Polityka gospodarcza Polski na tle państw Europy Środkowej w dwudziestoleciu międzywojennym

Economic Policy of Poland in Comparison to Countries of Central Europe in the Interwar Period

Abstract: In the interwar period which started in 1918 after the Great War, the dominant politics was that of the economic liberalism which, along with the changes taking place on the political scene, shifted towards interventionism or economic nationalism. This path was also taken by three countries of Central Europe, i.e. Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. However, each one of them implemented its own economic policy, initially largely dependent on the heritage of the previous era. After the post-war economy (war economy in Poland), the time has come for the economic prosperity, and afterwards, the Great Depression which reevaluated politicians’ thinking about the economy. At the beginning of the 1930s, the Central European countries started to move away from the liberal concepts in favour of interventionism and statism. Each of them tried to implement this ‘common’ concept in its own way. None of the countries achieved their intended goals. The fall of Czechoslovakia and Poland in 1939 and Hungary’s dependence on Germany was by no means the result of adopting the erroneous economic policy by any of the countries of Central Europe. It was a consequence of the German policy of Drang nach Osten, which they could not oppose together (for political reasons), much less on their own. The aim of the article is to present mechanisms of the economic policy of the Second Republic of Poland in comparison to countries of Central Europe, which is understood, to follow Piotr Wandycz, as a tight territorial, cultural, economic region including the Republic of Poland, the Republic of Czechoslovakia, and the Kingdom of Hungary. The discussion also addresses modernization.