Continuities in Poland's Permanent Transition By Harald Wydra. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000. 257p. $65.00.

Extract

In studying and analyzing the postcommunist “transition” countries, it is becoming ever more apparent that what calls for explanation is not only change, as expressed in the trajectory of liberal capitalist reforms, but also continuity. Even in the face of profound institutional transformation, mentalities and behaviors associated with the past are not readily giving way to new modalities of thought and action. Accordingly, one way of approaching the problem of explaining the variability of regime outcomes in the former Soviet bloc is to focus on the particular institutional and discursive forms that the interplay of change and continuity has produced in each country. In his work on Poland, Harald Wydra encourages us to analyze this interplay from a particular point of view—one that is rooted in the lived experiences of the populations involved, as opposed to how countries measure up with respect to progress toward liberal capitalist outcomes. Consequently, he argues that even as discontinuity and change have characterized the “first reality” of post-1989 institution-building, important continuities mark the “second reality of images, myths and mentalities” (p. 26). In turn, this “second reality” provides “fundamental reference points in post-1989 Poland and Eastern Europe” (p. 25) that infuse the new institutional realities with unique, culturally determined, content and meaning.