Building and Civil Society in Thesis

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At the same time, as compared to Ukraine, in Poland "the hard budget constraint on state enterprises, together with sufficient standards of corporate governance" were the main governmental instruments to avoid a "large-scale asset stripping before privatization"

. This was one of the key reasons for which the economic rebound started quite early for Poland, as compared to Ukraine. The privatization process did not take the chaotic characteristics it had in Ukraine, where the state assets were often simply divided between groups of interests and individuals close to the decision factors and power leverages. The rational privatization process in Poland meant that many of these assets, still functional, could be used to resume economic growth. Further along, the fact that there was a rational privatization of these assets meant that the direct foreign investment could gradually start during the early 1990s.

There was another explanation for the economic evolution in Poland during the transition period as compared to that of Ukraine. The Polish governments during the 1990s promoted an environment in which the small and medium-size enterprises (SME) could develop. Any economic theory will argue that this is the sector of a national economy that best supports a sustainable market economy. In Poland, the fact that this SME segment was encouraged by the government and supported with the appropriate legislative and executive actions also meant that the enterprises inherited from the Communist period would have an important competitor on the market. None of these actually occurred in Ukraine or, whenever they did, it was an isolated act rather than a generalized, governmentally-supported approach.

One final element worth referring to with regard to the economic aspect of state building and to the role of the government refers to the fiscal reforms and, more notably, the pension reform in Poland, a key element to ensure that one of the most vulnerable categories, the elderly, could be somewhat cushioned against the effects of the economic transition.

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With a rational division of the pensions in different tiers, the Polish governments implemented fiscal and pension reforms during the early 1990s, while in Ukraine, the comprehensive pension reform only started around 2005 and has been stalled for the last years.

Civil society

Civil society, along with political society and economic society, previously mentioned, is the third of the five interconnecting "arenas of democratization," as Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan have labeled them

. The role of the civil society is significant, especially in the early phases of post-Communist state building, both in terms of aiding the government in the institution and societal changes that need to be implemented, and also of providing the appropriate feedback and control mechanism as to how these reforms are being implemented.

In Poland, the civil society and its activism had been one of the direct causes of the fall of the Communist regime, starting with the Solidarity movement in the early 1980s. The tradition of an active civil society became even more obvious after the fall of the Communist regime, when, from 1989 to 1996, data reported a significant increase in the number of civil society organizations

. In 2003, there were 24,000 civil society associations and foundations in Poland

In Ukraine, this process was significantly slower than in Poland and it had different characteristics as well......

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