Reinventing Poland

Economic and Political Transformation and Evolving National Identity

Martin Myant, Terry Cox, Martin Myant, Terry Cox

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134056941
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

The end of communism and accession to the European Union have had a huge impact on Poland. This book provides an overall assessment of the post-1989 transformation in Poland. It focuses in particular on four key themes: economic transformation and its outcomes; the heritage of the past and national identity; regional development in Poland including the implications of EU accession for regional development; and political developments both before and after EU accession. In addition the book shows how changes in all these areas are related, and emphasises the overall common themes. The book is in memory of George Blazyca, of the University of Paisley, whose work on the political economy of transition in Poland is highly regarded, and who did a great deal to support the work of Polish academic colleagues and to promote the work of young scholars.

Part I
Economic transformation and recent economic developments

1
George Blazyca on shock therapy and the third way

Tadeusz Kowalik

Socialist academic

The aim in this chapter is to look at the works on Poland of George Blazyca as a historian of economic and social ideas. That means that I shall pay attention to his ideas rather than to economic tools or even theories. In a way George Blazyca and Ryszard Rapacki prescribed this role for me, nominating me as ‘a self-confessed socialist (in tradition of the Solidarity Left rather than the Communist party)’ (Blazyca and Rapacki 2001: 2). George was post-humously described in a similar way by David Hearst in his obituary entitled ‘Socialist academic with a profound grasp of the Polish economy’ (Guardian, 31 March 2005). I happen to belong among those Polish colleagues or friends of George who believed that he was a convinced socialist, although after the collapse of communism both of us had profoundly to redefine the very notion of socialism.

My knowledge of George’s work is limited to three books he co-edited and to two essays (Blazyca and Rapacki 1991, 2001; Blazyca and Dąbrowski 1995; Blazyca 2000, 2006). I met him many times and discussed a lot of fundamental problems of the contemporary world and particularly of capitalism and the systemic transformation in the region of Central Europe. I can therefore look at his publications in the light of my own personal recollections.

However, I am sure that, for many Polish readers of Blazyca’s publications on the Polish economy, such a presentation of him would be a great surprise. Indeed, in his writings and publications, he not only carefully avoided any socialist or even social-democratic rhetoric, but also brought to English-speaking readers’ attention many contributions written by neo-liberal economists.

How can this puzzle be explained? It is not easy to find an answer. We can start with a look at the main books and essays co-edited, co-authored and written by him.

Balcerowicz’s shock therapy

The book Poland into the 1990s: Economy and Society in Transition (Blazyca and Rapacki 1991) brought together thirteen essays by Polish scholars on different aspects of the economy and society George co-edited this book and co-authored an introduction, both with Ryszard Rapacki. The book was written in July 1990, with the perspective of half a year of implementation of Leszek Balcerowicz’s famous ‘shock therapy’, sometimes also called the ‘Big Bang’, and the two authors of the introduction clearly noted the ‘immense cost’ of this surgery They wrote: ‘real incomes were cut by around 36% in the first half of 1990 (compared to the same 1989 period), output fell by 30% and unemployment accelerated sharply upwards’ (Blazyca and Rapacki 1991: 2). They also noticed that the plan was too severe on domestic demand, likening it to ‘shooting a sparrow with too many cannon’. But ‘none of this’, they continue, should be taken to suggest that this plan was unsuccessful. Inflation was brought down, firms came up against hard budget constraints…black market was eliminated and…universal shortage disappeared’ (Blazyca and Rapacki 1991: 3).

We can notice that they did not suggest that the authorities should relax and slow down the implementation of their programme. On the contrary, they wrote that ‘the next steps…are more fundamental and may be more trying. Poland will need to overcome the legacy of forty years of generally misconceived economic policy’ (Blazyca and Rapacki 1991: 3). Thus, the above-listed sacrifices were only the first step, and the authorities should continue along the same path.

As far as the future was concerned, they were afraid not of the type of social order emerging but of a failure to continue with the chosen strategy They wrote:

Undoubtedly, difficult times lie ahead as Poland moves into the 1990s and there is a residual danger that, if the going gets too tough, the unemployment too high and for too long, and the degree of Western assistance is too parsimonious, the country could slip backwards towards a strong-arm internal politics of an almost pre-war vintage. It would be a tragedy if the democratization that has been the Solidarity emblem since 1980 were to be swamped by a misplaced romanticism for a bygone age.

(Blazyca and Rapacki 1991: 3)

One has to acknowledge that some of these forecasts sound prophetic. The economic policy was too tough, unemployment became the highest in the EU over a long period of time, and Western assistance was negligible and rather misplaced. Moreover, never before had there been such popularity in a Polish debate on internal politics for a bitter metaphor from the editor of the Paris-based monthly Kultura, Jerzy Giedroic, that contemporary Poland was being ruled by two coffins, that of the pre-war authoritarian Marshal Józef Piłsudski and that of Roman Dmowski, a leader of a pre-war extreme nationalist and anti-Semitic party. The Solidarity emblem of the 1980s had been swamped, not by misplaced romanticism but by a policy motivated by a conviction that Poland had to pass through a period of primitive accumulation of capital.

And yet, I feel uneasy with the above conclusion. The two authors seemed to have fully accepted a chosen path of transformation, ‘shock therapy’, not seeing any alternative within a very general framework of ‘Western-style capitalism’.

