were attracted to
the iconoclastic Stanislaw Tyminski, a wealthy expatriate with no
political experience. Tyminski's campaign made effective use of his
outsider status. His wild accusations against the leading candidates
found a receptive audience. Tyminski asserted that given a chance, he
could make all Poles rich.
The election results were a stunning rejection of the Mazowiecki
government. With only 18 percent of the total vote, Mazowiecki finished
third behind Walesa (40 percent) and the maverick Tyminski (23 percent).
The candidate of the Social Democracy of the Republic of Poland (SdRP),
successor to the PZPR, received more than 9 percent of the vote,
demonstrating the residual strength of the old party elite.
A runoff election between Tyminski and Walesa was necessitated by all
candidates' failure to achieve a majority. Walesa sought the votes of
Mazowiecki's supporters, promising to continue the basic course of
economic transformation initiated by Mazowiecki's minister of finance,
Leszek Balcerowicz. But the ad hominem attacks of the campaign made
immediate reconciliation impossible. With the reluctant support of the
Mazowiecki faction and the implicit endorsement of the Roman Catholic
Church, Walesa won the runoff with almost 75 percent of the vote to
become Poland's first popularly elected president. Although Walesa had
prevailed, the bitter campaign had badly tarnished his image and
worsened the splits in the old Solidarity coalition.
Poland
Poland - The Bielecki Government
Poland
Upon taking office in December 1990, Walesa offered the post of prime
minister to Jan Olszewski, a respected attorney who had defended
prominent dissidents in the 1960s and 1970s and who had a long
association with Solidarity. When Olszewski rejected the offer because
of Walesa's insistence on controlling key cabinet positions, Walesa
offered the position to Jan Bielecki, the leader of a small reformist
party, the Liberal-Democratic Congress. Believing that this would be a
short-lived interim government, Bielecki accepted and conceded to Walesa
the right to oversee cabinet selection. The new government retained
several key members of the Mazowiecki cabinet. Leszek Balcerowicz
continued to coordinate economic policy, and the widely respected
Krzysztof Skubiszewski remained in charge of foreign affairs.
By his involvement in forming the Bielecki government, Walesa
expanded the ill-defined powers of the presidency. His resolve to be an
activist president caused alarm in the parliament, intellectual circles,
and the press. Some people accused Walesa of harboring ambitions to
attain the powers of J�zef Pilsudski, the strong-willed leader in the
interwar years. Although he vigorously denied such charges,
Walesa's popularity plunged in early 1990 as his prime minister failed
to deliver the promised acceleration of economic reform and improvement
of government services. During his tenure, Bielecki made little headway
in privatizing large state enterprises and dismantling the managerial
bureaucracy left by the communists.
By the summer of 1990, factionalism and the obstructionism of
remaining communist legislators prevented the Sejm from enacting major
legislation sponsored by the Bielecki government. Therefore, with
Walesa's support, Bielecki asked the Sejm to revise the constitution and
grant the prime minister authority to issue economic decrees with the
force of law. The proposal was defeated, and the gridlock between
executive and legislative branches continued.
Walesa grew increasingly resentful of the political, institutional,
and legal constraints placed on his office. He felt especially
encumbered by the composition of the Sejm, which opposed much of his
economic agenda. Therefore, Walesa called for parliamentary elections in
the spring of 1991 to install a fully democratic Sejm. Because his
timetable could not be met, a long power struggle between the Sejm and
the president over parliamentary election legislation ensued, and Walesa
sustained a major political defeat. The president had favored an
election law that would end the fragmentation of the Sejm by fostering
large parties and coalitions. However, the parties formerly allied with
the communists joined other anti-Walesa factions in the Sejm in enacting
a system that allocated seats in strict proportion to candidates'
percentages of the total vote in thirty-seven multimember electoral
districts. Such a system, Walesa rightly feared, would enable dozens of
minor and regional parties to win seats in the parliament by receiving
only a few thousand votes.
Poland
Poland - Parliamentary Elections of October 1991
Poland
Over Walesa's veto, the Sejm version of the parliamentary election
bill became law in mid-1991. Elections were scheduled for the following
October. During the months before the election, Walesa refused to
endorse any of the numerous post-Solidarity parties and other parties
that fielded slates of candidates. He remained noncommittal, distancing
himself even from the Center Alliance, which had been his core of
support during the presidential election. In fact, Walesa defended the
Bielecki government from attacks by the Center Alliance. The president
participated in the parliamentary campaign only by urging voters to
defeat former communist candidates who had joined other parties after
the dissolution of the PZPR.
As Walesa had predicted, the first election held under the new
election law produced a badly fragmented parliament. Only 43 percent of
the electorate voted in the first totally free parliamentary elections
since 1928. Twenty-nine parties won seats in the new Sejm, but none
received more than 14 percent of the vote. Both extremes of the
political spectrum fared well, while the moderate post-Solidarity
parties failed to win the expected majority of seats. This outcome
promised a Sejm no less obstructionist than the one it replaced, and
prospects for a coalition agreeing on a new prime minister were dim. At
least five were needed to form a coalition holding a majority of seats
in the Sejm. The Social Democracy of the Republic of Poland was
essentially an ineligible party because of its roots in the PZPR.
Meanwhile, the grave split of the two leading Solidarity factions made
them incompatible in any coalition. This situation left a center-right
coalition as the only practical option. Walesa's initial nominee for
prime minister failed, however, because he lacked support from the
Center Alliance and Bielecki's party, the Liberal-Democratic Congress.
Poland
Poland - The Olszewski Government
Poland
After five weeks of struggle, Walesa reluctantly acceded to a Sejm
coalition of five center-right parties by nominating Jan Olszewski of
the Center Alliance as prime minister. Relations between the two men had
been strained in early 1990 by Olszewski's initial refusal of the
position of prime minister and by Walesa's fear that Olszewski would
abandon the Balcerowicz economic reforms. At that point, Walesa had even
threatened to assume the duties of prime minister himself.
Although supported by a fragile, unlikely coalition that included the
Confederation for an Independent Poland and the Liberal-Democratic
Congress, Olszewski was confirmed as prime minister. Within days,
however, the coalition began to disintegrate. Although the
Liberal-Democratic Congress had been promised a decisive role in setting
economic policy, the futility of that promise soon drove the party out
of the coalition. Next to leave was the ultranationalist Confederation
for Independent Poland, which was alienated when it was denied control
of the Ministry of National Defense. A frustrated Olszewski
submitted his resignation only two weeks after his nomination.
The Sejm rejected Olszewski's resignation, sensing that no other
nominee was likely to form a more viable government at that time. The
prime minister survived mainly because of unexpected support from a
party outside the coalition, the Polish Peasant Party, which won several
key ministerial appointments in the political bargain. Nevertheless,
dissension within the coalition continued to weaken and isolate the
prime minister at the same time that the two largest parties in the
Sejm--Mazowiecki's Democratic Union and the Social Democracy of the
Republic of Poland, heir to the PZPR--openly opposed the government.
Although condemning the previous two governments for the deep
recession and budget crisis, Olszewski had very little room to maneuver
and continued the austerity policies initiated by those governments. Far
from easing the pain of economic transition, Olszewski was forced to
impose steep energy and transportation price increases. Government
spending could not be increased without jeopardizing crucial credit
arrangements with the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
A critical vote in the Sejm in March 1992 rejected the government's
economic program outline and revealed the untenable position of the
prime minister. The program, constructed by the head of the Office of
Central Planning, Jerzy Eysymontt, called for continued sacrifice,
reduced government spending, and higher prices for traditionally
subsidized goods and services. This program clearly conflicted with the
government's promises for a rapid breakthrough and a reversal of
Balcerowicz's austerity policies.
Efforts to bring the major opposition parties into the governing
coalition began in 1992, but preliminary talks produced nothing and
alienated coalition members who had not been consulted in advance. Some
members objected to all compromises with the Liberal-Democratic Congress
and the Democratic Union. One such member was the Christian National
Union, a strong supporter of Olszewski, which dominated his cabinet and
advanced a Roman Catholic agenda incompatible with the secular views of
the two opposition parties. The most problematic issue upon which the
parties disagreed was the state's position on abortion.
The Sejm's rejection of his economic program convinced Olszewski to
push harder for expansion of his coalition. In the days following the
vote, Olszewski personally offered economic compromise to Mazowiecki in
exchange for support by the Democratic Union. Mazowiecki insisted on a
dominant role in economic policy and inclusion of his allied parties in
a restructured government. Several weeks of amicable negotiations failed
to enlarge Olszewski's coalition.
Even as he sought potential coalition partners and proposed economic
compromises, Olszewski alienated the opposition and, most importantly,
President Walesa, by his partisan leadership style and personnel
policies at all levels of administration. Two members of Olszewski's
cabinet defied presidential prerogatives in highly publicized,
politically destabilizing incidents. First, Minister of National Defense
Jan Parys enraged Walesa by failing to consult him in making key
personnel decisions, a failure that led to dismissal of Parys for making
public accusations that members of the president's circle planned a
coup. Then the circulation of an unsubstantiated list of sixtytwo
current and former government officials alleged to have collaborated
with the communist secret police caused a major upheaval. Walesa charged
that the list threatened the stability of the state and required the
dismissal of the Olszewski government. The Sejm then voted Olszewski out
of office in June 1992 by the substantial margin of 273 to 119 votes.
Olszewski and his cabinet did not leave office quietly. The outgoing
government launched unprecedented personal attacks on Walesa, accusing
him of presiding over the recommunization of Poland. Walesa replied that
Olszewski had issued orders to place on alert security forces in Warsaw,
including the presidential guard, as a prelude to a coup d'�tat.
Poland
Poland - The Pawlak Interlude
Poland
In June Walesa nominated Waldemar Pawlak, the thirty-two- year-old
leader of the Polish Peasant Party, as Olszewski's replacement. The Sejm
approved the nomination by a vote of 261 to 149. To calm the highly
charged atmosphere in Warsaw and the persistent rumors of coup plots,
the new prime minister immediately replaced ministers implicated in
circulation of the controversial list. Despite Pawlak's reputation as a
reasonable and competent politician, he could not surmount his
membership in a party tainted by past accommodation to the communists;
he was unable to assemble a cabinet acceptable to the splintered Sejm.
The first prime minister without Solidarity connections since the Round
Table Agreement, Pawlak failed to win the support of any major party
linked to Solidarity. When talks with the major opposition parties broke
down a month after his appointment, Pawlak asked Walesa to relieve him
of the mission of forming a new government.
Poland
Poland - The Suchocka Government
Poland
Once again frustrated by an uncooperative Sejm, Walesa threatened to
assume the duties of prime minister and form his own cabinet unless a
governing coalition were assembled within twenty-four hours. In July two
emerging coalitions in the Sejm (a four-party Christian and peasant
block and the existing Little Coalition formed around the Democratic
Union) surprised most observers by reaching agreement on the candidacy
of Hanna Suchocka of the Democratic Union and on the allocation of
cabinet positions. Despite misgivings, Walesa approved the cabinet with
the warning that if Suchocka failed, he would assume the duties of chief
executive in a French-style presidential government.
A relatively unknown political figure, Suchocka was acceptable to
other parties that felt personal antipathy toward the more prominent
leaders of the Democratic Union. To strengthen support for the new
government, two deputy prime minister positions were created, one for
economic affairs and one for politics. These posts went to members of
the Christian National Union and the Party of Christian Democrats,
respectively. Drawing heavily on the experience of the first three
Solidarity governments, Suchocka's cabinet included such well-known
figures as Jacek Kuron and Janusz Onyszkiewicz (minister of national
defense) of the Democratic Union, Bielecki of the LiberalDemocratic
Congress, Eysymontt of the Polish Economic Program, and independent
Krzysztof Skubiszewski (minister of foreign affairs). Members of the
Little Coalition received eleven ministerial posts, most of which were
concerned with economic policy; the Christian National Union received
five cabinet positions, ensuring it a prominent role in social policy
issues such as abortion. Noticeably outside the coalition were the
Center Alliance, the Social Democracy of the Republic of Poland, and the
Confederation for Independent Poland, all of which found their political
fortunes declining in mid-1992.
