How the East Was Won: Transnational Social Forces and the Neoliberalisation of Poland's Post-Communist Transition*

Abstract

The article proposes a Gramscian account of Poland's transition to a market economy. It considers what has generated, sustained, and legitimated neoliberal hegemony and illustrates how neoliberal ideas attained a hegemonic position through the development of a particular class and national state project. It uncovers where the agents of this process are visible by contrasting two waves of post-communist reform that have contributed to the reconfiguration of the Polish political economy in the current conjuncture of global restructuring. Firstly, it focuses on the centrepiece of neoliberal efforts to constitute hegemony in the shape of the “shock therapy” reform programme and then on the later application of a highly selective form of Europeanisation. Finally the article considers which social forces have offered the most effective resistance to neoliberalism in an appraisal of the recent populist turn in Polish politics. *Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the CEEISA/ISA International Convention, Budapest, Central European University, 26–28 June 2003 and a workshop on Nation and Region: Reconciling Nation-Building and Supranational Integration at the European Policy and Research Unit at the University of Manchester, 9 March 2007. I am also indebted to Dorothee Bohle, Paul Cammack, Greig Charnock, Randall Germain, David Makarenko-Smith, Inderjeet Parmar, Hugo Radice, Geoffrey Underhill, Heloise Weber and the two referees for their comments, interventions and advice on earlier drafts of this paper, as well as the patience of the editors of Global Society.