As seen by the neo-liberals

The second important book on the Polish economic transformation, Monitoring Economic Transition: The Polish Case, was published four years later (Blazyca and Dąbrowski 1995). With the exception of Chapter 2, authored by George, it was written by ten researchers, all from the Gdansk Institute for Market Economics. This institute is a well-known think tank of the Gdansk conservative liberals, founded by their leaders. Dąbrowski himself was one of the institute’s directors. Friedrich von Hayek, Milton Friedman and Reaganomics are, or at least were, their ideological trademarks. The topics of the chapters in this most coherent volume covered state firms and privatisation, firms’ performance, the financial and banking systems, forecasting, and the place of the Polish economy in Europe.

It would be unfair to say that George uncritically accepted the manifestly neo-liberal views of these authors. He supplied many critical comments. In a section within his chapter covering social and regional differentiation (Blazyca 1995: 25–6), he added some crucial information about the social consequences of shock therapy, above all about high unemployment. This was over 16 per cent on average, but in some regions close to, or even above, 30 per cent! Moreover, his conclusion was a drastic warning:

A firm timetable for EU membership looks likely to be one of the single most important issues for the future and the failure to agree on one is likely to have immense consequences both political and economic. But most important, and perhaps potentially most dangerous, will be the damage that might be done to any successful transformation by social and regional disparities that grow in unrestrained manner.

(Blazyca 1995: 35)

What is striking, however, is that he simply limits himself to informing about these real and potential facts, not pointing out that the authorities did not have any convincing programme for dealing with these pathological phenomena. In several remarks he rather defended the government’s economic policy, in which there was much more continuity of the Balcerowicz policy than change. This continuity was at that time noticed by many Polish and foreign observers. For George, his collaborators seemed to be too pessimistic with regard to the government’s policy. It is also striking that, even when writing on a five-year experience, he still limited his wording to ‘transformation to Western style economy’. Such notions as capitalism, systemic choice and alternatives and neo-liberalism do not even appear.

Ambiguous success

Now I can make some remarks on my personal experience with the last book, Poland into the New Millennium (Blazyca and Rapacki 2001). Here I have to rely on my memory. Initially, when George asked me to contribute to it, I refused. I was just working on a longer study entitled ‘Why the social democratic option failed: Poland’s experience of systemic change’ (Kowalik 2001b), for a book edited by Andrew Glyn. I was convinced that, knowing tough British copyrights and habits, it would be difficult to write something similar without areas of glaring overlap. I recommended, instead, Włodzimierz Pańków, who contributed an essay on Poland’s industrial relations.

After a while, however, George came back to this issue, urging me to write a general evaluation of the Polish transformation. If I remember correctly, this was after having received a text from the former prime minister Marek Belka, who was quite happy with the results of the newly emerged Polish socio-economic order. George said that he badly needed an alternative point of view and added something like: ‘You can write things that I cannot write’. This surprised me, and I reminded him that he had written such a polemical text, which only needed to be updated. He had contributed to a book which I had co-edited. This was published in Polish. It was an essay evaluating negatively the Polish systemic changes as an outcome of neo-liberal policy and recommending a sort of ‘third way’. I describe this remarkable essay below. As a reaction to this, he reminded me of what I had told him in either late 1989 or early 1990. This was a story of a team of American leftists, with Tom Weisskopf (1992), who had wanted to work for the Polish government, advising a very moderate form of market socialism à la John E.Roemer. This proposal was flatly rejected by Polish officialdom. The well-known Polish émigré Włodzimierz Brus had a similarly bitter experience. During his first visit to Warsaw since his departure from Poland in 1972, in the autumn of 1989 he argued for following some ideas from the Swedish model (Brus 1992). George stressed that he had understood these stories as advice. If he wanted somehow to be accepted by an academic milieu, he had to collaborate with people from the dominant currents of thought.

This was not that convincing an argument for me, because the atmosphere had radically changed from that at the beginning of the 1990s. A leftist criticism of shock therapy and of the neo-liberal recipe was already part of a public debate. Then, his final argument was that this time he wanted not so much to monitor changes in the economy and society but to present a spectrum of views on systemic changes in Poland. Indeed, in their introductory chapter, George and Ryszard Rapacki wrote that ‘the collection should be viewed as a contribution to on-going debate’, hoping that it would encourage ‘a wider discussion across social science perspectives’ (Blazyca and Rapacki 2001: 1). This is how I was convinced to write my chapter, entitled ‘The ugly face of Polish success’ (Kowalik 200la), giving a totally different picture of systemic changes in Poland to that given by Marek Belka, although in the title I gave an unnecessary gift to the then prevailing opinion that there had been a success. If, seventeen years after the creation of a new system, we had retained over a long time period the highest rate of unemployment in the EU, if unemployment allowances had been almost abolished and if the quite high rate of growth of GDP was accompanied by rapidly growing numbers in absolute poverty, then it is impossible to describe this as a success, albeit one with an ugly face.

The third way for Poland?

At the beginning of the 1990s I, with Jerzy Hausner, the leftist economist who was a professor at the Economic University in Krakow, initiated a series of public lectures by Polish economists from abroad. These were to be lectures on freely chosen topics, but in such a way that they would show to the Polish audience the main lines of the lecturer’s life’s work and scientific interests. We managed to publish these lectures in a book, Polscy ekonomiści w świecie (Kowalik 2000). Although George was not an émigré, and only ‘half of Polish origin, we included him because of his strong ties with Poland and the Polish economists’ milieu. George’s lecture was presented, in my absence from Poland,...