Poland's Solidarity Movement and the Global Politics of Human Rights

Abstract

In the Fall 2013 issue of the Journal of Cold War Studies, Robert Brier published an article “Broadening the Cultural History of the Cold War: The Emergence of the Polish Workers’ Defense Committee and the Rise of Human Rights,” which examined the emergence of a dissident movement in Communist-era Poland. Following a student uprising in Poland in March 1968 and the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in August of that year, distinctive forms of opposition began to challenge the Communist monopoly of power in Poland. Inspired by Soviet dissenters, most notably Andrei Sakharov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Polish opposition activists also later appealed to the human rights agenda of the Helsinki Accords of 1975, which the Polish authorities had recognized by signing but failed to enact in practice.Poland's key opposition movements in the 1970s were the Workers’ Defense Committee (KOR) and the Movement to Defend Human and Civil Rights (ROPCiO). Their aspirations were encouraged by the arrival of the Polish Pope, John Paul II, in 1979, though Brier contends that the pope's visit “may not have been as heroic as some accounts suggest” (p. 34). These were significant impulses for the creation of Solidarity, whose “Twenty-One Demands” articulated the agenda of human rights. Solidarity was temporarily accepted by the Communist authorities in the Gdańsk Agreement of August 1980, but after sixteen months of legality Solidarity was banned by martial law, and the human rights agenda was brutally suppressed.The world watched the Solidarity underground in the decade that followed. But, as Brier explains, international responses were often determined by domestic agendas. To West German Chancellor Willy Brandt—himself a former refugee from Nazi Germany—foreign policy was governed by lengthy time-horizons during which détente gradually unfolded through the evolution of intergovernmental relations. His Ostpolitik hence saw dissidents as promoting an unreasonable, or simply ignorant, view of history. Even so, Western officials began to extend their visits by meeting opposition figures and stopping at sites of popular remembrance, notably the tomb of Father Jerzy Popiełuszko, a Polish priest murdered by secret police officers in 1984.The French left engaged in fierce debate from 1974—triggered by Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago—about the respective merits of Communism and Marxism. Brier argues that “the once dominant framework of the French Left—Marxism—collapsed completely” (p. 108), and in its place human rights became the principal concern. As the abstractions of “totalitarianism” were replaced by specific concerns for human rights, political prisoners and dissidents in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe became central figures. Left-wing intellectuals demanded that Communist rulers heed human rights and other universal norms they had endorsed at Helsinki. Rather than acknowledging Communist autocracy, they had to accept Solidarity's democratic principle that citizens should have a direct influence on public affairs. This was also the priority at home.U.S. debates on foreign policy were also driven by domesticity. In the 1970s, Democrats like Senator Henry Jackson began to use the language of human rights to reinforce the ideological differences between East and West and thereby “reclaim American virtue” (p. 128). But under Ronald Reagan's Republican presidency the target was extended from anti-Communist rhetoric to measures against any social system antagonistic toward the creativity of individual human beings. As Reagan dismantled some welfare policies and reduced the influence of trade unions, union leaders in the United States argued that Solidarity represented a human right that was under threat at home: freedom of association.Brier concludes that Solidarity became a “vessel” for the ideas and wishes of its supporters abroad. Its leaders, including “iconic figures” such as Lech Wałęsa, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983, were harshly suppressed by the Communist regime and were lauded abroad as prisoners of conscience. Poland became a “canvas unto which West Europeans and Americans could project their own struggles” (p. 145). Brier does recognize their assistance in helping to keep Polish activists out of prison, providing funds to sustain their activity and nudging the Polish government toward the 1989 roundtable talks with the opposition. These were significant steps toward the end of Communism in Eastern Europe and of the Cold War, but Brier suggests their main impulse was domesticity rather than internationalism.His book is a contribution to the promising Cambridge University Press series “Human Rights in History,” which one hopes will explore these issues further. Not least are the dramatic changes of the post-1989 era, as political leaders in Poland and Hungary have moved to recentralize state power and limit, or indeed extinguish, the role of human rights-based opposition.