Poland Post URSS

Table of contents

GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION 3

HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION 4

THE THIRD REPUBLIC OF POLAND 5

1989-1995: THE ADVENT OF DEMOCRACY 5

1995-2005: THE TWO TERMS OF PRESIDENT KWASNIEWSKI 6

2007: THE LIBERALS IN POWER 7

Geographical Introduction

The Polish landscape consists almost entirely of land constituting the North European Plain. The south is however marked by the Carpathians and Sudeten, which forms a natural border with the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The country has a large opening on the Baltic facilitating exports of agricultural and manufactured goods and raw materials (coal), and enabling the creation of shipyards. The border with Germany was set on the Oder- Neisse line, the name of the river and its tributary to the west of the country.

Poland is a parliamentary republic. The President of the Republic (Prezydent Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej), elected by direct universal suffrage for five years, is the head of state. He appoints the prime minister and has a veto that cannot be lifted by the Lower House that a qualified majority of three-fifths. If the guarantor institutions, powers are hardly extensive and the President of the Republic becomes more of a political and moral authority.

The President of the Council of Ministers (Prezes Ministrów Rady), usually referred to as the Prime Minister is the head of government of the country. Responsible to Parliament for the activities of his office, he conducted the affairs of the nation.

The Parliament of the Republic is composed of two chambers: the Diet (called the Sejm), composed of 460 seats and the Senate consisting of 100 seats.

Finally, the Constitution of 1997, laying the foundations of the Third Republic, established a Constitutional Court (created in 1986, however) to oversee the constitutionality of laws; secondly, it establishes a defender of rights, based on a model of the Swedish Ombudsman function. It enshrines the independence of the judiciary with the creation of National Council of the Judiciary.

Historical Introduction

Politically, the fall of the Eastern block is preceded by a long period of challenge regimes, which can locate the beginning to the suppression of the uprising German worker is 16 June 1953. Based on the information collected with some informants and some defectors in the 1980s, this agony is primarily that of the Soviet Union itself after the death of Stalin. Phenomena stem from the same dynamics, the causes are the same and their evolution is parallel. The Cold War, including the arms race with the West have focused political attention and diverted energies and considerable detriment to economic development economic resources, in addition to the denial of the legitimate aspirations for a liberalization of society. In reality, the political blocs, especially in its implementation by Moscow in Eastern Europe, helped accelerate the decline of the Soviet Union.

Various factors, other than political, contributed to this agony, not least of which is the structural deterioration of domestic economic and financial conditions in the Eastern bloc. The Soviet Union had refused in 1948 American Marshall Plan funds, to finance the reconstruction of the affected economies by war. She had forced countries Eastern Europe under its section to do the same. After the death of Stalin in March 1953, economic guidance from the Stalinist period was never challenged dramatically. There was no attempt to return to a new CIP (“New Economic Policy " policy easing, limited and provisional capitalism desired by Lenin and Stalin later rejected in favor of a planned economy based heavy industry). The most notable manifestation of this deterioration is rapid depletion of economic growth as well as investment capabilities and capacity to generate productivity gains in the Soviet Union itself despite the looting rule throughout Eastern Europe is from 1948, including the systematic dismantling of factories and their transfer in the Soviet Union, despite the subsequent drainage of the resources of Eastern Europe through the Comecon countries. The Soviet Union and quickly using industrial espionage to organize a large-scale economic plunder in the West to try to compensate for these weaknesses, but failed, like technical failure What represented the TU- 144, the Soviet copy of the Concorde. The Soviet Union also proves unable thereafter to get on the train of the technological revolution on the way to the digital world, introduced by the generalization of personal computing. Some Eastern European countries are in a state of virtual bankruptcy in the early 1980s, as the GDR. The GDR and refinanced by West Germany, which will give it the opportunity to redeem the East German regime jailed dissidents over time and the authors of failed attempts to move to West. The “coup de grace,” which finally makes unbearable the disastrous economic situation of the Eastern bloc, is the consequences of the explosion of a reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine in 1986. Precarious state economic development of countries of the Eastern bloc partly explains the political as well as financial countries of Eastern Europe Moscow dropping.

The failure to renew the Soviet ruling class and the lack of political orientation at the top of the Soviet state as a result of the rapid succession of secretaries general at the head of the CPSU after the death of Leonid Brezhnev also contributed to this agony. The gradual usurpation of power by a conservative and corrupt nomenclature under the long reign of Brezhnev prevents any reform. The power struggle between reformists and conservatives then gives rise to a total standstill until the arrival of Gorbachev. This struggle will continue in effect until the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 came after a last unsuccessful attempt Conservatives seize power held by Gorbachev in a military coup. She reflected on the ground by many resistance attempted by Gorbachev reforms.

It is this phase of slow agony that has created the conditions for access to power of Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev was chosen to succeed him by the reformer Yuri Andropov, who became General Secretary of the CPSU Leonid Brezhnev and immediately after that was before that almighty KGB boss. However, the death of Andropov, the conservative old guard prefers Konstantin Cherenkov, who died quickly, paving the way for Gorbachev.

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