Polens Solidarität: Geburtstätte der Gegenwart

Das 25.-jährige Jubiläum der Gewerkschaft „Solidarnosc“ illustriert gegensätzliche Haltungen im Selbstverständnis Polens – und die Wendungen der Geschichte. Hierüber schreibt Wojciech Kosc in Transitions Online.

Twenty five years ago today, 31 August 1980, triumphant workers carried Lech Walesa on their shoulders through the gates of the Gdansk shipyard. After weeks of negotiations, Walesa had just emerged to announce that the communist authorities had recognized Solidarity, an independent trade union that had paralyzed one of the Soviet bloc’s largest shipyards and had quickly turned itself into mass opposition movement.

Twenty five years on, Solidarity members are again at the gates, picketing the shipyard in protest at Poland’s – and the world’s – celebration of that moment. They are relatively few in number – 200 or so – but then, the number of shipworkers in Gdansk has shrunk dramatically in that quarter-century, from 17,000 in the Solidarity era to just 3,000. Were they just spoiling the party? (And it was a big party: just a few hundred meters on the other side of the gate in now-disused areas of the shipyard, some 100,000 people watched a live show by Jean-Michel Jarre on 27 August.)

The workers’ discontents cannot be dismissed as party-pooping by a few malcontents. The difference between the celebrators and the picketers was perhaps inadvertently highlighted in the slogan of the official celebrations, “Today was born in Gdansk.” For some, today’s Poland is no cause for celebration. 

Giving birth to the unknown

Back then, of course, what Solidarity was giving birth to was uncertain. “We have achieved all that could be achieved in the current situation” was what Walesa said in 1980, after the strike ended. But Solidarity had changed the “current situation” and nine years later Solidarity was no longer negotiating with the authorities about its right to exist but about the first semi-democratic elections in Poland. A wave of revolutions followed, sweeping across the region and sweeping away the communist system. For those at the celebrations, Solidarity was the force – or one of a few forces – that began to undermine the communist regimes of Central and Eastern Europe. 

(Walesa himself, a man rarely expected to deliver a modest comment on his role in the events, believes the start of that process can be traced back further. “It all began after a Pole became the pope,” Walesa said, referring to the late John Paul II, who died on 2 April this year. “His words awakened the Polish nation and other nations followed,” Walesa said during the conference on 31 August.) 

But those who planned the official celebrations have been eager to make the moment of more than historical significance. President Aleksander Kwasniewski stressed that the ideals of Solidarity were not just limited to the Poland of the 1980s. “The message Solidarity carried is still alive and we saw it during the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. The atmosphere from that hot summer of 1980 in Gdansk repeated during cold winter in Kiev in 2004,” Kwasniewski declared on 31 August, pointing to Ukraine’s President Viktor Yushchenko. He could also have pointed to Georgia’s President Mikhail Saakashvili who came to power after the so-called Rose Revolution in 2003 and who was invited to Gdansk for the same reasons.

Could that be stretching Solidarity’s significance too far? While the political significance of Solidarity is now being praised and elevated even by a former communist minister like Kwasniewski, others believe too much attention is now being given to the political dimension of events 25 years ago. “We must remember about their moral and social character too,” Janusz Sniadek, the current held of Solidarity argued on 31 August. “Forgetting about that is now causing a lot of bitterness and disappointment in Poland,” Sniadek says, arguing that the “free market without social solidarity will not solve the world’s problems.” 

Earlier that day, he repeated those words while visiting the picketers in front of the shipyard. Their bitterness and disappointment was clear to see. “The Gdansk shipyard – robbed and destroyed – has its ‘celebration’ today” read one of their banners. A punk band played a protest song against lay-offs, the video for which was shot in the shipyard. “There’s no reason to celebrate. There are reasons to protest. We want to defend the shipyard, that’s why we’re here,” picketers’ leader Karol Guzikiewicz told journalists.

More than 20 new ships a year used to be launched in Gdansk in the 1980s. The number is down to just three today. 

For these and many others in Poland the ‘today’ that Solidarity created is a Poland of high unemployment and striking disparities between haves and have-nots. The most explosive original demands of the striking workers in Gdansk in 1980 were political demands for independent trade unions and freedom of speech and press. They did not contain anything that even remotely alluded to the need for economic changes in the shape they took after 1989. It was the working people who brought down the “workers’ republic” – and the workers who were buried in the rubble. 

That view is taken by Andrzej Gwiazda, one of the leaders of Solidarity at the time. “Twenty five years later, Poland, instead of becoming a developed country, has found itself in morass,” Gwiazda said on 31 August. He accuses post-1989 governments of a “neo-liberal” approach to economy that has caused mass unemployment and poverty for million of Poles. Whatever the rights and wrongs of his argument, statistics do show that about a third of Poland’s 36 million-strong population lives on up to 20 euros a week for expenses, including food, clothing, and rent.

To read the full text of the article, visit the Transitions Online website.