Post-Communist Poland
Ever since the Soviet army had occupied Poland in the summer of 1943, the Soviet Union had maintained a Communist dictatorship in Poland through simple preponderance of arms. Already anti-Russian thanks to the Tsarist occupation of Congress Poland and the Nazi-Soviet pact that started the Second World War, the Polish nation proved decidedly reluctant to serve as a potential future battleground between the League of Nations and the Soviet Union. Throughout the 1950's, Poland's Communist liberalized the country in stages -- the Catholic Church soon regained much of its previous autonomy, for instance, while the right to own private property was never stripped from the Polish population.
When, in April of 1960, news reached Warsaw of the Soviet Civil War that erupted in their overbearing eastern neighbour, few Poles were disturbed. Even as the Soviet garrisons looked on, the Polish Communists followed the lead of their Baltic counterparts and simply voted to dissolve the Communist dictatorship. For a time, there were fears that the garrisons might intervene, but the support of the garrison commanders for the Leningrad liberals and the extreme vulnerability of their position made a hardline stance unthinkable. As a broad coalition of nationalists, Catholics, and social democrats quickly formed the Provisional Government of the Republic of Poland, their first priority was to ensure the rapid withdrawal of the Soviet garrisons. Eventually, the League of Nations and the European Confederation achieved not only the rapid transfer of Soviet army units out of Poland and the Baltic States, but secured the acquiescence of the Soviet Union to the eventual incorporation of the five countries into the European Confederation as neutral states.
By August of 1960, the Soviet troops had finished their hasty withdrawal from Poland. For the first time in 20 years, Poland was independent in fact as well as in name. However, independent Poland was left with numerous problems. Five in particular were threatening.
Fortunately, Poland's international environment in 1960 was far more congenial to Polish independence than in 1918. The union of all non-Communist Europe in the League of Nations, and the still-stronger bond that existed between the member-states of the European Confederation, positively discouraged thoughts of revanchism. Poland managed to quickly resolve any potential problems with Lithuania through the institution of permanent bilateral discussions held in Warsaw and Vilnius, encouraged by the Polish Foreign Minister and poet Czeslaw Milosz, himself born in Polish Vilna. The signing of the 1962 Kaunas Accords, which reiterated mutual Polono-Lithuanian recognition of their common frontier and allowed each government to subsidize the cultural institutions of their co-nationals in the other country, marked the end of any possible tensions.
Polish relations with the German states were rather less pleasant. Public opinion in Saxony, in particular, was quite hostile to Poland owing to the settlement of many of the ethnic Germans expelled from the Oder-Neisse lands in Saxony, with many favouring the "return" of Polish Silesia to Saxon hands. The Bundesrepublik was less hostile to Poland owing to its recognition of the atrocities suffered by Poles and German hands, but here, too, German expellee groups agitated in favour of border revisions. (Brandenburg, which might have served as the core of a revisionist neo-Prussian state, was kept under control by the League of Nations.) When Poland tried to accede to the League of Nations in December of 1960, the Polish application was temporarily blocked by the Saxon government. Heavy pressure applied upon Saxony by its European Confederation partners served to withdraw Saxon opposition. In the summer of 1961, Poland signed border treaties with the neighbouring German states of Saxony and Brandenburg that entailed Saxon and Brandenburg recognition of Polish sovereignty over the Oder-Neisse lands. The Bundesrepublik recognized Poland's independence within its modern borders.
The rapid improvement of Poland's relationship with Lithuania and the German states, in turn, was crucial in the rapid extension of full European Confederation membership to Poland in March of 1963. Unlike the later member-states, Poland was not faced with a terribly large numbers of EC regulations to assimilate into its domestic legislation, while the large Polish emigrant communities elsewhere in Europe -- particularly in France -- helped rally support in these countries for the inclusion of Poland in the European Confederation, despite fears of Polish immigration or competition from Polish agriculture.
