If you are in London on Tuesday and sick of the UK general elections, have fun thinking about Poland’s Presidential elections instead. You can watch the Polish Ambassador Witold Sobkow and me in discussion with Liam Halligan on the always interesting subject of Poland’s transition from communism to what it is now. Success? Triumph? Failure? Something in-between?

I have been mulling over what to say. I was in Poland from 2003-2007, when the transition had rather a ‘flat’ phase of messy politics and incessant chopping and changing in top government positions. Yet even then the economy continued to grow at a non-trivial pace.

Even the most cynical critic of what has happened in Poland since 1990 has to be impressed by the absolute improvements that latterly have seen Poland maintain economic growth throughout the financial crisis that has afflicted the rest of Europe. That said, maybe success is a bad thing because it has meant intensification of the neo-conservative exploitation of the Polish proletariat?

Take, for example, the views of Dr Stuart Shields, who appears to have read widely on the subject:

The outcome is a double dose of Shock Therapy, a malformed capitalist development installed during the transition and subsequently exacerbated by accession characterised by uneven development, socially regressive policies and political volatility. Transition and accession are part of the same pathology; the intensification of neoliberal restructuring of European social relations of production (van Apeldoorn 2002; Bieler 2002: 576; Cafruny and Ryner 2003). Central to neoliberal restructuring is the primacy accorded to an idealized set of market relations (Brenner and Theodore 2002: 351). In contrast, the reality of neoliberalism, particularly in the new capitalisms being restored in ECE is that markets do not operate according to any such immutable set of laws. Instead, it is imperative to rearticulate the politics of transition; its context and the embeddedness of neoliberal restructuring across a range of both coherent and contradictory levels of analysis including the local, national, regional and global. A transnational historical materialist perspective offers a number of significant reorientations that address a number of lacunae in the orthodox ‘transitological’ literature (see Pickel 2002; Pickles and Smith 1998; Sokol 2001).

In Dr S’s glorious People’s Democratic Republic of Spartland, no Marxist jargon metaphor goes unmixed:

The precipitous transformation in the standard of living has nourished widespread popular resentment

While state socialism was economically unsustainable, it has sedimented an important set of so-called path dependencies

Unemployment and recession is (sic) often wittingly brought about by governments wishing to decompose labour into a more readily exploitable source of labour power through the imposition of scarcity through austerity

The outcomes of neoliberalization at the national level are a complex series of negotiations reconciling neoliberalism-in-general with institutional hybridity, path specificity and uneven development in, but not exclusive to, the national social formation.All neoliberal transitions are thus distinctive and may therefore walk hand-in-hand with populist forces, but each example negotiates its own re-authoring of the relationship between the national and the global; in this case, actually existing neoliberalism.

Aaaaiiiieeee.

Apart from the catastrophic obscurantism and insolent tedium of this sort of ‘analysis’, there is literally nothing at all in his long writings on Poland that explains what precisely he would have done instead when Soviet-imposed communism keeled over in Poland, leaving inflation of some 600% and crippling debts and basic food shortages. Leszek Balcerowicz took on the job of leading Poland’s economic reform programmes because no-one else would do it. The best available experts thought that nothing meaningful could be done in such a pitiful situation.

Thanks to Balcerowicz and his steely logic, Poland has taken its medicine and surged ahead. Yes, there were awful social costs of different sorts, some of which are still there. But send the bill for them to the Left, not the Right.

In short, if Poland’s economic transition has been less wonderful than it ‘theoretically’ might have been, so what? Choices were made in extreme circumstances, and they have had both short-term and long-term consequences. The broad ‘pro-European’ and ‘pro-market’ direction of reform has been endorsed unambiguously time and again in Poland’s free elections since communism crashed: to insinuate that Poles are somehow the pathetic victims of an experiment in ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ is stupid and insulting.

My own questions about Poland’s transition boil down to these more ‘ideological’ aspects:

Was it wise to draw a ‘thick line’ and not do more to bring communist crimes and criminals to account? Did they get too easy a ride?

Should more have been done to ‘open the files’ of the communist secret police to show just how far the spying and manipulation went under communism? One line of argument has it that this has not been done to protect the Catholic Church (too many awful documents on compromised priests who are now high in the Church leadership)?

Yes, Poland has seen fine economic growth in the past years of relatively stable government coalitions. But has that come at the price of slacking off on key reforms? Given Poland’s demographic trends and debt trajectories, is this success quite as good as it looks? I meet too many senior smart Poles who are fed up with the current Citizens Platform government’s complacency and cynicism.

Poland is committed to the EU (albeit now with Warsaw much relieved that it did not join the Eurozone). But does that come at too high a price in some areas? Dare Poland do anything much to help Ukraine if Germany does not want that to happen? Have relations with Russia been handled well or badly since 1991?

My basic theme in the whole debate will be (or at least could be) timescale. What criteria does one use to judge a successful ‘transition’? When if ever does it end?

See also South Africa: was its transition peaceful? 

Anyway, be there. Or be square.