Review of Aleksandra Komornicka’s Poland and European East-West Cooperation in the 1970s | Pawel Markiewicz

BOOK REVIEW

Poland and European East-West Cooperation in the 1970s:

by Aleksandra Komornicka

Routledge
2024. 246 pp.
(cloth), ISBN 978-1-03-239216-5

Reviewed by Pawel Markiewicz (Polski Instytut Spraw Miedzynarodowych)

For many who lived in Poland through the 1970s, the decade is often remembered and described as an era of political liberalization and social prosperity. Coming on the heels of Polish United Workers’ Party (PUWP) head Edward Gierek’s visit to Washington, DC, in 1974, a New York Times article described the new era in the People’s Republic of Poland (PRL): “As Poles turned on color television sets to watch their leader touring the United States this week, the Polish Government basked in an image of political stability, economic prosperity and friendship with most of the world.”[1] This was a time when the PRL pivoted toward the West. It is precisely this turn that Aleksandra Komornicka discusses in her recent monograph. In it, she takes a deep dive into Warsaw’s domestic agenda and foreign policy initiatives that aimed at tightening cooperation and integration with Western partners in Europe during the Cold War. The author provides a rich analysis of an important era in Polish history (but not only) by drawing on extensive archival materials from several countries accompanied by broad primary and secondary sources that support her key arguments of how global and economic transformations affected Polish decision-making processes that the Gierek regime directly participated in shaping.

The book’s topic is a reflection of Komornicka’s academic research interests, which combine international and economic history of postwar and Cold War Europe. Poland finds a special place in the mix, and it should be no surprise that she chose to focus on this exciting period of modern Polish history as the backdrop of her interesting book. Structurally, the book is divided into two parts. The first is a well-rounded assessment of the development and implementation (at both the domestic and foreign policy levels) of a political strategy that aimed to liberalize the political system in the PRL based on an opening with the West. The second part of the book is of equal interest and complements Komornicka’s detailed account very well. Here, the author examines the Gierek regime’s license policy, which illustrated in action all the principal aspects of the national strategy. Besides the political dimension, she evaluates the effects that the purchase of automobile, bus, and audio equipment licenses from Italy, France, and West Germany had on the notion of social liberalization in a critical Eastern bloc country.

The political inertia that propelled the PRL toward beginning formal steps of drawing up and implementing a policy of Western European cooperation in the 1970s was evident in domestic and international contexts. A much-needed changing of the guard at the top of the PUWP apparatus—the single political party ruling the country since 1947—combined with a series of world developments affected views and decision-making processes among Warsaw’s elites. After coming to power in 1956 with high hopes of liberalization following a period of hardline Stalinism, social unrest, and protests, by the late sixties, the inability to improve everyday quality of life and economic investments geared primarily at heavy industry by Polish leader W?adys?aw Gomu?ka and his coterie of old-guard Polish communists weakened their heretofore longstanding authority. A key foreign policy initiative, however, helped usher in the later Western pivot. Gomu?ka concluded a bilateral treaty with West Germany (December 1970) whereby both parties formally accepted Poland’s western border designated after World War II, which came at the expense of prewar territory belonging to Germany (along the Oder-Neisse River line). Formalizing this issue was important for the Polish regime, which viewed the Cold War through the German lens, that is, wartime trauma stemming from Nazi German occupation and possible German territorial revanchism. As Komornicka rightly points out, from the Polish perspective, resolving the German problem undermined the rationale for the Cold War in Europe since the chief Western threat was removed, shifting the systemic rivalry between East and West from political and military spheres to economic and social ones. In addition, it also put into question the need for a close alliance with the Soviet Union, which until then was seen as the security guarantor of the PRL’s western borders and its sovereignty over the so-called postwar recovered territories.

Of immense interest is Komornicka’s discussion on how Gierek and his team designed and implemented a national strategy aimed at balancing various ideas and demands from the previous decade that they planned to realize. This centered on increased consumption, accelerated economic growth, more foreign loans, increased imports, and social liberalization. Pursuing an ambitious domestic agenda in this fashion illustrated that the Gierek regime—consisting of politicos primarily from the industrial Silesian region of Poland and constituting the youngest group of policymakers in Eastern Europe—was sensitive to public opinion. One would think that Gierek himself always had in the back of his mind the image of Polish workers with their short fuses that, when lit, could lead to protest, unrest, and political destabilization. After all, the events of December 1970 that erupted in several cities along Poland’s northern coast sparked by massive increases in food prices ultimately toppled Gomu?ka and brought Gierek to power.