The resolution of the problems of the ethnic minorities inside Poland were also resolved by many of the same processes that resolved Poland's problems in its foreign relations. Poland's largest minority -- the two million Eastern Rite Catholics from interwar Poland's Belarusian provinces, deported to Poland after the Second World War by the Soviet Union on the grounds of their supposed Polish sympathies -- were more than willing to assimilate into Polish society in all respects save their particular religion. The 1.2 million ethnic Belarusians and Ukrainians were more recalcitrant, but the Soviet Union and its component republics failed to support the claims of these populations to cultural autonomy. The establishment of the principle of Polish unilingualism in the Polish school system in 1961 encouraged the assimilation of the rising generation of Orthodox Poles, while vernacular Ukrainian and Belarusian media received no official funding and negotiations began with the Ecumenical Patriarchy in Constantinople for the establishment of a Polish Orthodox Church that would conduct its ecclesiastical life in the Polish language.
The Lithuanians and Jews were rather smaller minorities than the Slavs, in 1960 numbering only 90 thousand and 110 thousand each. Both populations, though, had long roots in Polish society, and despite the travails of the Second World War and Communism insisted upon their claims to cultural autonomy. The Kaunas Accords guaranteed Poland's Lithuanian minority access to Lithuanian-medium schools in Poland mostly funded by the Polish government, while the opening of Polish-Lithuanian frontiers allowed Poland's Lithuanians (and Lithuania's Poles) to renew their old ties with their coethnics. Poland's Jews were concentrated in Warsaw and Kraków, and in most respects were assimilated into Polish culture. (More Polish Jews spoke Polish than Yiddish as their first language, for instance.) Despite some anti-Semitism, Polish Jews took advantage of the post-Communist transition to attain official recognition as an ethnic and religious community, organized into a Polish Jewish Consistory on the French model.
Though the three hundred thousand Germans of Poland were concentrated in the district of Opole (German Oppeln), the Polish state firmly resisted attempts by the Saxon government to make Polish official recognition of its German minority a precondition for Polish membership in the European Confederation. The wounds of the Second World War were far too fresh for Poland to do anything but tolerate the existence of its German minority, while other countries with German minorities refused to support the Saxon proposal. Thus, the Germans of Poland remained a population whose component members were guaranteed civil rights as individuals, but which was also denied cultural rights as a collectivity.
Poland's political system was definitively stabilized by the Constitution of 1962, approved in a popular referendum by some 80% of the Polish electorate in April of 1962. Most power was vested in the national legislature of Poland, which was divided into two chambers: the Sejm, or lower house, and the Senat, or upper house. (The Sejm existed during the Communist era, while the Senat was abolished in 1947 and only restored after the end of Communism.) Parliamentarians in both chambers were elected to four-year terms according to a system of proportional representation.
The balance of power in the Polish executive branch was balanced decidedly towards the prime minister, who serves as the actual head of government. The prime minister is appointed by the president with the approval of the lower house of the legislature and was required by the Polish constitution to be a leader of the majority party or coalition. The prime minister is a member of the Council of Ministers -- a rough equivalent of the British Isles' Cabinet -- which is responsible for carrying out the decisions of the legislature, whether through particular government ministries or through legislative commissions. The president is directly elected for a maximum of two four-year terms. As head of state, the president is the highest representative of the country in domestic and international affairs and the head of the armed forces. Under certain circumstances the president also has the power to dissolve the legislature and call for new elections.
A further significant change in Polish governance was the decentralization of local administrative matters from Warsaw to the various provinces and local communities. The vast majority of Poles remained opposed to any degree of federalism, asymmetrical (as in the Second Orleanist Kingdom) or otherwise; there was no question of devolving actual sovereignty to the provinces. Still, democratic local elections to provincial assemblies and local governors were held in 1961, and the Constitution of 1962 divided Poland into 19 provinces (województwa), each named after the town from which it is administered. The provinces are further divided into more than two thousand towns and communes (gminy).
