Poland : social policy - its results and goals

Abstract

The responsibility of the politicians dealing with social issues and their awareness depends on the answer to the question: What is the real role of social policy and its real impact on the formation of a given society? Social politicians are sometimes observed to tend to attribute greater importance to their function than others do. When analyzing Polish society over the last decades and its evolution in the sphere of the so-called social order, we can reach the conclusion that social policy is like the weather: it can be either bad or good, but it is always there. In other words, absence of social policy is also a kind of social policy. The situation in Poland provides many examples which, given without a deeper explanation, may not seem clear enough. An instance of such lack of policy can be seen in the living conditions of the rural population, conditions which are civilizationally and culturally different from the town. This very difference results from the more or less purposeful social policy towards the countryside. My intention is to present certain social effects of our social policy so far, as well as the assumptions of the social policy for the nearest future, namely the period of crisis and the following years. For obvious reasons this presentation will be extremely brief and synthetic.