Poland
Poland - THE CONSTITUTION
Poland
Although significantly amended after the Round Table Agreement of
April 1989, much of the constitution of 1952 remained in effect in
mid-1992. The symbolic target date of May 3, 1992 for adopting a new
constitution proved unrealistic in light of Poland's political climate.
That date would have commemorated the twohundredth anniversary of the
enactment of Poland's first written constitution, the Ustawa Rzadowa of
May 3, 1791--a widely hailed document intellectually rooted in the
philosophy of the Enlightenment. But in 1990 and 1991 a new constitution
was impossible because the Round Table Agreement had allowed the
communists continued predominance in the Sejm and because of growing
factionalism within Solidarity, the most powerful party. Even after free
parliamentary elections in October 1991, however, political instability
precluded the adoption of a new constitution in the near term.
The Constitution of 1952
With the adoption of the 1952 document, which replicated much of the
Soviet Union's 1936 constitution, the Republic of Poland was renamed the
Polish People's Republic, and the crown symbolizing national
independence was removed from the country's flag. The constitution
declared that power derived from the working people, who by universal
suffrage and the secret ballot elected their representatives in the Sejm
and the regional and local people's councils. Like its Soviet
counterpart, the 1952 Polish constitution listed in exhaustive detail
the basic rights and responsibilities of the population. All citizens,
regardless of nationality, race, religion, sex, level of education, or
social status, were guaranteed work, leisure, education, and health
care. The constitution promised freedom of religion, speech, the press,
assembly, and association, and it guaranteed inviolability of the
person, the home, and personal correspondence. As in the Soviet Union,
however, the idealistic Polish constitution did not deliver the promised
individual rights and liberties.
Instead, the constitution of 1952 provided a facade of legitimacy,
behind which the PZPR concentrated real political power in its central
party organs, particularly the Political Bureau, usually referred to as
the Politburo, and the Secretariat. The document's ambiguous language
concerning establishment of a state apparatus enabled the PZPR to bend
the constitution to suit its purposes. The traditional tripartite
separation of powers among governmental branches was abandoned. The
constitution allowed the PZPR to control the state apparatus "in
the interests of the working people." As a result, all levels of
government were staffed with PZPR-approved personnel, and government in
fact functioned as the party's administrative, subordinate partner.
Between 1952 and 1973, the PZPR-dominated Sejm approved ten
constitutional amendments concerning the organization and function of
central and local government bodies. In 1976, after four years of work
by a Sejm constitutional commission, roughly one-third of the original
ninety-one articles were amended. The new version described Poland as a
socialist state, presumably signifying advancement from its earlier
status as a people's democracy. For the first time, the constitution
specifically mentioned the PZPR, which was accorded special status as
the "guiding political force of society in building
socialism." The document also recognized the Soviet Union as the
liberator of Poland from fascism and as the innovator of the socialist
state. More importantly, the 1976 amendments committed Poland to a
foreign policy of friendly relations with the Soviet Union and its other
socialist neighbors. These provisions, which in effect surrendered
Polish national sovereignty, provoked such widespread protest by the
intelligentsia and the Roman Catholic hierarchy that the government was
forced to recast the amendments in less controversial terms.
In the decade preceding the Round Table Agreement, the PZPR endorsed
a number of amendments to the 1952 constitution in a vain attempt to
gain legitimacy with the disgruntled population. In the spirit of the
Gdansk Agreement of August 1980, which recognized workers' rights to
establish free trade unions, the constitution was amended in October
1980. The amendments of that time promised to reduce PZPR influence over
the Sejm. For that purpose, the Supreme Control Chamber (Najwyzsza Izba
Kontroli-- NIK--chief agency for oversight of the government's economic
and administrative activities) was transferred from the Council of
Ministers to the Sejm. In December 1981, the imposition of martial law
temporarily halted the erosion of the party's constitutional authority.
But in March 1982, the Jaruzelski regime resumed its effort to appease
the public by again amending the constitution.
The March 1982 amendments provided for the creation of two
independent entities, the Constitutional Tribunal and the State
Tribunal, which had the effect of reestablishing the traditional Polish
constitutional principle of government by rule of law. The 1976
amendments had placed adjudication of the constitutionality of statutes
with the Council of State (chief executive organ of the nation).
Although the authority of the Constitutional Tribunal was strictly
limited, beginning in 1982 that body issued a number of important
decisions forcing the repeal of questionable regulations. The State
Tribunal was established to adjudicate abuses of power by government
officials. Although legally prevented from reviewing the activities of
Sejm deputies, the State Tribunal represented yet another major step in
the evolution of the democratic concept of government by the consent of
the governed.
Shortly before the official lifting of martial law in July 1983, the
Sejm enacted additional constitutional changes that held the promise of
political pluralism. For the first time, the United Peasant Party and
the Democratic Party officially were recognized as legitimate political
parties, existing independently from the PZPR. The amendments also
tacitly sanctioned the political activities of church organizations by
stressing that public good can derive from "societal
organizations."
Another important step toward meaningful constitutional guarantees in
a civil society was the July 1987 decision to establish the Office of
the Commissioner for Citizens' Rights as a people's ombudsman. The
office provided a mechanism for citizens to file grievances against
government organs for violations of constitutionally guaranteed civil
rights. Receiving more than 50,000 petitions in its first year, the
office immediately proved to be more than a symbolic concession.
Constitutional Revisions after April 1989
The Round Table Agreement brought a number of amendments that
substantially altered the 1952 Constitution. The so-called April
Amendments resurrected the traditional Polish constitutional concept of
separation of powers. The legislative branch would again be bicameral
after four decades of a single, 460-member Sejm. The new body included a
freely elected 100-member Senate and retained the 460-member Sejm as its
lower chamber. Power would be distributed among the houses of parliament
and the newly established Office of the President, which was to assume
many of the executive powers previously held by the Council of State.
The April Amendments provided for election of the president by the two
houses of parliament.
In December 1989, the new parliament made several additional, highly
symbolic amendments to the 1952 constitution to rid the document of
Marxist terminology. The PZPR lost its special status when its
identification as the political guiding force in Polish society was
deleted from the constitution. The hated words "People's
Republic" would be discarded and the state's official name would be
restored to the prewar "Republic of Poland." Article 2 was
revised to read "Supreme authority in the Republic of Poland is
vested in the People," amending the Marxist phrase "the
working people." The amendments of December 1989 also wrote into
law the equality of all forms of property ownership, the essential first
step in establishing a market economy.
Aware that piecemeal revision of the Stalinist 1952 constitution
would not meet the needs of a democratic Polish society, in December
1989 the Sejm created a Constitutional Commission to write a fully
democratic document untainted by association with Poland's communist
era. The next year, the National Assembly (the combined Sejm and Senate)
prescribed the procedure by which the draft would be enacted. The
document would require approval by a two-thirds vote of both assembly
houses in joint session, followed by a national referendum.
Theoretically, this procedure would bolster the constitution's
legitimacy against doubts created by the dubious political credentials
of some of its authors.
Chaired by one of the Solidarity movement's most brilliant
intellectuals, Bronislaw Geremek, the Sejm Constitutional Commission
faced serious obstacles from the outset. The legitimacy of the Sejm
itself was at issue because the Round Table Agreement had allowed
Solidarity to contest only 35 percent of the Sejm seats. Claiming that
its open election in 1989 made it more representative of the popular
will, the Senate condemned the Sejm Constitutional Commission and began
working on its own version of a new constitution. In reality, however
the Senate was not an accurate cross section of Polish society because
it lacked representatives from the peasants and the political left.
Subsequent efforts to form a joint Sejm-Senate constitutional commission
proved futile.
After his victory in the December 1990 presidential election, Walesa
cast further doubt on the commission's activity by challenging the
credentials of the existing Sejm. Nevertheless, the commission continued
its work and presented a fairly complete draft constitution by the
spring of 1991. The draft was based on the two series of amendments
passed in 1989. It also borrowed heavily from various Western
constitutions, most notably the constitution of the Federal Republic of
Germany (West Germany). The draft was soon discarded, however, because
of the Sejm's undemocratic constituency; for the same reason, the
commission as such ceased to exist in 1991.
In the first half of 1992, attention shifted to the so-called Little
Constitution, a document that used much of the 1991 draft in redefining
the relationship between the legislative and executive branches of
government and clarifying the division of power between the president
and the prime minister. The Little Constitution was to be a compromise
that would solidify as many democratic institutions as possible before
all constitutional controversies could be resolved. Nevertheless, the
new document would supersede all but a few provisions of the 1952
constitution and provide the basis for a full constitution when
remaining points of dispute could be resolved. Its drafts retained the
statement that Poland was a democratic state of law guided by principles
of social justice. Agencies such as the Constitutional Tribunal, the
State Tribunal, and the Office of the Commissioner for Citizens Rights
were also retained.
Poland
Poland - GOVERNMENT STRUCTURE
Poland
The three years following the Round Table Agreement of 1989 were a
period of dramatic but uneven change in the governmental structure of
the Republic of Poland. The Round Table Agreement itself moved Poland
decisively away from a Soviet-style unitary hierarchy in which the
formal government was merely a bureaucracy to implement decisions made
by the extraconstitutional organs of the PZPR. The Round Table Agreement
created a tripartite structure in which power was distributed among the
executive, legislative, and judicial branches. By mid-1992, the Polish
government had evolved into a presidential and parliamentary democracy
with an increasingly independent judiciary. The adoption of the Little
Constitution promised to resolve ambiguities in the executive powers of
the president and the prime minister and to clarify the scope of control
of the bicameral National Assembly.
<>The President
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Sejm
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Senate
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Supreme Control Chamber
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Council of Ministers
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Regional and Local Government
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Judicial System
Poland
Poland - The President
Poland
The presidency was established by the Round Table Agreement to
replace the communist-era Council of State as the primary executive
organ of government. According to the agreement, the president was to be
elected by the National Assembly to a term of six years. Although not
the head of government (that function was performed by the prime
minister), the president was empowered to veto legislation and had
control of the armed forces. The negotiators of the Round Table
Agreement clearly crafted the presidency with the expectation that
General Jaruzelski would be its first incumbent. A Jaruzelski presidency
would have ensured PZPR compliance with the concessions the party had
made in the agreement. Moreover, Jaruzelski was expected to be effective
in protecting the new political arrangements from Soviet interference.
After solidarity succeeded in forming a noncommunist coalition
government in mid-1989, however, Jaruzelski lost most of his powers, and
the presidency became a largely ceremonial office. The office changed
drastically when Walesa became Poland's first popularly elected
president in late 1990.
A constitutional amendment in the spring of 1990 provided for direct
popular election of the president to a five-year term with a limit of
one reelection. Any Polish citizen at least thirtyfive years of age was
eligible to appear on the ballot after obtaining 100,000 nominating
signatures.
If accused of violating the constitution and Polish law, the
president could be indicted before the State Tribunal if twothirds of
the National Assembly so voted. Upon indictment, the president would be
relieved temporarily of the duties of office. A guilty verdict from the
State Tribunal would bring expulsion from office. The presidency also
could be vacated because of physical unfitness to hold the office, as
determined by the National Assembly. In such circumstances, the Sejm
speaker would temporarily assume the duties of the presidency until a
new president could be sworn in.
The president's duties include protecting the constitution;
safeguarding the sovereignty, security, and territorial inviolability of
the Polish state; and overseeing adherence to international agreements
and treaties. The constitution authorizes the president to call for
elections to the Sejm, Senate, and county councils. The president also appoints
diplomatic representatives and officially receives foreign diplomats;
acts as commander in chief of the armed forces; calls and presides over
emergency sessions of the Council of Ministers; and performs other
duties assigned the chief of state by the constitution or by law.
