The second economy in Poland, as we just saw, is best understood as having been divided into two large islands, whereas in Hungary it increasingly resembled a pyramid at whose center were a variety of informal and – increasingly – formal institutional links with the state sector. The metaphor of separate islands would have appealed to Poland's great classical sociologist, Stefan Nowak, who understood all of Polish society analogously. For him, the family and its immediate social circle were pitted against the communist state; in between was an enormous “social vacuum.” But in fact, during the 1980s especially, a richly complex civil-social sphere emerged in Poland. If in Hungary by the early 1980s we see a dense institutional landscape in the economic sphere, in Poland we see a proliferation of voluntary associations, particularly after Jaruzelski's military coup at the end of 1981.

By the mid-1980s, these associations constituted an incipient civil society. Already, just two weeks after martial law was imposed, the Committees for Social Resistance (KOS) emerged. A dizzying array of informal activities soon proliferated.