Fifteen years a member of the European Union, Poland has managed to achieve a high level of economic progress and very good results in infrastructure; this is due to the fact that even in the pre-accession period, the Poles learned how to function in a market economy, Poland’s Ambassador to Moldova Bartłomiej Zdaniuk told an interview with IPN.
Three decades ago, Poland’s economy was in shambles, as the Poles had purposefully been rendered incapable of functioning in a market economy. “This was in fact the worst damage ever done by the Communist system”, says the ambassador. Now Poland is the largest economy in the former Eastern bloc, with its small and mid-sized enterprises sector being considered the backbone that has driven the country’s economic growth uninterruptedly since 1994.
Despite this progress, Poland has been struggling with negative demographic trends, with the first wave of mass emigration registered way back in 1830. This has resulted in a labor crunch. “We have achieved a level of development so high that we are unable now to meet our labor market demand on our own”. At a current population of 38 million, it is estimated that 20 million more Poles live outside of the country. “These are residents that we have lost because of poor economic conditions”, says Bartłomiej Zdaniuk, while noting optimistically that birth rate trends have started to improve in recent years.
Poland’s participation in the former Eastern bloc meant meager livelihoods for the population, says the diplomat, and the 1956 uprising in the city of Poznań was a reflection of this, as “the Poles understood that the Stalinist regime was a mistake”.
As Moldova prepares to mark both Victory Day and Europe Day tomorrow, Bartłomiej Zdaniuk said the holidays are observed separately in Poland. Like everywhere across the European Union, Poland marks the Victory in Europe Day on May 8, and not on May 9 as per the Soviet tradition. The ambassador recalled that Europe Day is a tribute to an event that happened five years and one day later, when on 9 May 1950 the French foreign minister Robert Schuman famously proposed the creation of a European Coal and Steel Community, which ultimately grew into the present-day European Union. “This was the first symbolic step towards the European construct”, said Bartłomiej Zdaniuk.
However, the ambassador notes that Poland had a limited role in both of those historical events. “The year 1945 was victorious. The question is, was it a victory for the Poles? I think not. The costs of the war had been huge. Poland lost 6 million people to the war, and its cultural heritage and economy were destroyed. The system introduced in Poland with the arrival of the Red Army was not something that we chose, it was imposed to us. So can we call it a victory after all? It was only in 1989 that the Poles were able to create a system by their own design. As concerns European Union, we celebrated it last week on May 1, when we also celebrated the 15th anniversary of Poland’s accession to the EU”, the ambassador told an interview with IPN.