A critical duty of the president is naming the head of government,
the prime minister. The Little Constitution amends the procedure
prescribed for this function. Originally, the president nominated the
prime minister, but the Sejm had to approve both that nomination and the
prime minister's cabinet choices that followed. The Little Constitution
specifies that the president designate the prime minister and appoint
the cabinet upon consultation with the prime minister. Within two weeks,
however, the new government must receive the Sejm's confirmation (by a
simple majority of the deputies present voting in favor). If the
government is not confirmed, the Sejm then has the responsibility to
nominate and confirm its own candidate, again by a majority vote. If the
Sejm fails in this attempt, the president has another chance, this time
with the lesser requirement that more votes be cast for approval than
for nonapproval. Finally, if the president's choice again fails, the
Sejm would attempt to confirm its own candidate by the lesser vote. If
no candidate can be confirmed, the president has the option of
dissolving parliament or appointing a six-month interim government.
During the interim period, if the Sejm does not confirm the government,
or one of its own choosing, parliament automatically would be dissolved.
The constitution grants the president certain legislative
prerogatives, including the right to propose legislation; to veto acts
of the National Assembly (the Sejm could overrule such a veto with a
two-thirds majority); to ask the Constitutional Tribunal to judge the
constitutionality of legislation; and to issue decrees and instructions
on the implementation of laws. The president ratifies or terminates
international agreements but needs prior approval from the Sejm to
ratify agreements involving sizable financial liability on the state or
changes in legislation.
If national security were threatened, the president could declare
martial law and announce a partial or full mobilization. He or she could
also introduce a state of emergency for a period of up to three months
in case of a threat to domestic tranquility or natural disaster. A
one-time extension of a state of emergency, not to exceed three months,
could be declared with the approval of both houses of the National
Assembly.
Poland
Poland - Sejm
Poland
The lower house of the bicameral National Assembly, the Sejm, is the
more powerful of the two chambers. The Sejm has the constitutional
responsibility of initiating and enacting laws that "set the basic
direction of the state's activity" and of overseeing "other
organs of power and state administration." The constitution
specifies election of the 460 Sejm deputies to a term of four years. The
1991 election was conducted by a system that awarded seats in the Sejm
in strict proportion to the number of votes each party or coalition
garnered nationally. This system was blamed for the extreme fragmentation
that plagued Polish politics in 1991-92. The new Sejm is required to
convene within one month after national parliamentary elections.
Upon taking the oath of office, the Sejm deputies immediately elect a
permanent marshal, who serves as Sejm speaker. The marshal and three
vice marshals constitute the Presidium of the Sejm, the chief duties of
which are to oversee accomplishment of the Sejm agenda, to coordinate
the activities of the parliamentary commissions, and to represent the
Sejm in external affairs. The marshal, vice marshals, and leaders of
parliamentary caucuses (called "clubs") form an advisory organ
to the Sejm Presidium known as the Council of Elders (Konwent Senior�w),
which assists in scheduling.
The constitution empowers the president to declare a threemonth state
of emergency in the event of parliamentary paralysis. During this
period, the president may perform the duties of the prime minister, but
the Sejm cannot be dismissed, and changes cannot be made to the
constitution or electoral law.
Among the most important agencies of the Sejm in mid-1992 were
twenty-one permanent committees, which enjoyed considerable autonomy in
deliberating issues and in referring their findings to the entire Sejm
for action. The committees set their own agendas in analyzing the
performance of individual sectors of the economy or units of state
administration. The Sejm could also create special committees to study
specific issues. Committee appointments were highly partisan and
reflected the numerical representation of the various parties and
factions within the Sejm.
The National Assembly has exclusive responsibility to pass a central
state budget and to finance the entire range of state activities,
including foreign monetary payments, and to approve a domestic credit
plan and balance sheet of incomes and expenditures. The budget bill and
financial plans passed by the Sejm are sent to the Senate, which may
propose changes. The Little Constitution specifies that the Sejm can
overturn the Senate's changes with an absolute majority vote.
Previously, overriding Senate changes had required a two-thirds
majority, with a quorum of at least 50 percent of the Sejm deputies. The
president can dismiss parliament for failing to pass a budget within
three months.
Poland
Poland - Senate
Poland
The upper house of the National Assembly, the Senate, was
reestablished by the Round Table Agreement more than four decades after
being abolished by the communist government. The Round Table Agreement
provides for the direct popular election of all 100 senators--two from
each of the forty-nine districts (wojew�dztwa; sing. wojew�dztwo,
sometimes seen in English as voivodship) with the exception of Warsaw
and Katowice, which elect three senators each. The senators' four-year
terms of office coincide with those of Sejm deputies.
The Senate sets its own agenda and committee structure. As in the
Sejm, committee appointments are dictated by the numerical strength of
the parties and factions represented in the chamber. Besides its budget
review function, the Senate also reviews Sejm legislation and may
approve, amend, or reject within thirty days. The Senate also confirms
key appointments, including the commissioner for citizens' rights and
the chairperson of the Supreme Control Chamber, both of whom are
nominated by the Sejm.
Within one month after parliamentary elections, the president is
required to call the first session of the new Senate. The Senate
Presidium consists of the permanent marshal and six other prominent
senators. The Sejm and Senate presidia occasionally meet to coordinate
agendas and create joint committees as required.
Poland
Poland - Supreme Control Chamber
Poland
The Supreme Control Chamber, often referred to as the NIK, was
established during the communist period to monitor the economic,
financial, and administrative activities of state organs, their
subordinate enterprises, and other organizational units. The chairperson
of the NIK was appointed or recalled by the Sejm with the concurrence of
the Senate. The chamber gained a reputation for incorruptability in the
communist era, exerting some control over inefficiency and budgetary
excesses. The office has retained its watchdog role in the democratic
system. Among other activities, the NIK submits reports on the
performance, abuses, and failures of enterprise funds, customs offices,
and currency exchanges.
Poland
Poland - Council of Ministers
Poland
The highest administrative organ of state authority, the Council of
Ministers (commonly called the cabinet), and its chairperson, the prime
minister, constitute the acting government. The Council of Ministers
answers to the Sejm or, between Sejm sessions, to the president. Prior
to the adoption of the Little Constitution, the Sejm could dismiss
individual ministers or the entire Council of Ministers on its own
initiative. The Little Constitution restricts this prerogative by
requiring the Sejm to nominate an alternative candidate supported by an
absolute majority of Sejm deputies. If the Sejm produces no such
candidate, no vote for dismissal may be taken. The Little Constitution
also eliminates the president's power to move for the government's
dismissal.
The authority of the Council of Ministers is quite broad. The council
coordinates the activities of the ministries and their subordinate
entities. Among its other legally specified functions is compiling an
annual state budget and presenting it to the Sejm and the Senate for
approval. The Council of Ministers also presents an annual report on the
previous year's budgetary implementation. Other constitutional functions
include ensuring public order; protecting the interests of the state and
the rights of individual citizens; guiding foreign policy and national
defense; and organizing the armed forces and setting induction quotas.
In running the Council of Ministers, the prime minister is assisted by
one or more deputy prime ministers and a director of the Office of the
Council of Ministers. In mid-1992, the government consisted of seventeen
ministries, the Office of Central Planning, and three ministers without
portfolio.
The jurisdiction of the ministries is defined by statute, on the
basis of which the ministries issue decrees and regulations. Under
secretaries of state and vice ministers provide managerial support to
the ministers. For certain ministries with exceptionally broad
responsibilities, the position of secretary of state was established.
The prime minister has authority to appoint and dismiss secretaries and
under secretaries of state.
Poland
Poland - Regional and Local Government
Poland
The territory of Poland is administered through a system of
forty-nine districts established in 1975 to replace the previous system
of twenty-two districts. In addition, three city councils- -Warsaw,
Lodz, and Krak�w--enjoy special administrative status. Each district is
managed by a government-appointed wojewoda (typically a
professional administrator) and a district assembly whose members are
chosen by the popularly elected local government units, the community (gmina;
pl., gminy) councils. Both the district and community levels of
government enjoy far greater autonomy than they did under the highly
centralized communist system of administration.
According to the amended constitution in use in mid-1992, local
self-rule is the basic organizational form of public life in the
community. The community possesses legal status and acts on behalf of
the public interest in accordance with the law. The residents of the
community directly elect a standing council of their peers to a
four-year term by universal secret ballot. A community or town of fewer
than 40,000 residents elects council members in single-seat districts on
a simple majority basis. Cities with more than 40,000 people use
multiseat districts, and seats are allocated on a proportional basis.
The executive organ of the community is the municipal government (zarz
d), which consists of a "chief officer" (wojt;
pl., wojtowie) or mayor, his or her deputies, and other
members. Communities may form intercommunity unions to coordinate
projects of mutual interest.
Community councils in a given district elect delegates from their
membership to a self-governing regional council (sejmik samorzadowy),
which approves formation of intercommunity unions and works closely with
district authorities through mandatory reports moving in both
directions. The prime minister and district authorities monitor
community activity, but they may interfere only in instances of obvious
incompetence or violation of law.
Poland
Poland - Judicial System
Poland
The constitution of 1952 reflected the communists' disdain for the
concept of judicial independence. As in the Soviet system, the Polish
judiciary was viewed as an integral part of the coercive state
apparatus. The courts were not allowed to adjudicate the
constitutionality of statutes. Instead, the function of constitutional
review was within the purview of the legislative branch until 1976, when
it passed to the Council of State. A key provision of the Round Table
Agreement was the reemergence of an independent judiciary, a concept
rooted in the Ustawa Rzadowa, the constitution of 1791. By 1992 most of
the communist political appointees had left the Supreme Court, and at
all levels new judges had been recruited from among qualified academic
and courtroom barristers. On the other hand, in 1992 Poland's body of
laws still contained a motley assortment of Soviet-style statutes full
of vague language aimed at protecting the communist monopoly of power
rather than the rule of law itself. A complete overhaul of the legal
system was a universally recognized need.
The National Judicial Council
A critical step in establishing the autonomy of the judicial branch
was the Sejm's vote in December 1989 to create the National Judicial
Council. The twenty-four member council, consisting of judges from the
national, district, and local levels, serves a four-year term and has
the primary function of recommending judgeship candidates to the
president. Another basic function of the body is to oversee the entire
judiciary and establish professional standards.
The Supreme Court
Reform of the appointment mechanism for justices was a necessity to
ensure an independent judiciary. In the communist era, the Council of
State appointed Supreme Court justices to five-year terms, making
selections on purely political grounds. Because the Supreme Court had
jurisdiction over all other courts in the land, the political
reliability of its members was an important consideration in appointment
decisions. Judicial reform after the Round Table Agreement provided that
the president appoint Supreme Court justices from a list prepared by an
independent National Judicial Council, and that justices be appointed
for life terms. The presiding officer of the Supreme Court, called the
first chairman, is appointed from among the Supreme Court justices by
the National Assembly upon the recommendation of the president.
Dismissal from the chairmanship follows the same procedure.
The Supreme Court reviews the decisions of all lower courts; hears
appeals of decisions made by the district courts, along with appeals
brought by the minister of justice (who simultaneously serves as the
prosecutor general) and the first chairman of the Supreme Court; and
adopts legal interpretations and clarifications. The court is organized
into four chambers: criminal, civil, labor and social insurance, and
military. Because of its heavy case load, the Supreme Court is a large
body, employing 117 judges and a staff of 140 persons in late 1990.
Lower Courts
In 1990 the system of lower courts included forty-four district and
282 local courts. These numbers were scheduled to be increased to
forty-nine and 300, respectively, in 1991. Thereafter the local courts
were to concentrate on minor, routine offenses, and the district courts
were to take on more serious cases and consider appeals of local court
verdicts. Misdemeanors generally are handled by panels of "social
adjudicators," who are elected by local government councils. In
1991 these panels heard about 600,000 cases, of which about 80 percent
were traffic violations. To relieve the heavy appeals case load of the
Supreme Court, ten regional appeals courts were set up in late 1990 to
review verdicts of the district courts.
The Supreme Administrative Court
The Supreme Administrative Court was established in 1980 to review
and standardize administrative regulations enforced by government
agencies and to hear citizens' complaints concerning the legality of
administrative decisions. In 1991 the court heard some 15,600 cases,
mostly dealing with taxes, social welfare issues, and local government
decisions. As of late 1990, the court employed 105 judges and 163 staff
members.
