From Pandora's Box

A comparison of the country's contemporary situation and the contents of the legendary container of woes is indeed compelling. The EU accession process has developed a distinctly pear-shaped appearance, as the Europeans have begun to more than just nag Poland about the rotten state of its infrastructure and public standards in general, while the Red Cross has concluded that two million people, including 200,000 children, do not have enough to eat. This hardly amounts to a reflection of the modern state this should be after 12 years of intensive economic reforms and the inflow of some €60 billion of foreign investment. Yet the best the government can do about any of this is to dream up more ways of punishing taxpayers and imposing upon their long suffering backs further bundles of red tape, the result of which will be to deepen the endemic culture of contempt for honesty in public life - while encouraging a good deal more tax evasion.

The government has a valid point by insisting it inherited a mountain of debt. But that's all, because every government since 1989 has been compulsively addicted to debt. None of the money handed over by foreign investors has reached essential social services like health and education, care for the elderly and handicapped or assistance for the wretchedly poor, who may compose 30% of the population. About half the entire tax haul is absorbed by debt service, and insofar as Poland has ever had anything like a tax policy, it amounts to nothing more sophisticated than running furiously on the spot.
The fact that successive governments have allowed corruption to infiltrate every corner of the state, the emergence of massive social inequalities and the putrefaction of the judicial system, is no secret to anyone. Yet now there is a state of shock reverberating around the country that other Europeans have the temerity to tell Poles to put their house in order. It is as though various administrations simply thought these things were of no real significance. This is a plausible explanation because none of them trifled with remedial measures, beyond cynically cosmetic gestures.

The price of such complacency may be a high one. The European Union, always a mass of contradictions scouting in perpetual search of a compromise, has a history of waking up to things at the last moment. The heady romance of opening the doors of Europe to the east has been replaced by a cooler assessment in all the member states of what the impact and the costs will be of admitting 10 new member states on the same day in 2004. There have always been fainthearts. Now emboldened, they may succeed in delaying the pace of the accession process, and probably it is now wise for the Polish government to assume that will be the case.

Then the problem becomes that the government does not have a strategic policy on Europe. It has a policy of desperation and self-interest, which amounts to that of regarding the transfer of EU resources as the saviour of the budget. The government has been eagerly anticipating the receipt of those funds in 2004. If they do not appear, Mr. Kołodko will find some of his important fiscal assumptions predicated on membership of the club transformed into a soggy mess of bread and water. The government's political trajectory will veer significantly off course, taking with it the personal ambitions of some leading members of the administration, significantly those of Mr. Miller himself.

Not a Lot
It has been evident for many years that LOT is not excessively preoccupied with its domestic air services and that the airline clings to its monopoly only to deter interlopers. It means outrageous fares and indifferent quality, as anyone who has watched the daily pantomime performance at the check-in at the Warsaw domestic terminal will readily confirm.
Now the spirit of free enterprise has appeared in the form of a small Silesian airline that will fly cross-country services which, characteristically, LOT abandoned some years back. But the new entrant will not be challenging the national flag-carrying monopolist. A country which lacks respectable road and rail infrastructure should get open skies - now.