Poland The Society and Its Environment
Monument to Poland's greatest classical composer,
Frédéric Chopin, in Lazienki Park, Warsaw
THE SEVENTH-LARGEST country in Europe, Poland is
located in
the middle of the North European Plain that extends from
the
Netherlands to the Ural Mountains of Russia. Although its
topography is broken by some terrain variations,
especially in
the south, most of Poland lacks significant changes of
elevation.
The combination of geographic location and topography has
strongly influenced Polish society and the country's
relations
with surrounding nations.
In the years following World War II, Poland, like other
East
European countries, underwent a rapid, planned transition
from a
predominantly agrarian to a predominantly industrial
society.
When the country came under communist control in 1945,
Polish
society also was subjected to a set of rigid ideological
tenets.
Communist dogma failed to change the intellectual or
spiritual
outlook of most Poles, however, because traditional
institutions
such as the Roman Catholic Church and the family remained
strong
support structures for alternative viewpoints. On the
other hand,
the institutions created by the communist regimes
fundamentally
influenced the day-to-day functions of Polish society.
This
influence was especially pervasive in areas such as health
and
education, where state programs made services accessible
to more
of the population, albeit in a homogenized and regimented
form.
Among the permanent results of communist ideology was
the
disappearance of the landed aristocracy, which had played
an
especially large role in governance and in preserving
Polish
culture and national consciousness, especially during the
more
than 100 years when Poland was partitioned. The disruption
of
traditional social hierarchies and barriers also brought
substantially more upward mobility as the urban population
came
into direct contact with the peasants. Within a decade of
the
communist takeover, however, the initial benefits of this
social
engineering had faded, and in 1956 the first of several
waves of
unrest swept the country. Subsequent social and economic
stagnation mobilized intellectuals and workers to stage
increasingly widespread and effective protests. These
protests
eventually overthrew communism and ended its suppression
of
social diversity. Nevertheless, the forty-four-year
postwar
communist period left permanent marks on the Polish way of
life
even after the state control structures crumbled in 1989.
World War II resulted in a marked homogenization of the
Polish population, which previously had been ethnically
and
religiously rather diverse. Massive relocations of ethnic
populations resulting from boundary changes and the
destruction
of most of Poland's Jewish population in the Holocaust
meant that
a country previously two-thirds ethnically Polish and
spiritually
Roman Catholic entered the postwar era with a population
over 90
percent Catholic and over 98 percent ethnically Polish.
Demographically, Poland in 1992 was a young country,
more
than 64 percent of whose population was under forty years
of age.
The country also had one of Europe's highest birth rates.
By 1980
nearly half of employed Poles belonged to a socioeconomic
group
different from that of their parents, showing the mobility
of the
younger generations across traditional class lines. By
1980 less
than one-quarter of working Poles remained in agriculture,
and
about two-thirds were either manual or white-collar
workers in
urban areas. About one-third of the postwar intelligentsia
came
from worker families, while about one-quarter came from
peasant
families. These numbers represented a drastic change from
the
predominance of the aristocracy in the intelligentsia
before
World War II.
Both by cultural tradition and by recent social policy,
Poles
were relatively well educated. The 1990 literacy rate was
98
percent. At that time, more than 17 percent of Poles had
postsecondary education, and 4 percent had achieved
advanced
college degrees.
The end of communist rule in 1989 presented new
challenges to
Polish society and to government policy makers. The
concept of
universal, state-guaranteed protection from unemployment,
sickness, and poverty was challenged as Poland turned
toward
privatization and opened its economy to market forces.
Although
society had retained a healthy skepticism about the
benefits of
total socialization, postcommunist governments could not
devise
replacement social programs fast enough to avoid bitter
social
dissatisfaction when the security of the old system
disappeared.
Data as of October 1992
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