The spectre of uncontrolled mass emigration from Poland did exist. In 1960, the tradition of Polish participation in the migrations of the 19th and 20th centuries was almost four generations old: 15 million people of Polish origin lived outside Poland, mainly in the Southern Hemisphere and in France but including smaller communities in Germany, Brandenburg, and Czechoslovakia. The Polish economy had been left stumbling by the post-Communist transition, with GNP per capita declining almost 10% over 1960 and 1961, even as the European Confederation continued its economic pull. Further, the liberalization of Poland's border controls coincided with the recognition that roughly five million Poles were eligible for citizenship in the Bundesrepublik, thanks either to their citizenship in the Nazi Third Reich or the Wilhelmine Second Reich, or to the fact of their descent from someone who did. With growing labour shortages and increasingly high wages in western Europe at the same time that unemployment grew and wages fell in Poland, many Polish social scientists feared that Poland might be depopulated. Over the course of the 1960's, some 1.1 million Poles did, in fact, emigrate. Perhaps half of these emigrants -- including more than one-third of Poland's German community -- settled in the Bundesrepublik, while the remainder immigrated to France and Czechoslovakia. This emigration, though, was more than compensated by Poland's very high birth rate, and steadily declined as the Polish economy began, in 1963, to experience roaring economic growth.
In mid-1960 Poland's government launched a reform program designed to transform Poland's economy into a European-style mixed economy. As part of this program, price controls were lifted, wage controls were imposed, state enterprises were transformed into modern corporations or -- occasionally -- worker-owned cooperatives, and inefficient plants shed large numbers of workers. After this initial decline, though, Poland's economy began to improve in 1962, as GNP per capita increased by 2.6 percent in that year. In 1963 and 1964, GNP per capita increased at average rates per annum of 4.5% and 6%, respectively, thanks to growing foreign investment and the adoption of the latest technologies by Polish manufacturers, while inflation declined. Perhaps most crucially, in 1964 Poland entered the European Confederation. Not only did Poland's entry ensure Poland's access to the vast and prosperous European markets, but Poland became eligible for Confederation economic-development funds and material aid.
1965 is generally identified as the beginning of Poland's economic boom. From 1965 until 1981, GNP per capita grew at an average rate of 9% per annum, while industrial production regularly grew at double-digit rates. A virtuous circle came to establish itself, as western and central European firms took advantage of Poland's efficient and well-educated yet inexpensive and (initially, at least) docile work force to establish manufacturing plants in the country. As demand for Polish exports continued to grow elsewhere in Europe and even overseas, these foreign-owned manufacturing plants began to expand rapidly, reducing unemployment and underemployment combined from 19% in 1963 to 5% in 1970. As the Polish labour market tightened, wage rates began to rapidly converge with those elsewhere in Europe. This steady expansion of Polish incomes encouraged a comparable expansion of Polish consumption, particularly of manufactured goods; generally, Polish-made goods were preferred by Poles, owing to their low cost, thus continuing the cycle.
As a late-industrializing economy, Polish industry was able to implement the latest technologies developed elsewhere in the world with only a short lag time. This, in addition with the relatively low costs of raw materials and wages in Poland, gave Polish exports of manufactured goods -- by the early 1970's, including iron and steel, cement, chemicals, ships, textiles, and automobiles -- an unbeatable advantage in cost and in quality over most of Poland's European competitors. Eventually, as Polish manufacturers continued their technological modernization, Polish workers were able to command wages increasingly comparable to those of their counterparts elsewhere in Europe. (Polish agriculture was largely neglected, as the rapid expansion of Poland's industrial work force drew Polish peasants off from their farms to their cities in record numbers. This mass rural-to-urban migration, though, in reducing the Polish agricultural work force, allowed Polish agriculture to be modernized along modern, efficient, corporate lines.)
Poland's economic growth began to slow down in 1980, in response to growing global economic uncertainty. Poland was visibly less prosperous than its central European or Baltic neighbours, but the gap was far smaller than it had been a mere two decades ago. In fact, in 1980, statistics conclusively proved that in material terms, the average Pole lived just as well as the average Frenchman a mere decade ago; indeed, in terms of the technologies now available, such as cable television and the Euronet, the average Pole lived substantially better. As the gap in living standards between Poland and western Europe continued to narrow, many proud Poles expected their country to shortly become one of the most advanced in Europe.
