Poetry
Overton, Ron
production dropped, and the Polish standard of living, which had been below that of every country in the region except Romania, fell even further. Unemployment rose precipitously, homelessness...
...Now, governments in the region are all in the middle or on the verge of implementing austerity programs certain to be unpopular and certain to lead to political destabilization...
...The modernization of Eastern Europe requires sacrifices, there is no way around it...
...Quite the contrary: during his campaign, he promised acceleration of the plan and has subsequently appointed neoliberal Jan Bielecki as prime minister to replace Mazowiecki...
...Both the economic problems and successes of the Balcerowicz plan have been closely followed and strenuously debated in Poland and abroad...
...But the political dimension of the scheme has been frequently overlooked...
...Though capitalizing on discontent with the Balcerowicz plan during the fall campaign, President Walesa has not lessened the shock...
...When those adviseCrs were trade unionists, he championed industrial democracy...
...92: Commonweal...
...Developed by a government put into place by a mass movement, the plan for "overnight" capitalism represented the triumph of the technocratic approach, a reliance on a small number of experts, mostly from the West and almost exclusively monetarists...
...These questions should be answered in a democratic manner--not simply because one believes in abstract principles but for reasons that appeal as well to practitioners of realpolitik...
...Compared to nothing, which was the Solidarity economic policy at the time, the Sachs proposal was appealing...
...But not to everyone...
...and now, with neolib- erals, Walesa will keep to the Balcerowicz path...
...The public may not stand for anything else...
...The strategy was politically sophis- ticated, putting the population through the wringer quickly before voters could throw the rogues out of office via the new medium of democracy...
...And in what manner will the decisions be made...
...Attentive to the complaints of average Poles, he was searching for the weak points of a government he ostensibly created...
...The Solidarity movement of 1980-81 was founded on principles of social justice, translated into appeals for greater economic and political democracy...
...How long will sacrifice be required...
...His Ron Overton The Acting Program Director Holds a Press Conference to Explain the Death of the Challenger Shuttle and Seven Aboard in a Fiery Cloud of Snow On the watch beneath his starched cuff nu'nbers continue to change matter is simply energy at rest a shift in information just as evidence of shirtsleeve weather is brought to our winter by a systematic arrangement of dots seen from the right distance his face fills the plane of the screen while a gull apparently glides into his left ear and out his right popularity waning, Lech Walesa immediately resumed his role as spokesman for the opposition...
...The question here is not how to avoid austerity, how to sweeten it or postpone it or endlessly criticize it...
...For many, however, Walesa was not outsider enough, thus the surprise turnout for Tyminski...
...The various opposition movements in the region reflected these concerns...
...The Bulgarian opposition worked on behalf of jailed and unfairly treated ethnic Turks in the late '80s...
...Should Walesa not democratize the economic reform process, however, he may follow Mazowiecki down the path of dimimshing electoral returns...
...Unemployment rose precipitously, homelessness became a major social issue, crime increased, and the Mazowiecki government had neither the money, the Western assistance, nor frankly the interest in developing social policies that could treat these ills...
...ther leaders and parties in the region should pay careful attention to the Polish case...
...Walesa's industrial diplomacy was no mere altruism...
...Many parties--Democratic Forum in Hungary, National Salvation Front in Romania, the former Bulgarian and Serbian Communist parties, the Havel faction of Czechoslovakia's Civic Forum--promised grad- ual market transitions rather than a Polish "shock" treatment and won over their liberal opponents in national elections...
...After a brief honeymoon, Polish workers began to strike and farmers started their road blockades...
...with political activists he urged political reform...
...But who will sacrifice...
...Throughout the spring of 1990, he had been maneuvering for political space...
...As austerity began to bite, he found the appropriate rhetoric, exploiting the public's per- cep.tions of the Balcerowicz plan as conspiratorial wheeling and dealing (a tactic that united anticommunism, anti-intellectualism, antimodemism, and anti-Semitism), and playing up his own "out- sider" status...
...Walesa, it is often said, is the sum of his advisers...
...He negotiated compromises in the transport and shipyard sllikes in May, and in July he brought the Mlawa farmers' strike to a close in the face of a government decision to use force in the conflict...
...The chief spokesman of this clan, Harvard's Jeffrey Sachs, suggested the neoliberal rem- edy of last resort (employed by the Reagan administration in the early '80s): squeeze inflation out of the system by setting into motion a deep recession...
...For one thing, egalitarianism is still strong in the region, both from a historical standpoint and from the inevitable internalization of socialist principles in even those sectors of the population that most consciously opposed Communist rule...
Vol. 118 • February 1991 • No. 3
