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Ten years after the collapse of communist rule, church-state relations in Poland present a mixed picture. On the one hand, the Roman Catholic church continues to enjoy a privileged position in the country and has achieved most of its cherished goals. On the other hand, its very success carried with it seeds of its future decline. This was particularly true in several areas where the church's aggressive and arrogant behavior has proved counter productive: religious education, anti-abortion legislation, Christian values in mass media, antisemitism, murky church finances, the concordat with the Holy See, and the debate on the new constitution. As a result, there has been a steady decline in popular support for the church which itself has developed some serious rifts in its supposedly united posture. It may be hypothesized that the power and influence of the church actually peaked in the early 1990s and that, having absorbed some of the lessons from its decline, its future policies may well be less triumphalist and controversial, and more accommodating.

This discussion between violence & democracy in Eastern Europe excludes the regions of the former Soviet Union & Yugoslavia. In the interwar period, ethnic animosities were aggravated by the demands of treaties imposing the protection of minority rights. After WWII, however, tensions were eased by the reduction of the minority element in states throughout Eastern Europe. In addition, the horrors of WWII & the violence of the Communist seizure of power caused a massive & radical transformation of popular attitude toward both violence & democacy (at least in some East European countries), thus assuring that the majority of postcommunist transitions were conducted in a relatively peaceful manner. 2 Tables. Adapted from the source document.

In contrast to the voluminous literature dealing with the post-communist transformation, much less attention has been paid to the circumstances that led to the communist collapse. The purpose of this paper is to redress the imbalance by trying to examine the socio-political and economic situation on the eve of the changeover and to determine which factors, taken collectively, produced a trigger which ignited the implosion of 1989. The focus will be on Poland, the country which—it is generally agreed—was the first one to launch the process of change and to initiate the "domino effect" which ultimately affected the entire region.

Poland in mid-1995 appeared to be a country in the middle of a serious socio-political crisis. Considering that six years earlier it had been generally perceived as a strong candidate for achieving the successful transfer of power from the communists to the opposition, that could serve as a model for other East Central European countries, the obvious question is what went wrong. This article attempts to answer that question by focusing on a root cause which underlay the crisis—excessive pluralization of the Polish polity and society—that has resulted in the failure to make much progress with reconstruction of a civil society. This failure, together with the inability of the ruling elites to cope with the complexities of post-communist transition and with institution-building, has meant that despite a relatively healthy economy and a secure international position, Poland has need of drastic action to put it on the right track and propel it toward the establishment of a stable and viable democracy.