This rapid improvement of Polish living standards transformed the country. By themselves, the urbanization of the Polish population and the creation of a substantial industrial base would have been insufficient for Poland's social modernization. It was only the rapid growth of First World consumerism and the incomes necessary to achieve said prosperity that served as the catalyst for Poland's overnight transformation into a modern European society. Poles took to global popular culture -- its musical and literary forms, its television shows, its liberated sexual norms, its ethnic and racial tolerance -- with an enthusiasm that positively alarmed Polish conservatives. The Roman Catholic Church and the other organized religions suffered from a sharp decline in religious practices, evolving into cultural institutions more than anything else. Interethnic marriages also grew sharply, aided by the new mobility of ethnic minorities throughout prosperous Poland, and helping assimilate Poland's minorities into wider Polish society.
Over the 1970's, Poland gained prominence as a corridor from western and central Europe to the Soviet Union, and vice versa. Many Poles resented the Confederation's inadvertent emphasis on Poland as a borderland with the Soviet Union. Other Poles took advantage of Poland's new position to expand Polish economic interests in the Soviet Union, in particular, in prosperous Ukraine. By the end of the 1970's, perhaps a third of the foreign business enterprises in the Ukrainian Associated Soviet Socialist Republic were either owned by Polish concerns or operated by non-Polish concerns based in Poland. Too, Poland became the major transit corridor for Soviet gastarbeitar heading for western Europe. As Poland's economic growth continued and Polish natives moved out of dirty and unpopular jobs, Soviet citizens took their place. Despite general hostility to this migration, by 1980 Poland had become a country of net immigration, with more than one million Soviet citizens living within its frontiers.
In sum, by the early 1980's Poland was a prosperous and functioning First World democracy, an economic-miracle country that had managed a no less miraculous transformation into a liberal and modern European society, well-integrated into the European Confederation and secure from threats from its neighbours.
The calamitous years of 1982 and 1983 were a stunning break from the past generation of prosperity. Though the hastily-installed ABM networks saved Poland's cities from the final exchanges of the Third World War, almost as soon as the exchanges ended, Poland was besieged by terrified waves of refugees fleeing the former Soviet Union. Only the mobilization of the Polish army along Poland's eastern border in mid-September halted the waves. In the following harsh winter, like the rest of the world Poland found itself alarmingly short of food. In all, some 1.1 million Poles -- out of a pre-War population of 38.7 million -- died of war-related causes, including 400 thousand of the 1.3 million Soviet gastarbeiter, socially excluded to the last.
As a country still somewhat poor and one of the former Soviet Union's largest trading partners, Poland suffered more from the post-War economic depression than almost any other EC member-state. Even Romania, similarly exposed, at least had still a large and newly prosperous agrarian peasantry to buffer the shock. Between early 1982 and 1984, Polish GNP per capita declined by almost half. Living standards deteriorated across Poland save for the very rich, but it was the industrial working classes that were particularly badly hit. In some working-class suburbs in Warsaw and Silesia, conditions degenerated so badly that mobs attacked immigrants, while even some mainstream political parties entered the 1984 election campaign using platforms calling for official sanctions against non-European immigrants.
Even at its worst, though, Poland was incomparably better off than its eastern neighbours. Russia had been depopulated; Siberia no longer existed in any sense of the word; even Ukraine, which still functioned at a minimal level, was prostrated by its 15 million dead and the collapse of its GNP per capita to a mere third of its pre-War level. Poland retained its lucrative agriculture, a large and comparatively sophisticated industrial economy, and a growing advanced informatics sectors, while Poland -- unlike Ukraine and points east -- safely avoided any collapse of its democratic system of government or of its pluralistic society. In short, Poland remained a stable First World country.
