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

This book shows how Hungary and Poland led the transformations that brought down Communism.Hungary and Poland led the transformations that brought down Communism: Hungary through economic reform, Poland through political struggle. Seleny 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. Different conceptual frameworks and strategies of persuasion, Seleny argues, account for these divergences in virtually identical institutional settings. The distinctive political-institutional residues of state-socialist transformations now shape the Polish and Hungarian capitalist democracies and condition their prospects in the European Union.Hungary and Poland led the transformations that brought down Communism: Hungary through economic reform, Poland through political struggle. Seleny 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. Different conceptual frameworks and strategies of persuasion, Seleny argues, account for these divergences in virtually identical institutional settings. The distinctive political-institutional residues of state-socialist transformations now shape the Polish and Hungarian capitalist democracies and condition their prospects in 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 demonstrates how theselS,