The Constitutional Tribunal
The Constitutional Tribunal was established by the Jaruzelski regime
in early 1982 to adjudicate the constitutionality of laws and
regulations. The Sejm appoints the tribunal's members to four-year
terms. Initially, the body did not have authority to review laws and
statutes enacted before 1982. Findings of unconstitutionality could be
overruled by the Sejm with a twothirds majority vote. Selected by the
Sejm for their superior legal expertise, the members of the
Constitutional Tribunal are independent and bound only by the
constitution. In 1992 the tribunal made controversial findings that
government plans to control wages and pensions retroactively violated
rights constitutionally guaranteed to citizens.
The State Tribunal
The Jaruzelski regime created the State Tribunal in 1982, by the same
law that formed the Constitutional Tribunal, in response to instances of
high official corruption in 1980. The State Tribunal passes judgment on
the guilt or innocence of the highest office holders in the land accused
of violating the constitution and laws. The body's twenty-seven members
are appointed by the Sejm from outside its membership for a term
coinciding with that of the Sejm. Judges in the State Tribunal are
independent and bound only by the law. The chairperson of the State
Tribunal is the president of the Supreme Court. As of mid-1992, the
State Tribunal had never heard a case.
The Prosecutor General
The communist-era Office of the Chief Prosecutor was abolished
following the Round Table Agreement. Thereafter, the minister of justice
has served as the prosecutor general. The mission of the prosecutor
general is to safeguard law and order and ensure prosecution of crimes.
Since 1990 the prosecutors on the district and local levels have been
given autonomy from the police and are subordinated to the minister of
justice, who has assumed the role of the defunct prosecutor general. In
1992 many prosecutors remained from the rubber-stamp judicial system of
the communist era, however. Because they had no understanding of
democratic judicial practice, these officials seriously inhibited the
new legal system in dealing with the wave of crime that accompanied the
transition to a market economy.
The Commissioner for Citizens' Rights
The concept of a people's ombudsman to safeguard individual civil
rights and liberties was first proposed by the Patriotic Movement for
National Rebirth (Patriotyczny Ruch Odrodzenia Narodowego--PRON) in
1983. Four years later, the Sejm enacted legislation establishing the
Office of the Commissioner for Citizens' Rights. Appointed to a
four-year term by the Sejm with Senate approval, the commissioner is
independent of other state agencies and answers only to the Sejm. The
commissioner's mandate is to investigate on behalf of individual
citizens or organizations possible infractions of Polish law or basic
principles of justice by public officials, institutions, or
organizations. Although the commissioner may review the administration
of the courts, he or she may intercede only in matters such as
scheduling of cases. In military or internal security matters, the
commissioner does not investigate evidence but channels cases to the
appropriate jurisdiction. As a public ombudsman, the commissioner
confronts the accused party and conveys official displeasure at a given
action or policy. The commissioner also may request the initiation of
civil, criminal, or administrative proceedings and appeal to the
Constitutional Tribunal to review a law's constitutionality or
consistency with a higher statute.
The public greeted the creation of the Office of the Commissioner for
Citizens' Rights with enthusiasm. Lacking an established screening
mechanism, the new office received more than 55,000 complaints in 1988
alone. The commissioner also conducts systematic inspections of prisons
in response to inmates' complaints. Following the inspections, the
commissioner issued a comprehensive report, which has resulted in a more
humane, less congested prison system. In 1990 a national opinion poll
revealed that at that point the ombudsman enjoyed the highest popularity
of any Polish politician.
Poland
Poland - POLITICAL PARTIES
Poland
For four decades before the historic Round Table Agreement, Poland
had three legal political parties: the ruling communist PZPR and its two
subservient coalition partners, the United Peasant Party and the
Democratic Party. The first communist regime to gain power had outlawed
the major pre-World War II parties--National Democracy, the Labor Party,
and the Polish Peasant Party. The PZPR was formed in 1948 with the
merger of the Polish United Workers' Party and the Polish Socialist
Party. Realizing the lack of popular support for communism and public
fears of Soviet domination, the Polish communists eschewed the term communist
in their official name.
In return for acknowledging the leading role of the PZPR, the two
major coalition partners and three smaller Catholic associations
received a fixed number of seats in the Sejm. Although one of the latter
category, Znak, was technically an independent party, its allotment of
five seats gave it very limited influence. Typically, the United Peasant
Party held 20 to 25 percent of the Sejm seats and the Democratic Party
received about 10 percent. Despite the nominal diversity of the Sejm,
the noncommunist parties had little impact, and the Sejm was essentially
a rubber-stamp body that enacted legislation approved by the central
decision-making organs of the PZPR. Following the Soviet model,
political parties and religious associations, as well as all other mass
organizations, labor unions, and the press only transmitted policy and
programs from the central PZPR hierarchy to Polish society.
The years 1956, 1968, 1970, 1976, and 1980 were turning points in the
evolution of organized political opposition in Poland. With the death of
the Stalinist Boleslaw Beirut in 1956, Poland entered a brief period of
de-Stalinization. The PZPR relaxed its intimidation of the
intelligentsia, artists, and the church. The Znak group emerged and
experimented as a semiautonomous vehicle of dialog between the PZPR and
society. But with the Sovietorganized invasion of Czechoslovakia in
1968, the PZPR again suppressed dissent and expelled outspoken Znak
delegates from the Sejm. The 1970 shipyard strikes, which claimed
hundreds of victims, brought down the regime of Wladyslaw Gomulka
(1956-70) and demonstrated the potential of workers to oppose unpopular
PZPR policies. In 1976 the arrest of striking workers convinced a group
of intellectuals, led by Jacek Kuron and Adam Michnik, to form the
Committee for Defense of Workers (Komitet Obrony Robotnik�w--KOR), the
most successful opposition group until Solidarity.
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Solidarity
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Center Alliance
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Democratic Union
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Liberal-Democratic Congress
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Beer-Lovers' Party
<>More Political Parties
Poland
Poland - Solidarity
Poland
The breakthrough in ending the political monopoly of the PZPR came in
1980 with the emergence of the Interfactory Strike Committee, which
rapidly evolved into the Solidarity mass movement of some 10 million
Poles. Guided by Lech Walesa, the
Interfactory Strike Committee won historic concessions from the
communists in the Gdansk Agreement of August 31, 1980. The PZPR granted
recognition of the basic right of workers to establish free trade
unions, but in return the strike committee agreed not to function as a
political party. The workers promised to abide by the constitution and
conceded the leading role in state affairs to the PZPR.
Despite the pledges of the Gdansk Agreement, Solidarity did not
remain simply a trade union movement. It rapidly changed into an
umbrella organization under which a broad range of political and social
groups united in opposition to the communist regime. At Solidarity's
first national congress in the fall of 1981, the political nature of the
movement became explicit. The congress adopted a program calling for an
active Solidarity role in reforming Poland's political and economic
systems. In the following months, outspoken radicals urged their leaders
to confront the communist authorities, to demand free elections, and to
call for a national referendum to replace the communist government. The
radical challenge precipitated the imposition of martial law on December
13, 1981. Solidarity, now illegal, was forced underground until the late
1980s. Within six months after the start of
the Round Table talks in February 1989, Solidarity not only had regained
its legal status as a trade union, but also had become an effective
political movement that installed Eastern Europe's first postcommunist
government.
During its underground phase, Solidarity lost much of its original
cohesion as tactical and philosophical disagreements split the movement
into factions. The radical elements, convinced that an evolutionary
approach to democratization was impossible, created the organization
Fighting Solidarity in 1982. Ultimately, however, Walesa's moderate
faction prevailed. Favoring negotiation and compromise with the PZPR,
the moderates created the Citizens' Committee, which represented
Solidarity at the talks in 1989 and engineered the overwhelming election
triumph of June 1989. Led by Bronislaw Geremek, a prominent
intellectual, the newly elected Solidarity deputies in parliament formed
the Citizens' Parliamentary Club to coordinate legislative efforts and
advance the Solidarity agenda.
The stunning defeat of the PZPR in the June 1989 parliamentary
elections removed Solidarity's most important unifying force--the common
enemy. By the time of the local elections of May 1990, Solidarity had
splintered, and a remarkable number of small parties had appeared.
Because any individual with fifteen nominating signatures could be
placed on the ballot, an astounding 1,140 groups and "parties"
registered for the elections. In the local elections, the new groups'
lack of organization and national experience caused them to fare poorly
against the Solidarity-backed citizens' committees that sponsored about
one-third of the candidates running for local office.
Despite the success of the Solidarity candidates in the local
elections, serious divisions soon emerged within the Citizens'
Parliamentary Club concerning the appropriateness of political parties
at so early a stage in Poland's democratic experiment. The intellectuals
who dominated the parliamentary club insisted that the proliferation of
political parties would derail efforts to build a Western-style civil
society. But deputies on the right of the political spectrum, feeling
excluded from important policy decisions by the intellectuals, advocated
rapid formation of strong alternative parties.
Poland
Poland - Center Alliance
Poland
An outspoken Walesa supporter determined to end the political
dominance of the intellectual elite in the Citizens' Parliamentary Club,
Jaroslaw Kaczynski formed the Center Alliance in May 1990. The Center
Alliance supported a strong political center embodying the ideals of
Solidarity and Christian ethics. With the election of its candidate for
president, Walesa, and the appointment of Kaczynski as the president's
chief of staff, the Center Alliance became one of the most influential
political organizations in the country.
The Center Alliance platform for the parliamentary elections of
October 1991 called for accelerated economic reform, privatization,
rapid decommunization, and a strongly pro-Western foreign policy,
including full membership in NATO. Considering its prominent position in
the government and media and its large national membership, the party
fared rather poorly in the 1991 elections. Its popular vote total
yielded forty-four Sejm and nine Senate seats. The Center Alliance made
its last show of political power in engineering the selection of its
candidate, Jan Olszewski, to lead the coalition government in December
1991. By mid-1992, however, the influence of the party had waned because
of a bitter personal rift between Kaczynski and Walesa, the demise of
the Olszewski government, and the party's decision not to participate in
the ruling coalition of Hanna Suchocka.
Poland
Poland - Democratic Union
Poland
The Democratic Union (Unia Demokratyczna--UD) held its unification
congress in May 1991 to integrate three Solidarity splinter groups and
to adopt a platform for the parliamentary elections. The UD counted
among its members such luminaries of the Solidarity movement as Jacek
Kuron, Adam Michnik, Bronislaw Geremek, and Tadeusz Mazowiecki. The
party sought political and economic reform through the rule of law.
Rejecting extremism of any stripe, it pursued policies of economic
pragmatism. Although its registered membership ranked only fifth
numerically among political parties, the UD was a well-organized
national party with branches in all forty-nine districts.
In October 1991, with the UD expected to win more than a quarter of
the Sejm seats in the parliamentary election, party chairman Mazowiecki
indicated his availability to reassume the duties of prime minister. But
the UD took only sixty-two Sejm and twenty-one Senate seats, paying
dearly for its refusal to renounce the Balcerowicz Plan of economic
shock therapy and for opposing the Roman Catholic Church on the issue of
abortion.
During the first half of 1992, relations between the UD and Walesa
improved considerably. Walesa offered to appoint the two former prime
ministers, Mazowiecki and Bielecki, as his senior advisers. He
repeatedly urged the inclusion of the UD in an expanded governing
coalition, but negotiations toward that end failed. Instead, the UD
joined forces with two other economic reformist parties outside the
Olszewski government to form the Little Coalition. After the collapse of
the Olszewski government, the coalition failed to reach an agreement
with the new prime minister, Waldemar Pawlak, on the composition of a
new cabinet. According to Pawlak, the coalition insisted on total
control over the economy, a concession he was not willing to make. With
the election of Hanna Suchocka as the new prime minister in mid-1992,
the Democratic Union regained the leadership of the government and held
four of the key cabinet positions, including director of the Office of
the Council of Ministers and the ministries of finance, defense, and
labor and social affairs.
