The mobilization that was not : Explaining the weak politicization of the issue of unemployment in Poland
Résumé
By combining mass unemployment, a high level of restrictive changes in policies addressing the unemployed, and a low level of political and social conflict connected to these issues, Poland appears as a puzzling case in the European landscape. During 1989–1990, the revolutions that brought to an end decades of communist rule in Central and Eastern Europe were accompanied by a wave of hope for rapid material gains from economic restructuring. Similar expectations for an improvement in well-being accompanied European Union (EU) accession fifteen years later. In this context, the rise of unemployment, which is often associated with a failure of government policies, could be interpreted as a nonachievement of the new political regime.