Polish shock therapy fell short
Classified Polnews
Warsaw, Poland November 11, 2006. Shock therapy in Poland did not complete the job. It caused a change in the economy but it did not change the attitudes of a large percentage of the Polish population. And is this failure to change the attitudes that is resulting in a backlash against the changes that resulted and now threaten to roll back many of the advances made under the free market system in Poland.
Shock therapy was economic shock therapy. It was incomplete and a shortsighted reform that expected that hurting people economically would cause a change in attitude.
Economic shock therapy was sexy and easy. Changing attitudes is boring, hard and counter to some populist political agendas, so it has been largely ignored.
Economic shock therapy gave opportunities to many but also marginalized a large part of the country. For many there were no benefits to shock therapy. They were just left out of the system that resulted and business marched on without them.
These people have been left confused and longing for days past.
In the 1980's the people of Poland united against the communists to eject them from power. It was their mutual hatred of communism that melded them into a powerful force.
But once they removed the communists from power, there was a divergence of views that has never been overcome.
There were those who only wanted the sommunists removed from the government and to have the benefits of capitalism added to the benefits of the communist system.
And there were those who wanted to move to a free-market system.
As long as the political party SLD, generally made up of old communists, had some position the government, the parties Civic Platform and Law and Justice were able to work together in an attempt to counter what SLD was doing with the country.
But as soon as the SLD was removed from power and the Law and Justice Party given the opportunity to run the government, the difference in attitudes between the people making up the free market movement and the people who wanted the benefits of communism plus the benefits of capitalism came to the surface.
The vast majority of the Polish population is looking backward socially, economically and politically. Many of the people in Poland remember the days of Communist Prime Minister Gierek and remember the good times under his regime. They would like to return to those days. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Gierek"
That same group of people view businesses as bad. They have not benefited by the economic shock therapy. And there is no reason to see business in any way beneficial to them.
During the times of shock therapy, the communists were taken out of the government but communism was not taken out of the people. The attitudes of the people did not change. Only their economic and social positions did. They were marginalized and ignored. There was neither a retraining effort offered nor any effort to bring them into the modern economic system. Social programs of one sort or another were thrown at them to keep them silent.
The result is that today the country is split into various attitude groups. There are attitude groups in the major cities and attitude groups in the countryside.
In any discussion of attitude groups, the city of Warsaw must be discussed separately. Warsaw is an island unto itself. It is not a reflection of Poland. It is Warsaw. It may be in Poland, but it is not Poland at large.
Many of the people from Warsaw view the people from the countryside as backward. And many of the people in the countryside have little use for the people from Warsaw.
Westerners, for the most part, come into the main cities and get their view of Poland and attitudes from the people in the cities. They do not get into the countryside to get a feel for what the marginalized population thinks. They get a perverted view of Poland. And they get an incomplete view of the attitudes of majority of the people in Poland.
And so it is with many Polish politicians. They suffer from their own form of "inside the beltway syndrome". This affects the people in the Civic Platform and people who think like them.
And who might these other people be? The foreign chambers of commerce (American, British, French, Italian and so on), foreign businesses that have invested in Polish companies and embassies of foreign countries whose staff live their lives in Warsaw.
These groups have done nothing, as would be expected because they have no obligation to do so, to help change the attitudes of the people in the countryside. But by their inaction they have made things worse by giving opportunities to populists by their support of shock therapy without treatment.
To those proponents of shock therapy, the people shocked have been little more than economic chaff. And the proponents include the foreign embassies and chambers of commerce.
There are two main political groups in Poland that are fighting the concept of considering the people shocked as economic chaff. They are the Law And Justice Party of the Kaczynskis' and Samoobrona of Lepper.
Samoobrona was formed with the purpose, among others, of helping its members not repay debts. It is out to beat the system and it does that by pandering to the marginalized..
Law and Justice, generally made up of those people who want the benefits of the free market added to the benefits of communism, is bent on destroying the people who supported shock therapy and the economic changes that have occurred in Poland.
The Law and Justice Party is playing to the attitudes of the marginalized. It is looking backward and continuing its fight against the communists. Its approach to government reeks of the days of central control. It is demonizing anyone who has supported the changes that occurred under the free market system.
These two political parties are reinforcing the unchanged attitudes of the marginalized.
And there is no one providing a counterweight.
The proponents of shock therapy, generally the Civic Platform, seem oblivious to both the attitudes and plight of the marginalized..
The business community, Polish and foreign, seem to care less.
The Civic Platform has campaigned with the slogan of moving forward together. But the people in the countryside are not interested in moving forward. Their attitudes have not changed. They're interested in moving backward to the days of Gierik and social programs.
The Civic Platform does not present benefits to the people. It presents ideas and the people are not ready for ideas. They are concerned about their pocketbook and not free market dynamics. Shock therapy did not teach them a thing. It hurt them.
Conversely, the Law And Justice is talking about putting money in the peoples' pockets. And it is attacking the old communists that are so hated by these people. And it is getting their attention.
In the process the Law And Justice party is taking the country backward toward socialized and central control by trying to reverse many of the changes made.
For Poland to move forward there has to be a change of attitude. And that attitude change will come only with the maturation of the younger population. And they must be educated in the importance of free market dynamics.
But the young people whose attitudes were not formed under the Communists and who are the most likely supporters of free markets have been leaving the country in droves for greener pastures in the West. As long as they continue to leave the country there will be no shift in the attitudes of the general population since the young will be eliminated from the population as they develop.
And as for the older people, one might consider the advice of former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. He said about the East German banking system that the only way to change the attitudes is to wait 25 years until the people die off.
Should some of the émigrés to Western Europe return to Poland, they will of course foster some attitudinal change. But it is doubtful that in the near future these émigrés will return to Poland in any great numbers.
The process of shock therapy will not be complete until the free market thinkers and the business community show the people what it is all about by showing them the benefits that they have now that came from the process.
And the probability of that happening in the current political environment is not encouraging. The people who should be doing it are comfortably occupied preaching about it from their island cities.
Economic shock therapy has fallen short. The country is suffering a backlash because of the shortsightedness and failure of the free market thinkers to help the marginalized that caused the marginalization of a large part of the population.
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