Poland
Poland - Liberal-Democratic Congress
Poland
The Liberal-Democratic Congress (Kongres LiberalnoDemokratyczny
--KLD) arose in 1983 as a loose organization of businessmen dedicated to
a philosophy of small government and free enterprise. The KLD was
registered as a party in October 1990 and supported the presidential
candidacy of Walesa, who selected KLD leader Jan Krzysztof Bielecki as
his nominee to be prime minister. Another prominent party member, Janusz
Lewandowski, headed the Ministry of Ownership Transformation in the
Bielecki cabinet. Donald Tusk, chairman of the KLD executive board, led
an unsuccessful attempt to form a broad coalition to support candidates
in the 1991 Senate race. The party foreswore ideological sloganeering
and backed rational, pragmatic policies. In the parliamentary elections,
the KLD finished seventh in popular vote, winning thirty-seven Sejm and
six Senate seats.
Poland
Poland - Beer-Lovers' Party
Poland
Registered as a political party in December 1990, the Polish
Beer-Lovers' Party (Polska Partia Przyjaci�l Piwa--PPPP) may have
started as a prank. But with time, its members developed a serious
platform, for which the humorous stated goals of the party--lively
political discussion in pubs serving excellent beer--were a symbol of
freedom of association and expression, intellectual tolerance, and a
higher standard of living. Its humorous name probably helped the party
win votes from a politically disenchanted populace in the 1991
parliamentary elections, in which the PPPP captured sixteen Sejm seats.
In early 1992, following a split within the PPPP into the Big Beer and
Little Beer parties, the former assumed the name Polish Economic
Program. Losing its image of quirkiness, the Polish Economic Program
became associated with the UD and KLD in the Little Coalition of liberal
promarket parties and supported the candidacy of Hanna Suchocka as prime
minister.
Poland
Poland - More Political Parties
Poland
Peasant Alliance
In mid-1992, the party of the Rural Solidarity farmers' union, the
Peasant Alliance (Porozumienie Ludowe--PL) held two prominent positions
in the Suchocka government, the Ministry of Agriculture and the Ministry
of Environmental Protection and Natural Resources. The party also
controlled the post of minister without portfolio for parliamentary
liaison. In mid-1992 the Peasant Alliance and the Polish Peasant Party
(Polskie Stronnictwo Ludowe--PSL) were still divided by their political
backgrounds although they both represented Poland's large rural sector.
The PL, still distrusting the PSL for its past accommodation with the
communists, opposed the selection of PSL leader Waldemar Pawlak as prime
minister. The PL supported import tariffs to protect domestic farmers,
state subsidies to maintain farm commodity prices, and easy credit for
farmers.
Christian National Union
Socially conservative but economically to the left, the Christian
National Union (Zjednoczenie Chrzescijansko-Narodowe-- ZChN) was the
dominant member of a short-lived electoral alliance known as Catholic
Action. The alliance finished third in the 1991 parliamentary elections
and earned ZChN forty-nine Sejm and nine Senate seats. The ZChN
supported the involvement of the Roman Catholic Church in politics and
government, religious instruction in the schools, a generous social
welfare program, and trade protectionism. The party played a large role
in both the Olszewski and Suchocka governments. Under Suchocka, the ZChN
held five cabinet positions and the post of deputy prime minister for
economic affairs.
Party of Christian Democrats
Founded in December 1990, the small Party of Christian Democrats
(Partia Chrzescijanskich Demokrat�w--PChD) used the political
experience of its membership to gain success disproportionate to its
size. Its most prominent member, Pawe Laczkowski, became deputy prime
minister for political affairs in the Suchocka government. On social
issues, the PChD supported a more pragmatic, centrist brand of Christian
democracy than that advocated by the larger ZChN. On economic issues,
the PChD supported a rapid approach to economic transformation and
privatization.
Confederation for an Independent Poland
Founded in 1979 by military historian Leszek Moczulski, the
Confederation for Independent Poland (Konfederacja Polski
Niepodleglej--KPN) claimed with some justification to be the first true
opposition party of the communist era. Years before the emergence of
Solidarity, Moczulski was defying the authorities with calls for the
restoration of Polish sovereignty and the replacement of the communist
system; he was imprisoned repeatedly from the late 1970s through the
mid-1980s. The KPN did not participate in the talks leading to the Round
Table Agreement and refused to compromise with the PZPR.
Because of its reputation for radicalism and violence, the KPN fared
poorly in its first electoral tests: the parliamentary elections of
1989, the local elections of May 1990, and the presidential election in
the autumn of 1990. But by 1991 Polish voters had grown disenchanted
with the seeming impotence of the postcommunist political establishment
in the face of the country's worsening economic problems. As a result,
the KPN was among the extremist groups and individuals that fared well
in the 1991 parliamentary elections. The KPN won forty-six seats in the
Sejm, two more than the mainstream Center Alliance.
Following its success in the parliamentary elections, the KPN sought
to moderate its image by joining four center-right parties in a
coalition supporting the candidacy of Jan Olszewski as prime minister.
Moczulski took the KPN out of the short-lived coalition, however, when
Olszewski failed to name him minister of national defense. Outraged at
the government's charges that Moczulski had been a collaborator with the
communist secret service, the KPN voted for Olszewski's removal in June
1992. The KPN then withdrew its initial support of Pawlak as Olszewski's
replacement. The seven-party alliance in support of Suchocka in mid-1992
seemingly ended the KPN's participation in coalition politics and
returned it to the role of the uncompromising outsider.
PZPR and Successor Parties
During the 1980s, the Marxist underpinnings of the PZPR steadily
eroded, and, long before the round table talks, the ruling party had
lost its ideological fervor. Official PZPR documents compiled in May
1987 revealed that only about 25 percent of the membership were
politically active, more than 60 percent paid their dues but were
inactive, and 15 percent did not even pay their dues. By that time,
protecting the national interest had replaced Marxist doctrine as the
guiding principle of the government's actions. For example, the
Jaruzelski regime characterized its imposition of martial law in 1981
not as an attempt to restore Marxist purity but as a preemptive measure
to avoid Soviet military intervention in Poland. The PZPR had accepted
the necessity of economic decentralization, privatization, and price
liberalization, realizing that to regain political legitimacy it had to
win the cooperation of the opposition.
Despite its enormous advantage in institutional and monetary
resources, control of the electronic media and most print media, and a
slate of reformist, nonideological candidates, the PZPR suffered an
overwhelming defeat in the parliamentary elections of June 1989. Once
the parties that were its traditional allies had repositioned themselves
with Solidarity to install a noncommunist government, the PZPR had
become a political relic. In January 1990, at its final congress (the
eleventh), the PZPR patterned itself after Western social democratic
parties and adopted the name Social Democracy of the Republic of Poland
(Socjaldemokracja Rzeczypospolitej Polski--SdRP).
The SdRP, which inherited the assets and infrastructure of the PZPR,
was a political force that could not be ignored in the reform era.
During the 1990 presidential elections, for example, the SdRP candidate
received 9 percent of the vote. At its first national convention in May
1991, the party adopted a platform supporting pluralistic democracy, a
parliamentary form of government, strict separation of church and state,
women's rights, environmental protection, the right to work, a generous
social safety net, and good relations with all of Poland's neighbors. In
July 1991, preparing for the October parliamentary elections, the SdRP
invited other groups with a communist lineage to join it in a broad
coalition, the Alliance of the Democratic Left (Sojusz Lewicy
Demokratycznej--SLD). The most important of these groups was the
All-Polish Alliance of Trade Unions (Og�lnopolskie Porozumienie Zwiazk�w
Zawodowych--OPZZ), which Jaruzelski had created in 1984 to co-opt
Solidarity's influence among the working people. By the time of the 1991
elections, the OPZZ had a larger membership than Solidarity. Of the 390
SLD candidates for the parliamentary elections of October 1991, 45
percent were members of the SdRP and about one-third belonged to the
OPZZ. The SLD surprised most political observers by finishing a close
second to the Democratic Union and winning sixty Sejm and four Senate
seats. Its failure to expand its membership, however, made the SLD a
political outcast in the coalition-building efforts that followed the
1991 election.
Polish Peasant Party
The rebirth of the moderate interwar Polish Peasant Party (PSL) began
in the summer of 1989, when the United Peasant Party (Zjednoczone
Stronnictwo Ludowe--ZSL) joined forces with Solidarity and Democratic
Party deputies in the new Sejm to usher in a noncommunist government.
The ZSL adopted the name Polish Peasant Party "Renewal" to
distance itself from its past in the communist coalition; then it united
with the largest existing opposition peasant party and resumed its
original name. In the May 1990 local elections, the PSL garnered 20
percent of the rural vote. In September 1990, the PSL withdrew support
for the Mazowiecki government, citing its disapproval of current
agricultural policy and Mazowiecki's failure to appoint a PSL member as
the minister of agriculture. As it continued to seek legislative relief
for farmers, the PSL also became a vocal critic of the Bielecki
government that followed Mazowiecki.
As of mid-1992, the PSL was the third-largest single-party bloc in
the Sejm. In 1992 the party's 180,000 dues-paying members made it the
largest political party in the country. It showed considerable strength
even in such heavily industrialized areas as Upper Silesia. Although not
a member of the five-party coalition that installed Olszewski as prime
minister in December 1991, the PSL provided critical support in securing
Sejm approval for Olszewski's cabinet at a time when that coalition was
already beginning to collapse. Despite its initial support for
Olszewski, however, the party became disenchanted with the prime
minister's agricultural program and voted for his removal in 1992.
Poland
Poland - POLITICS AND THE MEDIA
Poland
Prior to the return of democracy in 1989, Poland's independent press
defied state censorship and flourished to an extent unknown in other
East European communist states. Active publication by opposition groups
in the 1970s formed a tradition for the well-organized distribution of
censored materials that flowered in the contentious decade that
followed.
The Early Opposition Press
As early as 1970, underground groups had begun issuing opposition
literature that included short-lived periodicals, strike announcements,
and brochures. By 1976 opposition groups were better organized and began
issuing influential carbon-copied and mimeographed serials. In the
autumn of that year, KOR began producing its Biuletyn Informacyjny
(Information Bulletin). During the period between 1976 and 1980, about
500 uncensored serial titles were recorded, some with circulations of
more than 20,000 copies. At the same time, underground book publishing
flourished as over thirty-five independent presses issued hundreds of
uncensored monographs.
Following the Gdansk Agreement of August 1980, Poland saw a new
explosion of independent publishing. In addition to Tygodnik
Solidarnosc (Solidarity Weekly), whose circulation was limited to
500,000 copies supplemented by ten regional weeklies, Solidarity and its
rural affiliate published hundreds of new periodicals. Assisted by
donations of printing equipment from the West, about 200 publishing
houses had emerged by December 1981, when martial law abruptly curtailed
independent publishing.
During Solidarity's first period of legal activity, reprints of
opposition literature from abroad, particularly the influential �migr�
journals Kultura (Culture) and Zeszyty Historyczne
(Historical Notebooks), were especially popular.
Liberalization in the 1980s
The imposition of martial law in December 1981 was a major setback
for independent publishing. But, despite the confiscation of printing
equipment and the arrest of opposition leaders, the clandestine press
quickly resumed issuing bulletins. By the end of 1982, some forty
publishing houses were producing a great variety of books, brochures,
and serials. Not only did the Jaruzelski regime fail to infiltrate and
shut down such publishing operations, it allowed considerable freedom of
expression in the "legitimate" press. For example, the
influential Catholic periodical, Tygodnik Powszechny (Universal
Weekly), founded in 1945, provided an independent voice defending the
rights of the Polish citizenry.
After the formal suspension of martial law in July 1983, the regime
grew increasingly tolerant toward independent publishing. The
underground press diversified to reflect the widening spectrum of
opposition points of view. By 1986 only about half of the known
independent serial titles were organs of Solidarity.
