Socialist Poland’s opening towards the West, 1970-­1980

Abstract

This thesis explores the phenomenon of socialist's Poland entanglement with the West in the 1970s. Between 1970 and 1980, the period of Edward Gierek's leadership, Poland multiplied its economic and political contacts with capitalist countries, especially Western Europe. Against the backdrop of European détente, it became a frontrunner of East-West exchanges among the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance and Warsaw Pact members. However, this experience of globalisation and Europeanisation weakened the socialist regime and offered the West leverage over its situation, proving critical for the country's crisis in the 1980s, and its political and economic future in the 1990s. As this thesis shows, the entanglement with the West was the outcome of conscious choices made by Polish socialist elites, who believed that Poland could open up towards the West without endangering socialism. Against the usual assumptions about the vulnerability of the socialist elites, this thesis presents them as confident and pro-active actors of the critical processes of the 1970s, including détente in the Cold War relations and globalisation. First, it does so by zooming on making, debating, and readjusting the national strategy, and second, by exploring its practices. Specifically, the thesis brings in the cases of cooperation with Western European states (Italy, France and the Federal Republic of Germany) and companies (Fiat, Berliet, Grundig, Thomson) in the production of cars, buses and audio equipment in Poland based on foreign licenses. By bridging the socialist regime's domestic history with phenomena such as Western European integration, oil crises, Helsinki process, or the sovereign debt crisis, this thesis offers an international reading of the Polish 1970s history. The 1970s were a transformative decade that reorganised global political and economic order. Poland was a case in this process.