Political and historic perspective of Poland - Essay Example

ng states would influence the course of Poland’s history from peace time to wars with specific periods in each of these countries’ histories, interconnected. For instance, according to Geoffrey Elton et al. (1990), the balance of power between landowners and the monarchy was so even throughout the century as to give to their relations, whether of conflict or co-operation, a significance that illuminates the more decisive conflicts which were at the same time being waged in the extremer parts of Europe. (526) More specifically, we have Poland’s war against Russia which reduced the country into near anarchy and eventually divided it among Russia, Prussia and Austria.

Afterwards, the Second World War would leave the country in ruins, earning for Poland the distinction of the country with the most percentage of deaths among its citizens. After the war, Poland became a communist country with a Soviet imposed government patterned after the rest of the Eastern bloc. In the communism’s fall in the 1990s, a democratic government was set in place and thus, began the history of Democratic Poland. Ethnic groups that have settled in Central Europe, such as Slavic, Celtic, Baltic and Germanic is said to have given rise to Poland.

A system that had some semblance to a government with a definite territory was first seen in 966 A.D. And since then, Poland had always had a unitary form of government except in the 12th century wherein the country descended into a period of feudal disintegration fragmenting the country into several states. Poland flourished during era of foreign migration, particularly during the influx of the Jews. The parliamentary system of government has been in place in Poland since the fifteenth to sixteenth century when the nobility wielded political power based on the local or country assemblies, which exercised parliamentary functions.

(Elton et al. 528) I would like to underscore that around the period of sixteenth century there was a large number