As the independent press grew more diverse, the state press
increasingly cited articles published in underground periodicals and
even began to publish "illegal" books. In 1986 the regime
granted legal status to Res Publica, a scholarly underground
journal representing a moderate social and political philosophy.
Meanwhile, the Catholic press grew ever more prominent when dozens of
church publications were resurrected after long being banned.
The Jaruzelski regime's increasingly liberal attitude toward the
print media was motivated not only by a desire to achieve national
reconciliation, but also by the realization that the state could not
suppress three highly prolific publishing networks--the underground
press, the church-sponsored press, and the �migr� press in the West.
After the mid-1980s, the nonstate publishing houses averaged 500 to 600
new titles annually.
The End of Press Censorship
A key element of the Round Table Agreement was the end of the
communist monopoly of the news media. In April 1990, state censorship
was abolished. The PZPR publishing and distribution monopoly, the
Workers' Publication Cooperative Press-Book- Movement began to break up,
and numerous communist-era periodicals were privatized. Some periodical
titles, such as the daily Rzeczpospolita (Republic) and the
weekly Polityka(Politics), were recast and gained respect for
the quality of their journalism. Others, most notably the official party
organ Trybuna Ludu (People's Tribune), changed their names but
continued to represent a leftist political viewpoint (Trybuna Ludu
became simply Trybuna). Many familiar communist ideological
publications were discontinued, however. After mid-1989, hundreds of new
periodicals appeared, failed, reappeared, and failed again. These
failures were the result of the high cost of newsprint, ignorance of
free-market business principles, and the unpredictable demand created by
a newly liberated reading public.
As of mid-1992, nearly 1,000 Polish periodicals were being published.
Among these were seventy-five daily and 164 weekly newspapers. The
left-of-center Gazeta Wyborcza (Election Gazette), with a
circulation of 550,000 weekday copies and more than 850,000 weekend
copies, was the most widely read newspaper. Gazeta Wyborcza,
issued in thirteen local editions, resembled Western papers in its
layout and extensive commercial advertising. Rzeczpospolit
claimed roughly 250,000 readers, followed closely by Zycie Warszawy
(Warsaw Life). Of the national political weeklies, Polityka and
Wprost (Straightforward) enjoyed the greatest success, with
circulations of 350,000 and 250,000, respectively.
In the years following the Round Table Agreement, the Polish press
presented a range of opinion that reflected the increasingly fractured
political landscape. Following the schism between Mazowiecki and Walesa
forces in 1990, Tygodnik Solidarnosc became the mouthpiece of
the pro-Walesa Center Alliance, while Michnik's Gazeta Wyborcza
and the Catholic church's Tygodnik Powszechny supported the
Mazowiecki faction.
Book Publishing
After the Round Table Agreement, book publishing, distribution, and
marketing entered a period of unprecedented upheaval. Together with the
welcome lifting of censorship came the end of generous state subsidies
for publishers. Thus, publishers of esoteric scholarly and literary
works with limited market appeal suffered severe losses. At the same
time, however, the newfound opportunity to gain profits by satisfying
the reading tastes of the Polish public caused a dramatic proliferation
of publishing houses. In mid-1992, between 1,200 and 2,000 publishing
houses, most of them small enterprises, were in operation. Only about
100 of that number had all the trappings of full-scale publishing firms:
catalogs, international standard book numbers, and observance of the
copyright deposit law.
Radio and Television
To a significant extent, electronic news and information sources
defied government control in the 1980s. Millions of Poles received
uncensored radio broadcasts from Radio Free Europe, the Voice of
America, the British Broadcasting Corporation, and other Western
sources. Solidarity units also occasionally broadcast news programs from
mobile radio stations. And hundreds of thousands of VCRs allowed the
Polish population to view taboo films by prominent domestic and foreign
directors.
Unlike periodicals, the electronic media adjusted slowly to the
changed political environment following the Round Table Agreement. As of
mid-1992, the Sejm had yet to enact legislation to regulate radio and
television broadcasting. Decades of communist manipulation of the
electronic media had taught politicians the power of those media in
shaping public attitudes. In mid-1992, Walesa indicated his continuing
distrust of broadcast journalism by stating that television should
represent the government's views and that state television was not the
place for contrary political opinions. The membership of the Committee
for Radio and Television, a communist-era holdover agency regulating all
broadcasting, was determined by the Council of Ministers, and
appointment of the committee chairman became highly politicized.
In mid-1992 Poland continued to have only two national television
channels, and by Western standards the program offerings were limited.
Besides daily news broadcasts, the most popular program was a political
satire, "Polish Zoo," a weekly puppet show that lampooned
leading political figures and institutions, including the church. To
supplement the meager offerings of domestic television, many Poles
received foreign broadcasts. Small satellite antenna dishes were common
throughout the country. Impatient with the government's inaction,
private television stations in Warsaw, Lublin, Poznan, and Szczecin
began to broadcast without licenses in the early 1990s.
The government interfered less with radio than with television
broadcasting. In addition to the four national stations broadcasting to
nearly 11 million Polish receivers, thirteen unlicensed radio stations
had come into existence by mid-1992. Nearly 600 applications for
broadcasting licenses awaited evaluation. Radio broadcasts were
dominated by Western popular music, just as the publishing and film
industries were overwhelmingly Western in orientation.
The continuing dominance of Western culture in the 1990s appeared to
be assured, as unauthorized reproduction of films, literature, and music
made inexpensive, high-quality copies easily accessible to the average
citizen. In the postcommunist era, intellectual piracy in Poland emerged
as one of the troublesome issues between Warsaw and the United States.
In early 1992, it was estimated that the United States lost US$140
million dollars annually to Polish audio, video, and computer program
piracy.
Poland
Poland - FOREIGN RELATIONS
Poland
In mid-1992, Poland was enjoying the fruits of three years of
skillful statesmanship by its foreign minister, Krzysztof Skubiszewski,
who had directed foreign policy in five governments beginning with
Mazowiecki in August 1989. Skubiszewski guided Poland through a
tumultuous period during which Warsaw reclaimed full sovereignty in
foreign affairs for the first time since World War II and moved
resolutely to "rejoin Europe."
The Soviet-dominated Warsaw Treaty Organization (known as the Warsaw
Pact) and its economic counterpart, the Council of Mutual Economic
Cooperation (Comecon), which had set the parameters of Polish foreign
policy for decades, no longer existed after mid-1991. By year's end, the
Soviet Union itself had disappeared, and by late 1992 Moscow was to
complete the withdrawal of combat troops from Poland. Meanwhile, Warsaw
pursued forward-looking bilateral relations with the many newly
independent states of the former Soviet Union. Only in the case of
Lithuania could relations with eastern neighbors be described as less
than cordial.
To replace the old Soviet-dominated military and trade structures,
Poland sought collective security with its southern neighbors, the Czech
and Slovak Federative Republic, and Hungary, with which it formed the
so-called Visegr�d Triangle. This arrangement envisioned a bilateral
free trade zone between Budapest and Warsaw, which both the Czechs and
the Slovaks were invited to join. The Visegr�d partners would also
coordinate their strategies to join West European economic and military
organizations.
In mid-1992, Poland's relationship with its other traditional enemy,
Germany, also was forward-looking. Acquiescing to German reunification,
Warsaw won assurances that Bonn would recognize the Oder-Neisse Line as
the official, permanent frontier between Germany and Poland, ratifying
the postwar transfer of German lands to Poland. Germany offered economic
assistance, investment, and support for Polish membership in the
European Community (EC).
Relations with other Western nations in mid-1992 were generally
excellent. Warsaw was frustrated, however, by its inability to gain full
membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the Western
European Union (WEU), and the EC and by the reluctance of the West to
lower import tariffs on Polish goods. Traditionally warm ties with the
United States returned to normal after the difficult 1980s, and Poland
regained most-favored-nation trade status and benefited from a range of
United States economic and technical assistance.
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Soviet Union and Russia
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Other Former Soviet Republics
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Germany
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The United States
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Other Western Countries
Poland
Poland - Soviet Union and Russia
Poland
The geopolitical realities of postwar Europe allowed Poland little
room to maneuver in foreign policy. Until the late 1980s, the ever
present threat of Soviet intervention kept Poland a compliant member of
the Warsaw Pact. In fact, Jaruzelski maintained that the decision to
impose martial law in December 1981 was taken to preempt a Soviet
invasion. Such an invasion would have been consistent with the Brezhnev
Doctrine, which justified military intervention in any Warsaw Pact
member where socialism was threatened. In early 1992, Jaruzelski's claim
received corroboration when a high official in the former Red Army
revealed the Soviet Union's plan to invade Poland at the end of 1981
under precisely that pretext.
In the late 1980s, the Brezhnev Doctrine was suspended when Soviet
leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev enunciated a new world view, which he called
"new thinking." For the first time in the postwar era, the
Soviet Union acknowledged the right of its East European neighbors to
pursue their own paths of social and economic development. Thus, Moscow
reluctantly accepted Poland's 1989 Round Table Agreement, the defeat of
the communists in Poland's first open parliamentary elections, and the
ensuing installation of a noncommunist government as beyond its
legitimate concern.
As the first postcommunist leadership of Poland, the Mazowiecki
government approached its relationship with the Soviet Union with
cautious resolve, reassuring Moscow that Poland would fulfill its
obligations as a member of the Warsaw Pact and Comecon. Nevertheless,
Poland soon demonstrated its determination to transform these
Soviet-dominated military and economic alliances into consultative
bodies respecting the sovereignty of all member countries. Foreign
Minister Skubiszewski guided foreign affairs skillfully through this
delicate period, as the Warsaw Pact, Comecon, and the Soviet Union
itself disintegrated.
Among the difficult issues the new government confronted in
redefining its relationship with the Soviet Union were the presence of
some 58,000 Soviet troops on Polish territory; the future role of the
Warsaw Pact and Comecon; new terms of bilateral trade; the plight of
more than 1 million ethnic Poles living on Soviet territory;
clarification of the "blank spots" in the history of
Soviet-Polish relations; and the Polish relationship to Soviet republics
seeking independence.
Skubiszewski handled the issue of Soviet troop withdrawal delicately.
In negotiating with Moscow, the government faced accusations of timidity
from presidential candidate Walesa on the one hand and the risk of
antagonizing Moscow and strengthening the position of Kremlin hardliners
on the other. Walesa and some of the center-right parties believed the
Mazowiecki government was moving too cautiously on the issue. But
Mazowiecki viewed Warsaw Pact forces as a counterbalance to a reunited,
possibly expansionist Germany. In September 1990, Mazowiecki yielded to
domestic pressure by demanding negotiations on the withdrawal of Soviet
forces and cleanup of the extensive environmental damage they had caused. By the end of 1990, the Polish side
was pushing Moscow to remove all its forces within one year.
Postcommunist Poland's trade relationship with the Soviet Union also
presented a complex problem. Moscow was Poland's most important trading
partner, the source of nearly all its imported oil and gas, and the
market for 70 percent of its industrial exports. Poland had benefited
from the comfortable if inefficient Comecon trading arrangements of
administered prices denominated in transferable rubles. Although the
impending end of Comecon clearly signaled the need for drastic
reorientation of trade policy, in 1990 no source could replace rapidly
the fundamental supplies available from the old system. Thus, Moscow
retained its economic influence on Polish foreign policy despite
Gorbachev's pledges to respect Polish sovereignty.
Yet another obstacle to normalized relations was the legacy of
Stalin's crimes against the Polish people in World War II and the plight
of Polish nationals who remained in Soviet territory after the war. In
April 1990, Gorbachev finally acknowledged Soviet culpability in the
massacre of thousands of Polish officers in the Katyn Forest, which
until that time the Soviets had attributed to the German army despite
widespread knowledge of the true situation. Indeed, early in 1989 the Jaruzelski government had
declared that Stalin's secret police, not the German army, had committed
the atrocities. Gorbachev's action in 1990 did not placate Poland. The
Polish government continued to demand information on critical
"blank spots" in the history of the World War II era, notably
the fate of Poles whom Stalin exiled to Siberia and Central Asia.
