Poland

Abstract

The purpose of this chapter is to offer a background case-study. This chapter provides an analysis of events that have led Poland to where it is today. As a result of its geographical location, Poland has always been in the ‘squeeze’ area between Russia and Germany, a position that has often proven difficult. The following sections looks briefly at Poland’s early history, especially its turbulent twentieth-century experience. The decades leading up to the 1989 transition are covered in detail in an endeavour to explain Poland’s problem of debt and the nature of the Polish dissident movement which brought down its single-party communist rule. An examination of the policies of transformation follow in order to illustrate the difficulties associated with moving from a command to a market-driven economy.