How to Kill a Democracy

Abstract

How to Kill a Democracy Elzbieta Matynia (bio) "if in 1987 god had asked the poles what their three most fervent wishes were," quipped Adam Michnik, a guest speaker at the University Lecture series "Women and Men in Dark Times" at the New School on April 10, 2018, "they would have replied: First, we want to live in a country with no political prisoners. Second, we want a country without censorship and foreign armies. And third, we would like the Soviet Union to fall apart. And the good Lord listened to Poland, and all three wishes came true. We got our freedom. And today God is asking the Poles: What have you done with that freedom?" It was three decades ago, in 1989, that a new kind of revolutionary imaginary emerged, one that promised a new beginning and demonstrated the possibility of comprehensive systemic change without bloodshed. Velvet or otherwise un-radical, this kind of revolution has become what I call a "site" of tangible hope, a site in which words have power, in which people are allowed to speak and are listened to, and where they realize their agency through instruments other than weapons. "Negotiated revolution" is not an oxymoron but is still an extraordinary event when it happens, as dictatorships are by definition opposed to any spirit of dialogue and compromise. It was then, under the enormous pressure exerted by society, including a new wave of nationwide industrial strikes the previous year, that the communist regime agreed to talk with its subjects at a roundtable in Warsaw aimed at a re-legalization of the Independent Self-Governing Trade Union Solidarity and reform of the political system. To prepare for the talks, Lech Walesa, the shipyard electrician who had become Solidarity's chairman, and who in 1989 was already a Nobel Peace Prize laureate—organized what was officially [End Page 23] named the Citizens' Committee, made up of 135 respected members of the public: trade unionists, workers, teachers, scholars, farmers, physicians, and artists. These organized themselves into 15 thematic groups to develop positions for the negotiations. At that point, it was of great importance that—after years of being banned—the phrase "Independent and Self-Governing Trade Union Solidarity" was allowed to appear in the official state media. The Roundtable Talks began on February 2, 1989, and lasted six weeks; the final documents were signed on April 5, 1989. The talks represented a perfect instance of a dimension of democracy that I call performative, which emerges above all from the dialogue, speech acts, and conversations of concrete people who discover in the process what they have in common. That discovery is further disseminated when they turn their encounters into a performance accessible to all, and when they turn their words, charged with practical consequences, into social facts. At the time, the Roundtable was an extraordinary instance of a dialogue between those who held dictatorial power and a broad social movement that—though still illegal, and often represented by people just released from prison or labeled enemies of the state—was now acknowledged by the regime, however reluctantly, as the one group able to bring credibility to the proposed talks and to an eventual contract. It took place in the context of a still-dictatorial power that, even if no longer robust, nevertheless seemed clearly irreversible. The citizens' stance at the Roundtable was—strikingly—both radical and moderate at the same time. Though inherently dramatic, that kind of experience, formed in the process of speaking and listening to others, was a joyous and affirmative dimension of the political. Indeed, the performative dimension of democracy releases civic creativity and helps bowed backs to straighten up. It is truly transformative for those engaged in it, as it launches a process of learning, forming opinions, reasoning, and speaking. And this brings about change. It is clearly an alternative to tanks and bullets, and it creates conditions for recovering the lost dignity of people. The speech-based [End Page 24] performative capacities employed at the Polish Roundtable by the citizens' side moved the negotiations toward a nonviolent, radical break with its own soon-to-be ancien regime (Matynia 2009). After those six weeks of...