From Solidarity to shock therapy. Rethinking and transforming economy in Poland 1975-1995
Final Report Abstract
This research project provided an innovative contribution to the social history of Poland’s post-socialist transformation and resulted in the first comprehensive source-based, account of the discursive origins of that transformation. It focussed on how market-oriented economic imaginaries gained traction already before 1989 and helped to prepare the ground for radical macro-economic shock therapy. Thus, the project contributed both to historicise social sciences approaches to post-socialist transformation, and to overcome hegemonic historical narratives that tend to reduce the fundamental social change of the time to political history. In chronological perspective, the project shifted attention to the last decade preceding the political regime change and highlighted its relevance as an incubation phase for transformation. It showed how the collectivist symbolic universe linked to industrial modernity eroded gradually during the 1980s, setting the stage for markets to become centra! signatures of the transformation age in Poland and East Central Europe alike. Specifically, the project brought out the major discursive break that separated the market-oriented shock therapy implemented in 1990 from the egalitarian trade-unionist movement of Solidarity of 1980/81. The scope of analysis was not limited to the economic policies pursued by the last communist and the first post-communist governments, but included contemporary expectations and experiences of ordinary Poles as well. Thereby, the project accounted for the importance of everyday Informal economic practices by underground entrepreneurs, marketeers, or petty businessmen as factors of social and discursive change. This approach also helped to shed light on the controversial post-1989 privatisation of state-owned industry, which met with delaying resistance and was realised comparably reluctantly in Poland. The study resulting from this project offers an empirically sound and genuinely historical basis for understanding late and post-socialist economic transformation in Poland! It widens the focus previously narrowed to the political caesura of 1989 and may contribute to historical reflections of the ongoing memory struggles related to it. Therefore, the project answered to a growing public demand for a historical re-evaluation of the transformation age. During the realisation of the project, this demand has been accommodated with several outreach activities, including lectures and publications for civic education and general public audiences.
Publications
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From “Rzeczywistość” to “Rondo”. How a communist hard-liners’ weekly discovered capitalism in the late 1980s. In: Media Biznes Kultura 2/2018, S. 99-113
Florian Peters
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Wann endete in Polen der Kommunismus? Konkurrierende Deutungen der polnischen Transformationsgeschichte, ln: Lernen aus der Geschichte, Nr. 4/2018, 25.4.2018
Florian Peters
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Der Westen des Ostens. Ostmitteleuropäische Perspektiven auf die postsozialistische Transformation in Ostdeutschland. In: Zeitgeschichte-online, 18.3.2019
Florian Peters
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Blick über den Tellerrand: Vorreiter Polen. [Teil des Titelthemas: Wendezeit. Die ersten Jahre der Einheit]. In: Damals. Das Magazin für Geschichte 52 (2020), Nr. 2, S. 40-43
Florian Peters
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Vom „Polenmarkt“ zum Millionär? Markterfahrungen und Marktdenken in der polnischen Transformationszeit. In: Ulf Brunnbauer / Dierk Hoffmann (Hg.): Transformation als Erfahrungsraum
Florian Peters
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„Rette sich, wer kann!“ Die wirtschaftlichen Reformanläufe der polnischen Kommunisten in den 1980er-Jahren. In: Jahrbuch für Historische Kommunismusforschung 2020, S. 105-119
Florian Peters
