Product Description: A brilliant meditation on politics, morality, and history from one of the most courageous and controversial authors of our age Renowned Eastern European author Adam Michnik was jailed for more than six years by the communist regime in Poland for his dissident activities...read more

Overthrowing communism in 1989 and joining the European Union in 2004, the Polish people hold loyalties to region, country and now continent – even as the definition of what it means to be ‘European’ remains unclear. Paying particular attention to those who came of age in the earliest years of the neoliberal and democratic transformations, this book uses the life-story narratives of rural and urban southern Poles to reveal how ‘being European’ is considered a fundamental component of ‘being Polish’ while participants are simultaneously ‘becoming European’. Ultimately, this study demonstrates how the EU is regarded as both an idea and an instrument, and how ordinary citizens make choices that influence the shape of European identity and the legitimacy of its institutions.

Product Description: The book offers an interdisciplinary but very grounded look at the question of memory politics in contemporary Poland. It describes the conflicting ways in which two groups of people - the former anti-communist activists and the former officers of the repressive regime - have actively engaged in representations and claims about the communist past in the contemporary reality of one Polish town...read more

Product Description: This book explores the reinterpretations of Poland’s past which have been undertaken by Polish national and local elites since the fall of communism. It focuses on remembrance practices and traces the de-commemorating of communism to examine the ways in which collective remembering and forgetting shapes present power constellations in Poland and impacts on foreign and domestic policy...read more

Product Description: Bitter Harvest, a historical ethnographic study, examines the property changes prompted by the early post-socialist neoliberal reforms designed to build capitalism in Poland. Historically, the book traces the halting but steady emergence of privatization and liberalization, even under socialism, and how these anticipated the reforms of the post-socialist period...read more

Product Description: Today's Euroscepticism contrasts sharply with the idealism of the thousands of Poles thrust out of their country after 1939 by war, occupation and communism. How could a future Poland find security and progress, but by membership in a union of European states? This book explores how Poles in exile attempted to shape opinion in Poland and the West...read more

Product Description: What has really happened in Poland since the election of 2005? After such spectacular events as the practice of lustration and the questioning of solidarity with the European Union, one has to ask: what is the nature of this newly emerging society? As with many of the recent developments in former communist countries that seem to be mysterious and irrational, the situation and ensuing problems are complex and the answers neither trivial nor easy...read more

Product Description: This book covers the history of Polish cinema from 1989 up to the present in a broad political and cultural context, looking at both the film industry and film artistry. It considers the main ideas behind the institutional changes in the Polish film industry after the collapse of communism and assesses how these ideas were implemented...read more

Product Description: After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the countries of East-Central Europe embarked on a journey to transform themselves into democratic capitalist societies. Their governments searched for strategies that would allow them to pursue radical market reforms within the context of nascent democratic politics...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This book examines change in post-1989 Poland by linking it analytically to the continuity of Poland's past. It argues that the first reality of objective-institutional changes is underpinned by the continuity of second realities...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Post-Communist Transition: The Thorny Road treats the historical endeavor to transform state-controlled economies to new institutional arrangements of free market economies. This ongoing transition is an indispensable part of globalization...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The Presidency and Governance in Poland parallels the studies the Miller Center has produced on the American presidency and governance. It draws on the most able specialists on Poland, in the United States and Poland, who address issues that are central to any discussion of governance...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: With an emphasis on popular experience and public opinion, this volume explores the process of the transformation of Poland's economy, polity and society. Illustrated with maps to highlight regional patterns, the book also makes use of attitudinal surveys...read more

This work is the first comprehensive presentation of liberal thought in Central Europe, especially in Poland, before and after 1989. The book contains a critical analysis of the proto-liberal anti-communist democratic opposition, in particular its ideas of the autonomy of the individual and civil society, and a description of economic liberalism as an alternative liberal orientation. The author's main theme, however, is the dilemma of liberalism in a post-communist society in which it is faced with historically unprecedented challenges. In countries which have no liberal tradition or the social or economic conditions which encouraged the emergence of liberalism in the past, the classic tenets of liberalism are undergoing essential modifications. Liberalism inescapably is becoming "constructivist" and serves primarily as the justification for a remarkable kind of social engineering whose objective is the rapid building of capitalism. This book is both an important contribution to our knowledge of the post-communist world and a voice in thh discussion on the nature and future of liberalism.

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Product Description: A study of the life and attitudes of young people in East-Central Europe following the fall of communism. It considers reforms which have taken place, old and new career paths, youth culture, family and community life, politics, and attitudes towards being citizens of the new society...read more

Product Description: This book is an enlightening, inspiring, and sobering account of the social and economic transformation of Poland. A multinational and interdisciplinary group of scholars examine the historical precursors that gave shape to the Solidarity movement, then focus on the institutional change that today presents challenges even more daunting than those of the earlier drama of resistance...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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