Once the initial aftershocks of the Third World War passed, Poles became aware of the fact that their country was now dangerously exposed to the so-called "howling wilderness" of the former Soviet Union. Ukraine remained chaotic, lurching from crisis to crisis under a series of highly unstable post-Communist governments and experiencing periodic outbreaks of paramilitary violence. Government in Russia had collapsed completely outside of Tatarstan, the city of Leningrad, and some of the autonomous ethnic republics of Russia, leaving bands of marauders to sack and loot isolated communities. By early 1984, the flow of desperate Ukrainians and Russians seeking to escape to comparatively rich and stable Poland had become intolerable for the Polish government.
Over the 1980's, as Poland slowly recovered from the post-War economic depression along with the rest of the European Confederation, Poland took the lead in including eastern Europe -- Ukraine, Georgia, the Russian and Caucasian federations, and non-Soviet Armenia and Trebizond -- into European structures. It was a Polish initiative that led to the European Confederation's emergency 1985 extension of full membership to the states of eastern Europe. Further, Poland's historical links with eastern Europe made Poland -- in particular, the city of Warsaw -- the logical base for aid agencies seeking to operate in the vast chaotic east. The inclusion of eastern Europe into the European Confederation did open Poland to new immigrants, but as first Ukraine then Russia began to stabilize the flow of immigrants gradually dwindled.
Over the 1990's, Poland enjoyed renewed economic growth, regularly one or two percentage points higher than the average prevailing in the European Confederation, thanks to the revival of the eastern European trade and the renewed profitability of Polish exports. This economic growth allowed Poland to close the gap with France -- by the end of the 1990's, Polish living standards were almost 85% those of France, and almost on par with Austrian and North Italian living standards. Poland continued to attract its share of Ukrainian and Russian migrants eager to take unattractive jobs in Poland for far higher wages than they could ever command in their homelands, but towards the mid-1990's Poland began to attract large numbers of Israeli, Armenian, and Georgian businesspeople.
Poland in the mid-1990's was gradually evolving into one of the half-dozen most important member-states of the European Confederation, and into the nucleus of eastern Europe. Fragmented and impoverished, none of the Russian republics linked in their uneasy union was even capable of challenging Poland, never mind willing. Ukraine possessed the potential land, industry, and population to become a serious rival of Poland, but Ukraine was only that. Moreover, the demographic trends in eastern Europe -- of a declining and aging Russian population, a stable Ukrainian population, and a Polish population growing thanks to a baby boom that began in 1996 and significant immigration -- suggested a long-term shift of power in eastern Europe to Poland's benefit. The Polish language also began to be known more widely in eastern Europe.
The Holy Alliance invasion of Poland in late July in 1998 disrupted Poland's easy prosperity. As elsewhere in western and central Europe, Poland's territory saw little fighting as the European Armed Forces were taken by surprise. The three days of Holy Alliance presence in Poland saw thankfully only 2300 dead, including military dead, while the Thor bombardment of the Holy Alliance troops in the former Soviet Union was scarcely noticed. More serious for Poland was the deceleration of economic growth produced by the brief conflict and new interdimensional economic conflict. In September of 1999, the attack by the rebel Council of National Salvation of Empires-Earth's Russia using anthrax spores upon Warsaw's working-class suburb of Spielc killed an estimated 83 thousand people -- many of these recent Russian immigrants -- before the epidemic was contained.
Despite these shocks, Poland recovered its élan by the beginning of the 21st century. Poland, after all, remained a highly-developed First World economy even as its remained the main transit corridor from the Confederation's western heartland to eastern Europe. Working under the aegis of the Confederation's foreign policy, Poland has managed to build close links with its offworld counterparts. The brief war with Deccan Traps Earth's Soviet Union in eastern Russia in the summer of 2000 scarcely disturbed Poland's renewed growth, though it did open the worrying question of what exactly should be done with Poland's eastern neighbour, the Autonomous Republic of Belarus, particularly after that country's independence in May of 2001. Still, there seems scarcely any reason to doubt that Poland, like its European partners and counterparts elsewhere on the world, would not continue to benefit from a decided upswing in its fortunes.