In December 1990, the bewildered Poles came
to elect their new president, Jaruzelski’s term hav-
ing been shortened. A hitherto unknown Polish-
Canadian gained more votes than Mazowiecki,
and Lech Wa∏e ̧ sa won easily. It would be more dif-
ficult to deliver what he had promised. Western
aid was relatively small. Without the Soviet mar-
ket, much of Poland’s industry was uncompetitive.
With such poor business prospects, who would
buy shares in privatised industries? Polish shock
therapy did bring down inflation and saved the
value of the currency, but living standards fell.
The Mazowiecki government in 1990 boldly
set in motion policies to achieve a rapid transition
to a market economy. Privatisation took off with
almost half of all Poland’s employees working for
the private sector by 1992 and nearly all retail busi-
ness in private hands. There remained a large state
industrial sector that no one wanted to buy. In
1990 Poland suffered from soaring inflation of
almost 700 per cent, but in 1991 it fell back to a
more manageable 60 per cent. Even so, price rises
fuelled popular discontent because wages did not
keep pace. Unemployment meanwhile exceeded
11 per cent of the workforce and in 1992 was still
rising. The Polish disenchantment with democratic
politicians was clearly in evidence when at the gen-
eral election held in October 1991 less than half
the Poles bothered to vote at all and those who did
returned twenty different parties to the Sejm with
none receiving more than 12 per cent of the vote.
The unity Solidarity had enjoyed in opposition did
not last long after its victory over communism. The
shock therapy of economic reform, applauded by
the West, which finally helped to reduce Poland’s
debt burden, turned the Polish people’s enthusi-
asm for post-communist freedom into disillusion-
ment. The transition to capitalism was proving
hard, even though Poland had started early. By
1993 the Polish economy at last showed signs of
recovery with output rising. Nearly half of the
GDP was produced by the private sector. Poland
was even being governed by its first woman prime
minister Hanna Suchoka. In the face of political
instability Poland made steady progress restructur-
ing its economy. The steep fall in output from
1989 to 1991 began to be reversed in 1992.
Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary
joined NATO in March 1999 (Yeltsin finally
dropped his objections after meeting Clinton in
Helsinki the previous March). Clinton offered
some concessions: no nuclear weapons would be
stationed in the countries of new entrants and the
US would cut its forces in Europe by two-thirds
to about 100,000; NATO weapons were already
below the limits of the Treaty on Conventional
Forces in Europe, and no longer posed a threat
to Russia. Though Russia was not invited to join
the alliance, a Russian–NATO partnership council
was established. Just a few years earlier such
developments would have been unimaginable.
Nevertheless, despite all attempts to disguise the
fact, NATO remained an insurance against any
future Russian belligerency. NATO has also
evolved a rapid reaction force in order to police
conflicts such as the war in Bosnia – provided
member countries are willing to use it.
Poland is by far the most important of the
central European countries, with a population of
some 39 million. As in other ex-communist coun-
tries, politics have taken an unexpected turn.
In the September 1993 elections Aleksander
Kwasniewski leader of the Democratic Left
Alliance, the reorganised Polish Communist
United Workers Party, became prime minister in a
coalition with the Polish Peasant Party. Although
the ex-communists, in their four years in power,
have not shown such enthusiasm for drastic mar-
ket reform as the previous Solidarity coalitions,
they have nevertheless continued to make selective
changes. Another ex-communist, Wlodzimierz
Cimoszewizs, followed as prime minister, but no
traces were left of the old communism; the Polish
leaders had become technocrats, following not
the bankrupt Russian model but the leading light
of Washington. The government sought to
restrict state spending in order to encourage the
private sector. With an excellent growth rate and
increasing foreign investment, Poland’s economic
performance has been the best in Eastern and cen-
tral Europe, though high inflation remained a
problem in 1996. Solidarity had become wary of
the market reforms: the closing of the Gdan ́sk
shipyard, where the party was born, was a particu-
larly bitter blow. A disparate opposition was
welded together by a Solidarity leader, Marian892 GLOBAL CHANGE: FROM THE 20th TO THE 21st CENTURY