> Anyway, my question is, how is Poland doing, and did they really do it 'our
> way'?
They're doing pretty well, but it's no thanks to the neolibs, who liberalized prices and trade in 1990 and imposed shock therapy in 1991, expecting the economy to boom just like the textbooks said it would. The economy spectacularly self-destructed, as Polish producers were cut off from cheap Soviet oil and gas supplies, and were confronted with ferocious EC competition on their doorstep.
The Poles, pragmatic people that they are (after centuries of Russian and German oppression, WW II and Stalinism, Poland has refined the fine art of saying one thing and doing another to an art form), continued to pay lip service to Western capital, but radically changed their strategy. After a bare six months in power the neoliberals were kicked out of office and Poland did what every other industrializing country has ever done in its history -- tax the hell out of imports, promote exports, use the state to shore up internal demand, i.e. print lots of money and inflation be damned. If Poland was located in Latin America, of course US rentiers would've been outraged and would've sponsored a dirty war or other hideousness to teach the serfs manners. But Poland had the good fortune to be located next door to the European Union, metropole of the future; the EU banks wrote off 10% of Poland's huge hard currency debt and renegotiated the rest, the European Investment Bank began helping out with infrastructure financing, and the EU allowed Polish manufactured goods to flood over the border.
Poland right now is basically a proto-social democracy, with big state holdings of major enterprises and a bourgeoisie friendly to state-sponsored accumulation, with a European-style system of proportional representation which is more advanced than that alleged icon of the future, the United States of Decay. They've registered 7% growth rates in the 1993-98 period, some of the highest in the world, and Polish exporters are following the German model and shipping their way to prosperity. They've also preserved much of their welfare state, and unions are ensuring that the benefits of economic growth get spread around.
True, they're still very much a semiperiphery of the EU, they've sold way too much of their domestic industry to Western corporations, and they're running big current account deficits, i.e. going into debt to finance their development. But as long as the EU keeps those euros flowing east and gradually expands the structural funds program, Poland and the other Eastern European countries are, as the pundits say, doomed to boom.
-- Dennis