POLAND: These are the key facts about Poland, which will now join the European Union in May next year.
Population: 38.6 million, overwhelmingly Roman Catholic. More than a third of the population lives in rural areas.
Geography: Poland covers 312,700 square kilometres (120,700 square miles). It borders the Baltic Sea to the north, Lithuania and Russia's Kaliningrad enclave to the northeast, Belarus and Ukraine to the east, Slovakia and the Czech Republic to the south and Germany to the west.
Capital: Warsaw (population 1.8 million). Other major cities are Lodz, Krakow, Poznan, Gdansk, Wroclaw and Katowice.
Political system: Parliamentary democracy, with a 460-seat lower house of parliament (the Sejm) and a 100-seat senate elected to four-year terms. The president, elected by popular vote, designates the prime minister and can veto bills.
Economy: Poland launched shock-therapy market reforms in 1990 to transform the centrally planned economy. Rapid economic growth of up to 7 per cent per annum followed in the mid-1990s, but has slowed since the 1998 economic crisis in Russia. The biggest challenge for the left-wing government is to curb unemployment, now at 18 per cent, while making spending cuts to prepare the budget for EU entry and later adopt the euro.
History: A regional power from the 14th to the 17th century, Poland was carved up by Austria, Prussia and Russia at the end of the 18th century. It regained its independence after the first World War, but was invaded by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939 at the start of the second, in which six million Poles died. As Soviet forces drove the Germans out of Poland in 1944-1945, dictator Josef Stalin installed the communist party in power. The party crushed workers' revolts in 1956, 1970 and 1976, until communism gave way to democracy in 1989.