List of Tables ; Preface; INTRODUCTION; CHAPTER ONE: The Institutional Sources of Crisis-Generating Tendencies; CHAPTER TWO: The Limited ""Reformability"" of State Socialism; CHAPTER THREE: The Logic of a Closed System: The Vicious Cycle of Decline ; CHAPTER FOUR: Crisis Management: The Trap of Negative Legitimation ; CHAPTER FIVE: Determinants of Normalization: Why Has It Failed to ""Normalize"" State Socialism in Poland? ; CHAPTER SIX: The Institutional Decomposition of State Socialism: The Syndrome of Withdrawal ; CHAPTER SEVEN: Beyond State Socialism
APPENDIX A: Stages of the ""Post-Martial Law"" Normalization"" A Bird's Eye View of Major Political Developments APPENDIX B: The Debt Trap; Abbreviations; Bibliography; Index
Summary
Does the abrupt collapse of communist regimes in Eastern Europe arise only from errors in implementing the policy of state socialism, leaving the concept itself still a potentially valid one? Bartlomiej Kaminski argues to the contrary: state socialism is a fundamentally defective idea that was well carried out, enabling it to exist until its accumulated shortcomings made its survival extremely difficult. How did the flawed state-socialist system endure for so long? Why is it failing now? In answering these questions, Kaminski, who is both an economist and a political analyst, proposes a gener