In 1990 and 1991, the Bielecki government continued Mazowiecki's
policy toward Moscow. The withdrawal of Soviet forces, the interruption
of oil and gas deliveries, and the collapse of the Soviet market for
Polish exports dominated bilateral relations during Bielecki's tenure.
Moscow's decision to shift to hard-currency trade at world prices as of
January 1, 1992 had painful consequences for Poland. In response to
severe disruption of its export market, fuel delivery, and domestic
employment, Warsaw established ad hoc barter arrangements with the
Soviet Union and individual neighboring republics.
Meanwhile, on the security front, the Soviets pressured Poland and
other members of the dying Warsaw Pact to sign new bilateral treaties
giving Moscow the right to veto entry into alliances inimical to Soviet
interests. Among the East European nations formerly in the Soviet
sphere, however, only Romania yielded to Moscow's pressure. Poland
refused to surrender its sovereign right to choose allies. After a
failed attempt by hardliners to take over the Soviet government in
August 1991, Moscow dropped its demand, and bilateral negotiations
proceeded more smoothly.
The coup attempt in the Soviet Union placed Warsaw in a precarious
situation and emphasized the real possibility that Soviet hegemony would
return to Eastern Europe if reactionaries overthrew Gorbachev. For
Warsaw such a scenario was quite plausible because substantial Soviet
forces remained in Poland and the former German Democratic Republic
(East Germany) at the time of the coup, and no bilateral treaty
guaranteed withdrawal. Although Walesa's official statements during the
crisis affirmed Poland's sovereignty and commitment to democracy, later
rumors suggested that he had considered recognizing the Moscow junta.
Galvanized by the coup events, Poland pressed the Soviet Union for a
withdrawal timetable. In October 1991, the countries initialed a treaty
providing for the removal of all combat troops by November 15, 1992,
leaving only 6,000 support personnel by the beginning of 1993. Signature
of a final treaty, however, was delayed by disagreement on compensation
details. Moscow claimed compensation for fixed assets left in Poland,
while Warsaw demanded compensation for damage done to its environment
and infrastructure by the basing and transport of Soviet troops and
equipment. Walesa and Russian president Boris Yeltsin signed the final
accords in May 1992.
The presidents also signed several other bilateral agreements on that
occasion. The most important was a new cooperation treaty to replace the
Polish-Soviet friendship treaty of 1965. The breakthrough on the new
treaty had come soon after the failed August coup, which dramatically
changed the relationship among the republics of the Soviet Union. Moscow
conceded to Poland the right to pursue its own security relationships
and to deal directly with individual republics. During his Moscow visit,
Walesa announced the beginning of a new chapter in Polish-Russian
relations; in return, Yeltsin expressed hope for mutual understanding
and partnership in future relations.
Walesa's visit to Moscow also yielded a Polish-Russian consular
convention; a declaration on cultural, scientific, and educational
cooperation; a provisional settlement of the issue of double taxation;
and an agreement on border crossing points. The presidents issued a
joint statement condemning the crimes of Stalinism against both the
Polish and Russian peoples and pledging to base bilateral relations on
the principles of international law, democracy, and the observance of
human rights.
Poland
Poland - Other Former Soviet Republics
Poland
From the outset, Foreign Minister Skubiszewski pursued a dual-track
policy toward Poland's eastern neighbors, Russia, Belarus, Lithuania,
and Ukraine. This approach enabled Warsaw to negotiate for Polish
interests with the central political authority that remained in Moscow
as the Soviet Union dissolved, while simultaneously developing bilateral
ties with the individual republics that would emerge from that process
as independent neighbors. The failure of the August coup signaled to
Warsaw the end of the highly centralized Soviet state and the
feasibility of officially recognizing independence-minded republics.
Accordingly, immediately after the coup Poland became the first East
European country to extend diplomatic recognition to the Baltic
republics of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. On the day following the
formal dissolution of the Soviet Union, Poland announced that it was
prepared to open normal diplomatic relations with all the members of the
Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).
Although it supported national self-determination, Warsaw feared that
the breakup of the Soviet Union might bring regional instability, armed
conflict fueled by rival territorial claims, and perhaps millions of
displaced persons crossing into Poland. Still struggling with its own
economic and political transition, Poland could not have borne the
burden of resettling huge numbers of refugees. These concerns moved
President Walesa to declare his support for Gorbachev's last-ditch
effort in December 1991 to reconstitute the Soviet Union as a loose
confederation. Then, after the formal demise of the Soviet Union, Walesa
called for massive Western aid for the newly created CIS to avoid what
he called a "mass exodus of hungry refugees."
Baltic States
On numerous occasions after mid-1989, the Polish government
demonstrated sympathy for the increasingly vocal Lithuanian independence
movement. After the Lithuanian declaration of independence in March
1990, a Polish senator was the first foreign government representative
to address the Lithuanian parliament. Poland provided important moral
support during the economic blockade imposed by the Kremlin, and after
the Soviet military crackdown in Vilnius in January 1991, Poland joined
Scandinavian nations, the Czech and Slovak Federative Republic, and
Hungary in calling for a discussion of the action by the Conference on
Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE).
Despite Warsaw's sympathetic actions, Vilnius grew impatient at the
Poles' unwillingness to grant diplomatic recognition. At that time,
however, such an action would have jeopardized negotiations on
withdrawal of Soviet troops from Poland-- especially because no major
Western power had recognized Lithuania. Skubiszewski noted that although
good relations with the Baltics were important to Poland, relations with
the Soviet Union had immediate strategic significance.
The demise of the Soviet Union transformed Poland's relationship with
Lithuania. As the threat of repression from Moscow diminished, Vilnius
began to perceive Warsaw as a likely source of external pressure. The
Lithuanian government grew suspicious that Warsaw coveted lost
territories in Lithuania, where ethnic Poles still resided in heavy
concentrations. From Poland's perspective, the respect of minority
rights for roughly 260,000 ethnic Poles residing in Lithuania emerged as
the most important issue in the bilateral relationship.
In 1988 and 1989, relations of the Polish minority in Lithuania with
the Lithuanian government deteriorated with the enactment of language
laws that discriminated against nonLithuanian speakers. The laws
provoked leaders of the Polish minority to declare an autonomous Polish
national territorial district. In response, Vilnius dismissed numerous
ethnic Polish local officials and placed districts with large Polish
populations under direct parliamentary administration. Further
contributing to the worsening relations between the two communities was
a citizenship law requiring a loyalty oath that the Polish community
viewed as oppressive. Relations reached their nadir in late 1991 when
the Lithuanian defense minister called Poland his country's greatest
threat. The following March, Skubiszewski charged Lithuania with
delaying elections to local councils in districts with large
concentrations of ethnic Poles.
Early 1992 also brought hopeful developments, however. The foreign
ministers of the two nations signed a wide-ranging tenpoint declaration
of friendship and neighborly relations and a consular convention. In the
declaration, each country renounced all territorial claims against the
other and pledged to adhere to European standards in respecting the
rights of its minorities, including native-language education rights.
Polish relations with the other two Baltic states were less
complicated. In mid-1992, Skubiszewski visited Latvia to sign the first
Polish bilateral treaty with any of the newly independent Baltic states.
He also signed important accords on trade, travel, and minority rights.
Skubiszewski praised Latvia's treatment of its sizable Polish
population, which in mid-1992 was estimated at between 60,000 and
100,000. Skubiszewski then signed a similar treaty in Tallinn, where the
Estonian foreign minister described relations with Warsaw as excellent.
Both Estonia and Latvia viewed Poland as a benign neighbor whose
experience in economic and political reform could facilitate their own
transition and could promote their integration into Western Europe.
Belarus
For several reasons, Polish relations with Belarus were slow to
develop. Belarus, which had never existed as an independent state, had
been so firmly incorporated into the Soviet Union that it lacked the
intense sense of nationhood found in the Baltic states and in Ukraine.
Prior to the August coup attempt, Polish overtures were frustrated
because the Belorussian Republic (as it was known before independence)
hesitated to pursue foreign policy initiatives without the Kremlin's
blessing. Most notably, in late 1990 the Belorussians refused to sign a
declaration of friendship and cooperation, although Russia and Ukraine
had already signed similar agreements. Minsk specifically objected to
wording about its borders with Poland and to the treatment of the
approximately 300,000 ethnic Belorussians in Poland.
After August 1991, relations evolved rapidly once Belarus had
declared its independence. In a declaration of friendship and
cooperation, signed in October 1991, each party renounced territorial
claims against the other and promised to respect minority rights. In
December 1991, Poland extended diplomatic recognition to Belarus.
Commercial ties between the two countries flourished in 1991 and 1992,
and several important transportation and economic agreements took
effect. A bilateral treaty of wideranging cooperation in security,
environmental, economic, and other matters was prepared for signing in
mid-1992.
Ukraine
Despite a centuries-old legacy of conflict, relations between Poland
and Ukraine steadily improved after 1989, particularly after Ukraine
gained its independence in late 1991. In the fall of 1990, the countries
signed a declaration of friendship and cooperation, renouncing all
territorial claims against one another and guaranteeing the rights of
national minorities on their territories. Ground-breaking bilateral
economic and cultural agreements followed in 1991, as Ukraine emerged
from Moscow's domination and reoriented itself toward Central Europe and
Western Europe.
Both countries had much to gain from improved ties. Kiev sought
Polish intercession to gain acceptance in European economic and security
organizations; Warsaw welcomed the prospect of a nonthreatening,
denuclearized neighbor on its eastern border.
Hours after the results of a referendum on Ukrainian independence
were announced in December 1991, Poland was the first country to grant
diplomatic recognition to the new nation. A bilateral cooperation treaty
ensuring minority rights on each side of the border was signed during
the May 1992 visit to Warsaw of Ukraine's President, Leonid Kravchuk.
The treaty called for annual consultations between the countries'
foreign ministers and cooperation in economic, cultural, scientific, and
environmental affairs. During Walesa's visit to Moscow (also in May
1992) to sign long-awaited troop withdrawal and bilateral cooperation
treaties, Walesa noted the rapid progress in bilateral relations since
1989 and hailed the countries' new emphasis on future goals rather than
past conflicts. Walesa also noted that the concept of a
Warsaw-Moscow-Kiev alliance, raised in his talks with Yeltsin, would
depend most heavily on peaceful relations between Russia and Ukraine.
This observation reaffirmed Poland's neutrality in ongoing
Russian-Ukrainian disagreements over the ownership of the Black Sea
Fleet, Crimea, and other territories.
Southern Neighbors and the Visegr�d Triangle
With the demise of the Warsaw Pact and Comecon, the so-called upper
tier nations of Eastern Europe (Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia,
which in 1990 became the Czech and Slovak Federative Republic) found
themselves in a security vacuum with both military and economic
dimensions. But by late 1991, all three had gained associate status with
NATO and the EC and were pursuing full membership in those
organizations.
Poland, the Czech and Slovak Federative Republic, and Hungary all
supported an enhanced peacekeeping role for the CSCE, and all joined
emerging regional integration associations such as the Central European
Initiative. Originally called the Pentagonale and including Italy,
Yugoslavia, Austria, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, this grouping aimed to
strengthen economic, cultural, and ecological cooperation in the region.
The organization became known as the Hexagonale when Poland joined in
July 1991, only to be renamed the Central European Initiative a few
months later when Yugoslavia's breakup brought the withdrawal of that
nation.
Already in 1990, Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia had begun to
coordinate efforts toward shared goals, including the end of the
Soviet-dominated Warsaw Pact and Comecon and entry into Western
institutions. A milestone in trilateral cooperation was the February
1991 summit meeting of Hungary's Prime Minister J�zsef Antall,
President V�clav Havel of the Czech and Slovak Federative Republic, and
Lech Walesa at Visegr�d, Hungary. An earlier summit at Bratislava had
initiated a series of meetings and exchanges among the leaders of the
three potential partners, leading to the formation of a consultative
committee to coordinate policy on regional problems. The following
January, the foreign ministers met in Budapest and issued a joint
communiqu� criticizing the Kremlin's military crackdown in the Baltics.
