 When Backwardness Became an Advantage: Professional Stays Abroad in the West as Midwife of the Transformation in PolandDagmara Jajeśniak-Quast ()
Chapter Chapter 11 in Roadblocks to the Socialist Modernization Path and Transition, 2024, pp 271-298 from Palgrave Macmillan Abstract: Abstract Socialist Poland was one of the few countries in the Eastern Bloc that was able to make targeted use of professional and scientific exchange programmes with the West. Thanks to Poland’s membership since the founding of the UN and the country’s qualification as a “developing country”, Poland was able to build on the programmes and grants of international organisations, above all the Technical Bureau of the United Nations and the foundations much more than, for example, the GDR or Czechoslovakia. Thus, in the case of Poland, Gerschenkron’s theory of the “advantage of backwardness” can be used to explain the transformation process. In the process of system transformation, the role of professional stays abroad by Polish experts and scientists in the West, since the late 1960s, should not be underestimated. Thanks to a liberal travel policy, the experts from Poland had an enormous advantage over the other countries in the Eastern Bloc. Many of those experts formed the post-communist elite after 1989—the “midwifes” of the transformation. Date: 2024 There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it. Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:stuchp:978-3-031-37050-2_11 Ordering information: This item can be ordered from DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-37050-2_11 Access Statistics for this chapter More chapters in Studies in Economic Transition from Palgrave Macmillan |
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