ABSTRACT
Wiktor Herer and Władysław Sadowski argue that modern Poland has been marked by a basic contradiction between a European culture and a backward economy [Gomułka & Polonsky 1990, ch. 6]. They discern what they term a Byzantine model in which wholly authoritarian leadership patterns are coupled with irresponsible social behaviour especially bad labour discipline and productivity. On the other hand the Prussian model in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and the Poznań and Silesian parts of Poland combined an efficient bureaucratic state with social habits of obedience and organisation. Interwar Poland with 63% of its workforce in agriculture, much of it rotting away unproductively, and its most profitable industry run by foreign capital was habitually referred to as ’Europe B’. But its educational, rail, postal, state institutions and much of its urban, not to mention its vibrant intellectual and cultural life was on a European level; this made the contrast with its backward sectors even more striking. Interwar Poland combined professional and skilled working classes on European or Czech levels of efficiency, remuneration and behaviour with Third World levels of backwardness in rural southern and eastern Poland. This explains why postwar governments benefitted not only from genuine popular enthusiasm for socio-economic reconstruction but also from the desire to break out of the constraints of the backward and peripheral form of capitalism of the time; the latter cannot sensibly be compared with its dynamic contemporary successor.
