Overview

This book offers an international reading of the Polish socialist regime’s history in the 1970s, and its opening up to the West. It bridges Poland’s socialist domestic history with critical developments of the global and European 1970s, including détente in the Cold War, western European integration, and globalisation. In this period of international transformations, socialist Poland under Edward Gierek's leadership multiplied its economic and political contacts with capitalist countries, especially western Europe, and became a leader of East-West cooperation among Council for Mutual Economic Assistance and Warsaw Pact members. Relying on sources from public and corporate archives in five different European states, the book demonstrates both that the global political and economic transformations of that period were critical for the decision-making process in Poland and, moreover, that the national socialist elites participated in shaping these transformations. By looking at the goals and expectations of the Polish socialist elites and their practices of political and economic exchanges with western Europe, the book explains the logic which drove the socialist regime into entanglement with the West. As is shown here, this entanglement proved inextricable and critical for the socialist regime's failure and Poland’s political and economic future. This book will be of much interest to students of European history, cold war studies, socialism studies and International Relations.

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9781032392165

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"'A must-read for anyone who would like to understand how a Soviet Bloc country became dependent on Western Europe well before the collapse of communism. Elegant in form and revelatory in content, this book illuminates how encounters of Polish modernizers with Western European business elites impacted not just Poland, but the entire continent. The book successfully explains that in the 1970s technology transfer, Western loans and licenses tied ""socialist"" and ""capitalist"" European countries were much stronger than previously assumed. Based on impressive research in Polish, French, German, Italian, and European Union’s archives, this book is a pioneering contribution to business and economic histories of the late 20th century Europe and the global Cold War.' Małgorzata Mazurek, Columbia University, 'Italian cars, French buses and German tape recorders: Komornicka’s account is not just an elegant and thorough reconstruction of the Polish national strategy in the 1970s. It intertwines historiographies that do not always talk to each other: the history of the Cold War, European integration and business history. A powerful combination that sheds important light on the history of post-1945 European relations.' Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol, European University Institute 'Historiography on Poland in the 1980s, on the Solidarity movement and the final years of the Polish road to democracy is very rich and copious. Interestingly, there has been much less on the 1970s decade that, in many ways inspired the decisive struggle for the post – communist society. This is the lacuna that Aleksandra Komornicka’s book addresses. It reveals how Polish entanglements with the West in the 1970s helped shape the trajectory that led to the collapse of the socialist regime a decade later and contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Bloc.' Svetozar Rajak, London School of Economics and Political Science"

Author Information

Aleksandra Komornicka is an assistant professor at Maastricht University and has a PhD from the European University Institute. Her research focuses on the international and economic history of post-war Europe in particular on the Cold War, European integration and Poland.

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