Word: poland
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...popular support; 1.5 million Poles would claim membership in April 1989. However, the Communist regime felt threatened by the union and responded with force. In 1981, Wojciech Jaruzelski, the secretary of the Polish Communist Party, declared martial law, criminalized Solidarity, and imprisoned much of its leadership. For two years, Poland suffered under military rule...
...decade, however, the situation had become all but untenable for the autocratic government in Warsaw. As complete economic chaos threatened to overwhelm Poland, the Jaruzelski clique was forced to moderate its views toward Solidarity. In September 1988, Minister of Interior Czeslaw Kiszczak had approached Walesa and made the unprecedented move of inviting Solidarity to political talks intended to fix the country’s worsening political and economic situation...
...talks, which resulted in an agreement to hold semi-free elections that summer. The results of these elections favored Solidarity’s candidates even more than its own leaders had expected; of the available seats, Solidarity won nearly every single contest. To many observers, it seemed as though Poland would move rapidly toward capitalism and democracy...
...Turning Poland into a market economy, however, was a more complex and painful process than anyone could have imagined. In the early 1990s, the Polish government attempted to use “shock therapy” programs—championed by Jeffrey Sachs and other Western experts—to jumpstart the economy. This resulted in high inflation and unemployment for years. The Polish economy eventually revived, but the intervening years were painful for most of the country. Solidarity, which had championed shock therapy, soon paid the political price for backing the unpopular economic platform...
...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...