| Poland:
A Child of Globalization, Me |
| By Bart
Nabrdalik |
| My plane had
just landed on the maze of reinforced concrete runways simply known as
JFK to all New Yorkers. America greeted me with a burst of humid
air, so typical of the Long Island summer. t is good to be back home, just
as it was good to get away for a while.
It was not
my first foray into Europe; I was born in the “Old World” and spent the
first twelve years of my life there, so technically I am a European. I
entered this world in Poland, behind what was then called the Iron Curtain,
imagined by many in the West to be a pulverized industrial landscape full
of smokestacks, with a statue of Lenin gracing every corner. To some
extent it was true, but the European cultural and architectural heritage
managed to remind the visitors that they were still in Europe. |
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| Poland is
actually located in the geographic heart of the old continent, so put your
Cold War blinders away- this is central, not eastern Europe. Now it
is a normal democratic and capitalist country, containing an area the size
of Arizona within its borders, although still much poorer than its western
neighbors and well, imagine that, even Arizona itself. However,
globalization is working steadily to elevate the standard of living and
negate the adverse effects two World Wars and an almost half-century of
hibernation under communism have had upon the country and its people.
Indeed, if
you visited Poland barely fifteen years ago, just as it was emerging from
the communist slumber, you will not recognize the place now. Gone are
the dreary state owned stores where everything other than bread and vinegar
were in perennially short supply. Gleaming huge supermarkets stocking
a vast array of imported and domestic products dominate the cities, giving
both open air markets and small shops a run for their money.
In larger cities, huge indoor malls boasting hundreds of chic boutiques
attract droves of shoppers, some coming not just to shop, but to also eat
out in fancy restaurants or gape at illuminated fountains and tropical
topiary. |
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| The streets
are congested, as thousands of families buy their first car every year,
with the more affluent adding a second family vehicle to cater to a more
hectic lifestyle. Many roads are being repaved and widened, even
as the countrywide construction of toll motorways gathers momentum. Catering
to all those motorists are countless new gas stations and car dealerships
that threaten to replicate in Poland the quintessential American landscape
of endless strip malls. Even the urban fabric of city life is changing,
with newly hip downtowns becoming the abode of banks and other financial
institutions, while single family houses surrounded by gardens are drawing
the nascent middle class away from living in high-rise concrete flats that
were the supreme achievement of socialism.
The countryside
is changing as well, if not as quickly or profoundly as the cities. |
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| Almost everybody
now has the telephone, electricity and running water, most farmers have
tractors and other useful farm machinery. Many hitherto dirt tracks
are getting paved in asphalt to make access to other villages and nearby
cities easier. Numerous aristocratic palaces and manors were renovated
to become the abodes of the nouveaux riche elites, while some wealthier
peasants had morphed into huge landowners, efficiently farming on hundreds
of acres and hiring their erstwhile neighbors as workers.
Of course,
prosperity is not evident everywhere, as there are huge numbers of people
barely making ends meet, working menial jobs or not finding any work at
all. Unemployment is particularly apparent in the small towns
and the countryside, where the collapse of state run farms and the disappearance
of heavy industry have caused much hardship.
The growing
service sector manages to absorb at least some superfluous industrial workers
and peasants, but for some life remains a struggle. |
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| What caused
this profound change in the Polish economy and the appearance of the country?
Yes, it is the process many people in the affluent West love to hate, globalization.
Long gone
are the days where most countries tended to be self-sufficient in manufacturing
and jealously guarded their marketplace from foreign products. National
governments made it difficult for foreign companies to invest money in
their country, and enacted high tariffs to benefit domestic producers.
These unnatural obstacles to free trade kept domestic prices up, reduced
the range and availability of many goods and services and promoted the
retention of uncompetitive and inefficient industries. Communism
was the supreme variant of protectionism, and as such failed most miserably.
Globalization,
which has been going on for a few decades now among Western nations, is
steadily working as a great equalizer. |
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| It is now
a distant past when the United States was a lonely island of prosperity
among the sea of poverty and despair. There are now quite a few countries
enjoying a high standard of living. Many poor countries are catching
up as well - seeing the rapid growth of western investment in Poland, which
seeks to tap a source of still cheap labor and new consumer markets, I
cannot fail to be impressed by a corresponding rise in living standards.
In fact, the domestic resources of Polish capital would fail to effect
the same kind of profound change that I had described before. This
holds true for most emerging markets, and who knows, perhaps in twenty
or thirty years the flow of my compatriots into America will dry up, or
even be reversed.
While it is
true that western companies pay low wages to many workers in the developing
world, they create jobs that would otherwise be non-existent or paying
worse still. For people living in the United States, globalization
means not just the siphoning off of manufacturing jobs overseas, it offers
American consumers the opportunity to buy a wide assortment of cheap products
made in Asia that would otherwise be out of reach for many in this country.
It is true
that globalization, such as any other worldwide economic phenomenon, has
its good and bad aspects. However, it is unquestionable that its
positive effects far outweigh its faults.
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