The foreign ministers also issued a statement of support for the United
States-led coalition in the Kuwait crisis.
The outcome of the Visegr�d summit was the Declaration on the
Cooperation of the Hungarian Republic, the Czech and Slovak Federative
Republic, and the Republic of Poland on the Road to European
Integration. The document committed the signatories to eliminate the
vestiges of totalitarianism, build democracy, ensure human rights, and
totally integrate themselves into the "European political,
economic, security, and legislative order." The triangle was not
intended to become a military alliance, as Foreign Minister Skubiszewski
carefully emphasized to allay fears in Moscow. Poland subsequently
signed bilateral military accords with the other triangle partners,
again insisting that the agreements were designed to promote
communication and understanding and posed no threat to any specific
country.
During the August coup attempt in Moscow, triangle political and
military leaders were in frequent contact, agreeing to adopt a common
position toward the crisis and the refugee and border security problems
that might result from it. In October 1991, a second summit in Krak�w
formalized the Visegr�d declaration, accelerated efforts to gain NATO
and EC membership, and advocated an expanded role for the CSCE. The
eight-point Krak�w declaration also chastised Serbia as the aggressor
in the Yugoslav conflict and called for national self-determination and
the preservation of the previously existing republic boundaries in that
country.
In the months following the Krak�w summit, several key events
strengthened ties among the triangle members and with the West. The
triangle supported a proposal by the United States and Germany to
establish a North Atlantic Cooperation Council that would promote
stability and communication between NATO and the nations of Central
Europe and the former Soviet Union. And in December, the triangle
countries were accorded associate membership in the EC. This step
established routine political contacts with the EC and set the course
toward eventual full membership. Also in December, the triangle members
agreed to coordinate their policy on recognition of the independence of
Slovenia and Croatia, which they granted in January 1992. In April 1992,
they jointly recognized the independence of Bosnia and Hercegovina.
By early autumn 1992, the future of the triangle was clouded by the
impending division of the Czech and Slovak Federative Republic and by
tensions between Hungary and Slovakia over a series of issues. After
meeting Czech prime minister V�clav Klaus in September, Polish prime
minister Suchocka stated that Poland viewed the split as a settled
matter and would treat the Czech Republic and Slovakia on equal terms.
Klaus stressed that trilateral relations would become less important,
and that closer bilateral ties among the members would be the way of the
future. Polish foreign minister Skubiszewski, however, favored
continuing the Visegr�d Triangle, stating that there were problems that
could be resolved better through regional cooperation than by unilateral
or bilateral action.
Poland
Poland - Germany
Poland
Together with securing the removal of Soviet troops from Polish
territory, the reemergence of a united, economically powerful Germany
presented Warsaw's greatest foreign policy challenge after 1989. Fear of
a resurgent Germany motivated Skubiszewski's initial desire to preserve
the Warsaw Pact as a political alliance guaranteeing the Oder-Neisse
Line as Poland's western border. <"http://worldfacts.us/Poland-Warsaw.htm"> Warsaw also welcomed the continued
presence of United States forces in Europe as a check on potential
German expansionism. At the same time, however, Germany represented the
largest potential source of economic assistance and investment for
Poland, accounting in 1990 for one-fifth of Warsaw's imports and
one-quarter of its exports.
Throughout the postwar period, relations between Warsaw and the
Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) had ranged from cool to
hostile. In 1981 Poland's international isolation following the
imposition of martial law further set back bilateral relations. Despite
the overall expansion of economic ties in the postwar period,
intractable differences remained over such issues as treatment of the
300,000 ethnic Germans in Poland, German territorial claims on Poland,
compensation for Polish victims of Nazi persecution, and the permanence
of the OderNeisse border. Warsaw consistently and energetically opposed
all movement toward German reunification and revanchism. On the other
hand, bilateral relations between Poland and East Germany were never
warm, in spite of their official alliance in the Warsaw Pact. Poles
resented East Germany's general enthusiasm for communist orthodoxy and
its support of Jaruzelski's martial law decree in 1981.
West German chancellor Helmut Kohl visited Warsaw in November 1989 to
accelerate the recent improvement of relations between the traditional
enemies. Kohl hoped to gain Polish guarantees for German minority rights
and to quiet fears about German revanchism that had escalated with
impending reunification. West Germany extended some US$2 billion in
economic assistance to Warsaw and acknowledged Germany's guilt for
attacking Poland in World War II. Kohl also reaffirmed a 1970 bilateral
treaty promising to respect existing borders. After Kohl subsequently
caused an international stir by hedging on that commitment, the border
issue was buried when Germany officially renounced all claims on Polish
territory and recognized the permanence of the existing border in May
1990.
December 1991 marked a milestone in Polish-German relations when the
parliaments of both countries ratified a treaty of friendship and
cooperation. On that occasion, Prime Minister Bielecki stated that the
common strategic goal of a united Europe had inspired Poland and unified
Germany to a level of mutual trust unprecedented in the long history of
their coexistence. Bielecki and his successors viewed Germany as
Poland's key to integration into the West. In turn, Germany considered
Warsaw the gateway to vast economic opportunities in the East. A central
element of the treaty was strict adherence to international standards in
the treatment of ethnic minorities.
In 1992 bilateral relations continued to improve. On an official
visit in the spring, Walesa praised Germany as a democratic, liberal,
and modern state and urged greater investment in Poland. In July the new
German foreign minister, Klaus Kinkel, visited Warsaw to sign routine
customs and border agreements. Kinkel praised Poland's treatment of its
German minority, which had gained seven representatives in the Sejm and
one in the Senate in the October 1991 parliamentary elections.
Despite the many positive signs of a lasting rapprochement between
Germany and Poland, however, in 1992 Poles remained suspicious of their
powerful western neighbor. European economic instability during the late
summer brought into question the feasibility of the EC goal of monetary
and political union and rekindled fears of German economic domination.
Widespread vandalism and violence by xenophobic extremists in Germany
also contributed to Polish unease.
Poland
Poland - The United States
Poland
Over the years, a special relationship evolved between the peoples of
Poland and the United States. Poles and persons of Polish ancestry made
enormous contributions at every stage in the development of the United
States. For Poles, family ties and genuine admiration for the United
States negated decades of official anti-American propaganda. As official
relations between Washington and Warsaw deteriorated after the December
1981 imposition of martial law, the United States maintained
communication with the centers of Polish opposition, including leaders
of labor, the intelligentsia, and the Roman Catholic Church. During the
1980s, United States policies of economic sanctions against the regime
and support for the opposition contributed to the ultimate fall of the
communist government.
Immediately after Jaruzelski imposed martial law in 1981, the United
States invoked economic sanctions against Poland. In 1982 the United
States suspended most-favored-nation trade status and vetoed Poland's
application for membership in the International Monetary Fund. In the
following years, Warsaw repeatedly blamed such United States policies
for Poland's economic distress. For the period 1981 to 1985, the Polish
government claimed that United States-inspired sanctions and Western
refusal to reschedule debts and extend additional credit had cost the
Polish economy US$15 billion in export income and other losses.
Despite the end of martial law and limited amnesty for political
prisoners in 1983, relations with the United States did not improve. In
the mid-1980s, Warsaw's determined efforts to prove its loyalty to the
Soviet Union made rapprochement with Washington impossible. Poland
supported the Soviet version of events surrounding the shooting down of
a Korean Airlines passenger plane in 1983, an incident that greatly
heightened Soviet Union-United States tensions. In 1984 Warsaw joined
the Soviet boycott of the Los Angeles Olympic Games in reprisal for the
United States boycott of the previous games in Moscow. Jaruzelski
delivered a scathing attack against United States sanctions policy in a
1985 speech at the United Nations. And in 1986 the Polish government
condemned the United States air strike against Libya.
Official relations between Washington and Warsaw began to improve
after the Jaruzelski government's 1986 general amnesty released all
political prisoners. By early 1987, the administration of Ronald W.
Reagan lifted all economic sanctions and restored Poland's
most-favored-nation trading status. Vice President George H.W. Bush
visited Warsaw the following October and promised United States support
for debt rescheduling in return for the Polish government's pledge to
respect human rights. In 1988, however, the United States decided to
withhold economic aid until Poland reestablished political pluralism.
After the Round Table Agreement of mid-1989, the United States moved
quickly to encourage democratic processes and assist economic reform in
Poland. Toward this goal, President Bush initially promised some US$100
million in economic assistance, and a three-year package totaling US$1
billion was proposed later in the year. In November Walesa visited
Washington and addressed a joint session of the United States Congress,
which greeted his unprecedented speech with promises of additional
economic assistance. The Congress enacted the Support for Eastern
European Democracy Act (SEED) to streamline the delivery of humanitarian
aid and assistance for the development of democracy and freemarket
institutions in postcommunist Eastern Europe. An interagency
coordinating council led by the Department of State was established to
direct assistance to Eastern Europe. The privately managed
Polish-American Enterprise Fund (PAEF) was created in May 1990 to
provide credit for Polish entrepreneurs to start businesses. Contingent
on the level of congressional funding, the PAEF estimated that it would
make US$130 million in loans in 1991. Another nongovernmental
organization, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, began
providing loans, loan guarantees, insurance, and advice to facilitate
United States private investment in Poland and other East European
countries. In 1990 the United States led an international effort to
create the US$200 million Polish Stabilization Fund, which was
instrumental in making the zloty convertible with Western currencies.
As a major player in such international financial institutions as the
World Bank, the IMF, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and
Development (OECD), the Paris Club, and the European Bank for
Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), the United States led the effort
to provide debt relief and other economic assistance to Poland. In early
1991, the United States pledged a further 20 percent reduction of
Warsaw's debt to Washington. In a mid-1992 visit to Warsaw, President
Bush praised Poland's political and economic reforms and proposed using
the currency-stabilization fund to spur private-sector growth.
Poland
Poland - Other Western Countries
Poland
After December 1981, Polish relations with the West were generally
unfriendly for several years. Few high-ranking Western delegations
travelled to Warsaw, and the Polish government failed to end West
European support of economic sanctions in response to martial law. In
1985 a brief meeting between Jaruzelski and French president Fran�ois
Mitterrand yielded no concrete results. Jaruzelski's first full-fledged
official visit to the West was his 1987 trip to Italy, during which he
signed an important agreement for automobile production with the Fiat
Corporation.
British and French policy toward Poland throughout the 1980s was
consistent with that of Washington. Both United States allies imposed
sanctions against Warsaw after December 1981. Both cultivated contacts
with nongovernment circles and assisted the development of pluralism.
And both welcomed the round table talks of 1989 and supported economic
assistance to the new government.
The visit of the British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, to Warsaw
in November 1988 sent a clear signal of Britain's support for pluralism
and economic reform in Poland. Thatcher met with Solidarity leaders and
made a symbolic visit to the grave of Father Jerzy Popieluszko, a
dissident killed by the Polish secret service in 1984. In June 1989,
Mitterrand visited Poland. In March 1992, Prime Minister Olszewski
traveled to Paris and received Mitterrand's assurances of support for
Polish membership in the EC.
Relations with Israel improved dramatically after 1988, when Poland
hosted an international conference to honor the victims of the Holocaust
and to observe the forty-fifth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto
uprising. Full diplomatic relations were reestablished in 1990.
Poland
Poland - Bibliography
Poland
Abromsky, Chimen, et al. (eds.). The Jews in Poland. New
York: Blackwell, 1986.
Ash, Timothy Garton. The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of '89
Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague. New
York: Random House, 1990.
------. The Polish Revolution: Solidarity. New York:
Vintage, 1985.
------. The Uses of Adversity: Essays on the Fate of Central
Europe. New York: Random House, 1989.
Barraclough, Geoffrey (ed.). Eastern and Western Europe in the
Middle Ages. (History of European Civilization Library.)
London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970.
Bhutani, Surendra. "Poland under Gierek: 1970-1980," IDSA
Journal [New Delhi], 16, July-September 1983, 40-55.
Davies, Norman. God's Playground: A History of Poland, 1
and 2. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.
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