Poland in a European context

Abstract

The integration of Poland into the European Union has created the conditions for the country’s faster modernisation and its fundamental transformation, leading to a ‘return’ to Western Europe and to its post-industrial civilisation. Well-developed European regions are the model of economic and social modernisation for post-socialism countries; the process of post-socialist transformation means ‘Europeanisation’ - the transformation from socialism to a market economy. This ‘return to Europe’ is a long-term process. Poland must catch up Europe in many aspects of economic and cultural life. Integration may be considered to be ‘in progress’, especially when the significant diversification of the Polish economic space is taken into account. The paper presents the conditions of this return to Europe from a geographical perspective, analysing the ways in which Poland is contributing to the creation of a new European space. It also shows the dynamics of regional organisation into central and peripheral areas at three stages in the recent history of Poland : the period of rapid industrialisation in the socialist Poland (1970s), the beginning of systemic post-socialist transformation (1990s), and the perspectives since European integration (beginning of the 21st century). The role of cities in these regional transformations is analysed in the third part of the paper, and shows that the hierarchy of cities has experienced major changes over the last decades.