The World in Words
From Solidarity to Freedom
Zbigniew Bujak
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Although the rise 25 years ago of Solidarity, the first independent civic movement in the former Soviet empire, had huge political consequences, Solidarity was, primarily, neither a political movement nor a labor union.
First and foremost, Solidarity was a cry of dignity. We simply had reached the end of our endurance with the omnipresent and all-powerful communist apparatchiks who ruled in our workplaces, neighborhoods, even places of rest. Writers, journalists, and artists could no longer stand the heavy-handed censorship and supervision. In factories as well, Party bureaucrats wanted to know everything and decide everything.
Every civic initiative, every activity of any kind was subject to ideological evaluation and control. All who were tempted to disobey were certain to be “taken care of” by the secret police.
Last winter, I saw a similar cry for dignity in Ukraine. Those hundreds of thousands of people who camped for weeks on the freezing streets of Kiev did so because they were demanding their dignity. Both the Polish and the Ukrainian experiences have convinced me that the will to live in dignity is the most powerful engine of human action, an engine that is capable of overcoming even the greatest fear.
But the desire for dignity is not enough to secure it. Something else is needed as well.
Second, Solidarity was a social movement. This meant that Solidarity – ostensibly a labor union – became a home for people from all social groups and classes in Poland: workers and intellectuals, engineers and artists, doctors and patients. Some passionately discussed economic reform, others talked about developing culture, while still others planned to reform education and the scientific establishment or assure the defense of the environment. Solidarity created a public space for all of these discussions, while protecting us all against the party apparatus.
But Solidarity was still something more. It was a Polish version of the ancient Greek agora, a meeting place of all citizens, a locus of a free conversation about our communal and individual future, about all kinds of problems and their solutions. We did not yet have a free state, but we already had something more important than that: a free civil society engaged in discussing the common condition of its members.
The society embraced by Solidarity counted 10 million members; indeed, 10 million real citizens. But even that was not enough to achieve the final victory over the party and police apparatus of the state.
Third, Solidarity was an institution; indeed, a unique one given the conditions under which we lived, and it is to its special institutional form that we owe our ultimate victory. Between the organizational structure of Solidarity and the official state and party organizations there was what might be called a “gap between civilizations.” Against the authoritarian and hierarchical structures of the regime, we raised a decentralized institution, a huge organism striving to achieve consensus about its aims and the methods of action. It was an institution committed to respecting the integrity of all individuals and all other institutions.
This may not be extraordinary in old democratic communities; but in our authoritarian environment, it was strikingly new. And only such a new institutional structure could respond to that deep cry for dignity.
So what is left of all this today?
To be sure, Solidarity achieved a stunning political success. Poland is a free country, a member of NATO and of the EU, while the Soviet Union is no more.
But recent history has not been kind to the victors. The leaders of the democratic revolutions in Eastern Europe quickly faded in the new environment. Democratic elections brought out new and savvier politicians, often from among those who were part of the old regime.
More strikingly, some of our hopes for a new social order also crashed against the rocks of the new rules of the game. True, Poland’s democratic institutions, despite their flaws, function rather well. Economic growth has been impressive, and life is definitely getting better.
But the vibrancy of civil society, the sense of common purpose, the universal manifestations of social solidarity that our union stood for in its time – all these things are largely gone. The union itself is a shell of its own former self, a partisan and mostly right-wing movement of workers buffeted by the new economic reality.
Most notably, the unifying character of Solidarity gave way to social divisions and, among many of Poland’s people, a large dose of alienation from both politics and civic engagements.
Is this what normalcy always means? Do heady times of struggle always give way to a somewhat deflating taste of victory? Am I merely a veteran wistfully reminiscing about the old days of struggle?
Perhaps. But I am not a nostalgic type. I know that we have come a long way, and I do not want to go back. But was it really inevitable that so much solidarity had to escape our Solidarity?
Zbigniew Bujak, former Solidarity leader for the region of Mazowsze (central Poland, including Warsaw) and a hero of underground resistance during martial law in the 1980’s, was a deputy in the Polish parliament from 1989 to 1997.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2005.
www.project-syndicate.org
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