The Political Economy of State-Society Relations in Hungary and Poland: From Communism to the European Union

The profound transformations that preceded the downfall of Communism originated in Poland and Hungary, but played out in strikingly different ways. Hungary led through economic reform, Poland through open political struggle. Analysis of these transformational variants yields important insights into systemic change, marketization, and democratization. This book shows how these changes were possible in authoritarian regimes as, over time, state and society became mutually vulnerable, neither fully able to dictate the terms of engagement. For Poland this meant principled confrontation; for Hungary, innovative accommodation. This book argues that different conceptual frameworks and strategies of persuasion account for these divergences in virtually identical institutional settings. Seleny traces the different political-institutional residues which, in both Hungary and Poland, now function as constraining or enabling legacies. In particular, she demonstrates that state socialist legacies account for salient differences between these two new capitalist democracies, and now condition their prospects in the European Union.