Read more: Walesa: Germany should play 'leading role in Europe'. But at the time, Walesa did not really believe the promise made by the communist regime. He still had fresh memories of previous anti-communist protests in Poland in , and , which ended in bloody clashes with the police.
Walesa had been working as an electrician at the Lenin Shipyard now Gdansk Shipyard in Gdansk since The shipyard built ships for the international market and brought considerable amounts of foreign currency into the communist country. The strikes at the shipyard began in mid-August , but there had already been smaller protests at companies in other parts of Poland in July. Polish-born Pope John Paul II provided one important source of inspiration when, during a Mass in Warsaw in , he spoke the sentence "Be not afraid.
Within a few weeks, 10 million of Poland's 35 million inhabitants had joined the Solidarnosc movement. But when there is a strike at a business that a state relies on for part of its revenue, it very much calls into question a communist system that legitimates itself by claiming to represent the proletariat," says Loew, who sees many parallels between Solidarnosc and the current wave of protests in Belarus.
Walesa was constantly aware of the danger that the protests could again be brutally put down. You have to think: There is no family anymore, no death, no money. I knew that they could kill me at any time. But I thought: They can kill me, but not vanquish me," he said. The East German dissident Joachim Gauck, who was later to become president in the reunited Germany, reacted to the events in Poland "with enthusiasm and skepticism," he says today.
He told DW that people in the former communist East Germany had lost any hope of change after events such as the suppression of the protest on June 17, and the construction of the Berlin Wall, leading to a feeling of political helplessness.
By contrast, he said, Poles had shown for centuries that they were ready to fight for their own identity whenever possible. He related how he had once said on a visit to Poland that "the language of freedom is Polish. When the Berlin Wall came down in November , Poland already had its first non-communist prime minister. The birthplace of Solidarity was the Lenin Shipyards in Gdansk.
The ensuing strike and violence, which spread to other Polish ports, resulted in dozens of deaths. Over the next several years, as the Polish economy stagnated, strikes occurred at various enterprises throughout the country. As such it was a socializing force that promoted behavioral attitudes based on mutual responsibility, solidarism, assistance, trust, loyalty; a teaching force that offered lessons in decentralized modes of self-organizing and participatory democratic governance; an empowering force that endorsed egalitarianism, individualism, and independence; and finally, a nonviolent force with its strict nonviolent discipline and belief in the greater effectiveness of nonviolent actions over other means of a political contestation.
Twenty years later after the roundtable talks and first democratic elections in Central Europe, Poland is a full-fledged democracy with a relatively strong civil society in comparison with other Central European states , competitive media and an increasingly consolidated parliamentary system based on a constitutionally strong executive and a popularly elected post of the president. The main socio-political cleavages in recent years have evolved around the role of religion and the Catholic church in public life, including state education; the effectiveness of transitional justice in dealing with collaborators of the former communist regime; and spectacular corruption scandals that besieged the Polish political scene in the last decade.
Generally, however, Poland is seen as a success story in its democratic transformation. Various factors played a role in this successful democratic transformation. The legacy of a Polish civil resistance is particularly discernable in four major democratic changes:. After the roundtable discussions between the communist government and the opposition, Solidarity leaders had only two months from mid-April to mid-June to prepare for the first open and free election in Poland since It was the self-organizing experience gained during the underground civil resistance, the well-developed underground press already legal by that time , and the extensive network of volunteers that gave Solidarity an important advantage over the communists in that election.
Solidarity ran a breathtaking campaign and eventually won all but one taken by an independent candidate contested seats in the pacted elections in June The design and implementation of major decentralization reforms in the second half of —which established 2, self-governing rural and urban communes with considerable governing powers, financial resources and legal status—had all the hallmarks of the Solidarity movement.
Underlying these reforms was a philosophy of decentralized governance with autonomous local institutions and a non-political, civic organization in charge of training tens of thousands of local civil servants and political officials in governance and empowering local councils and administrations.
During the first years of transformation, Poland experienced the largest number of protests, and lost work days due to strikes among all the countries in Central and Eastern Europe. Good neighborly relations with Germany, Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania, oftentimes despite a difficult history and problems with Polish ethnic minorities in those countries, were established surprisingly quickly. Learn more about our work here. Hundreds of past and present cases of nonviolent civil resistance exist.
To make these cases more accessible, ICNC compiled summaries of some of them between the years As intended, Martial Law made it extremely difficult to get up-to-date news from inside Poland out to the rest of the world.
However, in this respect, the BBC had three significant advantages. The first came as somewhat of a surprise to the assistant head of the BBC Polish Section, Eugeniusz Smolar, one of the new generation of Polish broadcasters, who in this new oral history interview reveals how the BBC outwitted Polish censors. The Istanbul telephone line and the IBM computer link provided the Polish Section of the BBC with vital insights into the unfolding events inside Poland, which were reflected in broadcast output.
However, this technological good-fortune was underwritten by the personal relations of some BBC Polish staff with leading figures in the Polish opposition movement who they had been to school and university with and protested with, before leaving Poland. These connections were known to some of the managers in Bush House and there were obvious editorial concerns about the risk of manipulation and bias in Polish programme output.
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