When Backwardness Became an Advantage: Professional Stays Abroad in the West as Midwife of the Transformation in Poland

Socialist Poland was one of the few countries in the Eastern Bloc that was able to make targeted use of professional and scientific exchange programmes with the West. Thanks to Poland’s membership since the founding of the UN and the country’s qualification as a “developing country”, Poland was able to build on the programmes and grants of international organisations, above all the Technical Bureau of the United Nations and the foundations much more than, for example, the GDR or Czechoslovakia. Thus, in the case of Poland, Gerschenkron’s theory of the “advantage of backwardness” can be used to explain the transformation process. In the process of system transformation, the role of professional stays abroad by Polish experts and scientists in the West, since the late 1960s, should not be underestimated. Thanks to a liberal travel policy, the experts from Poland had an enormous advantage over the other countries in the Eastern Bloc. Many of those experts formed the post-communist elite after 1989—the “midwifes” of the transformation.