Word: communisme
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...their coworkers, either at their desks slaving away until late at night or in regular evening drinking fests, than with their own husbands and wives. Layoffs were considered unseemly. In Japan, a social contract of "lifetime employment" guaranteed full-time employees they would have jobs until retirement. In China, communism brought the "iron rice bowl" and institutionalized cradle-to-grave employment with state-owned companies...
...Polish patriots took on the world’s largest army and succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, eventually toppling the Communist regime in Warsaw. They achieved this feat not through violent revolution, but through a series of negotiations that became famous as the Round Table talks. The defeat of Communism in Poland—which was soon followed by its total collapse in Eastern Europe and, in 1991, the Soviet Union itself—should properly be regarded as one of the greatest triumphs in European history...
...collapse of Communism in Poland was precipitated by both economic crisis and political ferment. By 1988, Poland’s command economy, overwhelmed by $6 billion of foreign debt and paralyzed by governmental incompetence, was in serious decline. Workers’ complaints over rising prices precipitated strikes and protests in 1970, 1976, 1980, and 1988. In July, a standoff between miners and the government saw the re-emergence of Solidarity, an illegal trade union...
...Walesa, Solidarity emerged from the overthrow of Communism popularly viewed as the savior of the Polish nation but proved to be much less effective as a governing party. Just four years after the Round Table talks, the once-dominant coalition led by Solidarity had fragmented and lost power to its Social Democratic opposition, some of whom had served in the Communist government. This was not due simply to the economic climate; in the first truly free elections, the movement split violently when Walesa ran for president against Tadeusz Mazowiecki, another Solidarity politician who was then prime minister...
...result, the political figures that had defeated Communism were not able to bring Poland into the greater fold of the European community. Instead, it took a new generation of political leadership to accomplish the unthinkable: turning a mismanaged and unproductive command economy into a functioning and streamlined market system. Yet all this hard work paid off in the end; on May 1, 2004, Poland and seven other formerly Communist countries in Central Europe joined the European Union...