Between Participation and Contestation: World Integration and Poland’s Bargaining with International Economic Organizations, 1956-1970

• In Event: The Search for Legitimisation in a Post-Stalinist Society: Polish Intellectuals and the Reconceptualization of the Marxist Project

Abstract

The 1960s, the so-called „decade of development” brought about a strong challenge to the legitimacy of the world economy from its peripheries on all continents, marked by their efforts to improve their position within the system. On the example of Poland, I argue, that this participation-through-contestation and contestation-through-participation was also essential for the countries of state-socialist Europe and that it began to impact Polish foreign policies already at the turn of the 1960s. Pursuing this argument, I analyze Poland’s cautious involvement with international economic organizations designed to foster international trade, such as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, aiming to explain the rationale behind this involvement, and the conceptualizations of global economic processes by Polish experts, that informed the policymaking.

Author

• Bartosz Matyja, U of Warsaw (Poland)