Captains or Pirates? State-Business Relations in Post-Socialist Poland

Abstract

In the 1990s, post-socialist states faced a critical dilemma: how to privatize and transform thousands of firms in the absence of domestic entrepreneurs with enough capital to assume control of the state's industrial patrimony. In the fifteen years of post-socialism, the elites created by the processes of transformation have been a decisive force in the economic and political development of Eastern Europe. Yet few studies focus on these early winners of reform. This article explores the interactions between the new economic elite, their firms, and the Polish state to construct a multilayered framework of state-society relations in post-communism. It concludes that the structure of state-firm relations and heightened political pluralism was crucial in limiting the predatory behavior of the new economic elite during the period of restructuring and privatization despite. This was critical in avoiding the rampant corruption present in other post-socialist countries and placed Poland on a markedly different path.