Suchergebnisse

After Solidarity ?
Poland enters the new stage under the impact of growing tensions inside of the ruling elite. Her vulnerable position between Russia and Germany offers some great historical changes but at the same time imposes upon Poles a formidable challenge. The main weakness is in the Polish economy definitely inadequate to the needs of the nation and its growing aspirations. Solidarity was an ambitious attempt to mobilize the whole nation to a major reform. As long as the USSR remains a major conservative force in Eastern Europe there is not much chance for Poles to acquire a margin for manœuvre, but the positive example of the Hungarian economic reform is much tempting. The confrontations between the nation and the government only by themselves are not enough to improve the internal and external situation of Poland. A good will is much needed on both sides in order to make a real progress.

What happened in Poland in the early 1980s is fascinating in many respects. The possibility of changing the Communist system in a peaceful manner was once again tried without much success, this time by the mass movement of industrial workers, with some additional help offered by intellectuals. The importance of these events should be fully recognized. As Persky states, "For the first time, a workers' state had been forced to concede to its workers, among other things, the ironic right to form their own working class organization to defend themselves from the workers' state." According to Ascherson, the success of Polish workers in setting up permanent representation beyond the control of the Party was a major achievement. In this respect the events of 1980/81 differed substantially from all previous workers' uprisings in eastern Europe.

The social experiment of Solidarity in Poland was a major attempt to modify the Soviet style state socialism by creation of a new institutional articulation of Wc interests. This experiment has proved that the current rule is less solidly entrenched than many people in the West think. The ruling party failed as an organizational weapon of the ruling elite & had to be substituted, at least temporarily, by the military establishment. The transition to a more democratic kind of socialism was effectively stopped, but the bureaucratized economy remained ineffective. The events around Solidarity have shaken the legitimacy of the current system in Poland, offering people, & especially the younger generation, the restoration of self-trust. The independent trade union movement has moved to the underground waiting for another occasion. The inability of the current system to mobilize human & material resources in order to secure a better life for the whole society, & not only for the relatively few privileged people, remains the obvious weakness of Soviet state socialism, closely related to the one party monopoly & the suppression of civil rights. The perspective of pluralism in Poland has been eliminated, but without offering the society another chance to improve at least the standard of living. AA.

For a long time state socialism in Eastern Europe has had a tendency towards ossification, and this leads to several negative consequences more or less clearly acknowledged by the local leadership. It is in the sociopolitical nature of the rigid Soviet-style system that any far-reaching reforms are difficult to introduce. Therefore, the Polish experiment of the 1970s started by Gierek and his équipe, after taking power in December 1970 from the équipe of Gomulka, should be carefully scrutinized for successes and failures. From the beginning, this has been an attempt to modernize the economy without transforming the power relations within the society. Modern industry and technology have been widely introduced in Poland during the 1970s, and a considerable part of these innovations has been financed by loans from the West. Application of scientific knowledge to production of goods and services, as well as to management and administration, has been generously promoted by the Polish government in order to maximize efficiency. There has also been much more emphasis than before on the rational utilization of human resources. In the first half of the 1970s, this path to modernity was accompanied by the rise of wages and salaries at a much faster rate than in the other countries of eastern Europe, but, on the other hand, the accelerated pressure on the population toward political conformity or at least passivity also occurred. This pressure was treated by many Poles, as well as by several western observers, rightly or wrongly, as the condition imposed by the neighbors of Poland, primarily the USSR, to tolerate any more vigorous contacts of Poland with the West, as well as the relative "secularization" of the Polish people in comparison with the rigid Marxist orthodoxy in which East Germans and Czechs and all Soviet people are constantly kept by their authorities.