In tandem with the domestic pillar guiding the development of Gierek’s national strategy was a bold foreign policy that aimed to see the PRL renew its image abroad, improve relations with Western states, and become the most influential Eastern bloc state after the Soviet Union. As Komornicka shows, the way the Gierek regime interpreted and adapted to several international situations in the 1970s (e.g., inflation in the West or the 1973 oil crisis) contributed to the expansion of PRL contacts with the West. In addition, the policy of détente reached between the United States and Soviet Union on the structure of East-West relations and the geopolitical circumstances associated with it allowed Gierek to firmly plant the Polish foot in the West’s door. This included a more assertive role in multilateral institutions that offered closer engagement with Western European partners, including the Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), a body designed to formalize détente through comprehensive negotiations between most European countries, the Soviet Union, the United States, and Canada. Here, the author draws on how Gierek positioned the PRL in this important international framework to achieve several key diplomatic objectives, especially in the area of security, which for the PRL centered on an idea of the inviolability of borders—what could be seen as an added international mechanism to prevent any possible German territorial revision. As Komornicka notes, Gierek’s diplomatic efforts of presenting the PRL as the most liberal and open satellite state in the Eastern bloc not only changed the country’s heretofore relationship with the West but also led to closer political and economic cooperation with key European states like West Germany, France, and Italy.

By 1975, the midway point through the implementation of the national strategy, Gierek was seen by many in the West as an unchallenged leader fully accepted by Moscow who cautiously yet boldly promoted economic growth by taking advantage of geopolitical circumstances stemming from détente. However, the second half of the decade proved more challenging for Gierek’s strategy than the first. As Komornicka shows, this again stemmed from a mixture of domestic (e.g., economic decline and the diversification of dissident organizations, which from then on became a permanent fixture of the PRL political landscape) and international circumstances. The latter aspect is of particular interest since the author presents how Gierek and his team were forced into a challenging balancing act in order to maintain good relations with the Soviet Union and the West. Complementing and even motivating growing domestic instability is what the author terms the pope effect (i.e., the election of Cardinal Karol Wojty?a to the papacy in October 1978), which to a large extent internationalized growing social demands for, for example, wage increases, free trade unions, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press that strike or workers defense committees peppered authorities with at various levels throughout the mid- and late seventies. Komornicka correlates this mass mobilization with the “Helsinki effect”: the elevation of human rights issues into international norms and the political language of dissidents in the Eastern bloc satellite states based on Basket III of the Helsinki Final Act concluded in 1975, which included key human rights provisions.

Upon reading Komornicka’s monograph, it is evident that the Gierek era was that of a political paradox. On the one hand, Gierek came to power with visions of liberalizing the PRL’s political system based on building a “second Poland,” one that would, above all, strive for greater European integration through tighter cooperation with Western partners while balancing its relationship with Moscow. Through more foreign loans and the purchase of consumer licenses from Western European companies, Gierek is remembered for catapulting and modernizing the standard of living for average Poles, who now strove to possess, for example, a Polish Fiat model 126P car (the so-called maluch or “little tike”) or German audio equipment. Indeed, the technology flow between East and West not only facilitated détente at the macro level but also served as a key element in liberalizing and westernizing the PRL at the micro one. On the other hand, despite signs of crisis brewing on the horizon, Gierek and his team maintained the course by continuing the national strategy. While Gierek eventually fell from power in a similar fashion as did his predecessor, he achieved what his team set out to do: to create a more liberal, open regime and a society that was unwilling to backslide to a strong arm, authoritarian regime. More importantly, as problems mounted or pressure increased from the Soviet Union, they defended their strategy, never questioning, reassessing, or pulling back from the PRL’s cooperation with the West. Komornicka succeeds in capturing this unique decade of Polish and Cold War history through an international lens. For this reason, her book is recommended reading for anyone interested in the 1970s and the East-West relationship defined by the détente policy that hung over that decade.

Note

[1]. Malcome W. Brown, “As Gierek Visits U.S., Poland Basks in Stability and Economic Prosperity,” New York Times, October 11, 1974.

[This review from H-Net is reproduced here under a Creative Commons License]