Longing for Western life and starting to adopt it

Social transformation was part and parcel of regime change, inseparable from political and economic modernization following the Western model. From occupational and income structure to household spending, lifestyle, and behavioral patterns, the entire social fabric loosened into a state of permanent change. Although radical, the post-1989 transformation did not begin from a tabula rasa. Instead, existing trends, generated by postwar, state socialist industrialization, were accelerated as well as changed by exogenous factors. The pull effect of the envied and admired West, strengthened by geographical proximity, facilitated the spread of Western influences. It proved overwhelmingly attractive to follow the West's lead down the modernization path first laid out in the nineteenth century.

The “Westernizers” of the region from the early nineteenth century consistently advocated imitative development: Count István Széchenyi of Hungary in 1830 praised Britain as the “core of the world,” and recommended adoption of British practices based on the logic that “copying others presents no danger; we can adopt their century-long experiences” (Széchenyi, 1830: 258). A century and a half later, Bronislaw Geremek, one of Solidarity's leaders, made the same argument: Poland had to make the difficult and painful adjustment to Europe to “secure the chances for Poland of getting a place” in the European order (cited in Kowalik, 1994: 122).