Abstract
The mention of 1989 brings immediately to people's memory the familiar image of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The author describes the emotional events that led to the liberation of Poland from the Communist regime and the factors that contributed to this peaceful revolution. The Polish example remains one of the success stories in the history of democratisation and allows the author to analyse what were the essential, replicable elements that marked Poland's path to democracy.
People still argue about the date Europe's totalitarian century began—in 1914 with the outbreak of the First World War or in 1917 with the triumph of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. There is no doubt, however, that the century ended in 1989. This was Europe's ‘annus mirabilis’, when millions of people in Central Europe regained their freedom as the Soviet grip on their societies eased, presaging the end of the Soviet empire.
It was an extraordinary year. The Communist authorities lost the political initiative in country after country, as the people shrugged off their party rulers. The year culminated in the fall of the Berlin Wall, which led to the reunification of Germany and to the withdrawal of the Red Army from Central Europe.
This year, the 20th anniversary year, has seen much discussion as to the causes of the Soviet debacle. It was a collapse which caught very many in the West completely by surprise and, to the regret of some—even in Western Europe—overturned the stable, if unjust, post-1945 European order.
Poland would like to claim credit for removing the first bricks from the Soviet system. But the headline event which everyone remembers is the picture of delirious Berliners prising open the Wall in November in a happy climax to the year. Or maybe it was the Hungarians who were responsible for the bloc's disintegration when they opened their frontier that summer to refugees from East Germany.
Opposition to the pre-1989 system is still a source of political legitimacy for Europe's current elites. The fact of resistance to the Communist regime is still worn as a badge of honour. Collaboration with the secret police is seen as a source of shame. At the same time these factors are becoming increasingly irrelevant for the younger generation, which has no memory of the time before 1989. Abroad, the claim that this or that society brought the Soviet Union to its knees can still bring acclaim in European debates although, again, the memory of the Cold War division of Europe is fading, especially among a new generation of leaders now coming to the fore in the transatlantic community.
In those days, there was a hard-headed realist school in Warsaw Pact countries which counselled hot-headed dissidents not to risk their freedom and careers in protests which were said to be hopeless. ‘Things will change here only when there is a change in Moscow’, the realists said. The advice was viewed with disdain by the opposition, which saw the realists as contemptible and cowardly opportunists. Nevertheless, the second half of the 1980s proved the realists right. For all the debates about who did most to undermine the Soviet system, its fate was sealed when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power and proceeded to try and reform a regime which, as he correctly gauged, had run out of steam economically and politically. It was glasnost and perestroika as well as the decision not to support Communist regimes in Warsaw Pact countries with the threat of armed force which put an end to the Soviet empire.
Invariably, empires rise and fall. Andrei Amalrik, the dissident Russian historian and writer, who was killed in Spain in a car accident in 1980, asked in a samizdat essay whether the Soviet Union would survive till 1984. Writing in 1969, he was not far off as to the date of the Soviet Union's demise. But he was wrong about the causes he argued would lead to decline. Amalrik described a coming war between China and Russia, as a result of which the ‘de-Sovietised countries of Eastern Europe will dash around like horses without their bridles and finding the Soviet Union powerless in Europe, will present territorial claims that have long been hushed up but not forgotten: Poland to Lvov and Vilna, Germany to Kaliningrad (Königsberg), Hungary to Transcarpathia, Romania to Bessarabia’. Amalrik [1] also expected that de-Sovietised Eastern European states would adopt regimes which would ‘resemble their pre-Communist regimes—liberal democracy in Czechoslovakia, a military nationalist regime in Poland and so forth’ (1970, 57-58).
Happily this vision, which suggested that change in Eastern Europe would be accompanied by internecine strife and the emergence of authoritarian regimes, was wrong. This was the result of both domestic factors and the existence of the European Community, which provided a democratic framework which the newly liberated states could aspire to and eventually join. But many people, like Amalrik, feared a negative outcome to the events of 1989. The demise of the Soviet empire and the events of 1989 were remarkable for the fact that they occurred almost without bloodshed. The fighting in Romania in December and the circumstances of the killing of Nicolae Ceausescu, the Romanian dictator, was the tragic exception.
Just as empires inevitably fall, so there is a dramatic script to their manner of passing, which revolutionaries appear fated to follow. There are the angry civilian demonstrations, and there are shots at the rebellious crowd ordered by the authorities. The repressions swell the ranks of the demonstrators and the troops refuse to obey their officers. They side with the people. Everyone storms the centres of power. The revolutionary flags are hung out on public buildings. The former rulers flee and a new provisional government is formed. This cathartic process was missing in Poland in 1989 and, if truth be told, everywhere else in the region. For the East Germans, the Trabant car which took them to freedom was the vehicle of change, the Czechs and Slovaks had their Velvet Revolution and the Poles had their round table.
It is Poland in the late 1980s which I want to concentrate on as it provides an almost textbook example of how to peacefully emerge from a dictatorship on good terms with neighbours and how to establish a functioning democracy. I wish also to consider if this is a model of change which can be applied to other dictatorial regimes still in place in the world.
While there is no point in arguing about who was first in 1989 or who did the most to topple Communism, there is every reason to discuss the Polish experience, which was a major exercise in non-violent change.
By 1989, both the Polish authorities and the Solidarity opposition had been together for almost a decade, albeit on opposite sides of the barricade. In that time they had got to know each other very well. Also, by the end of the decade both sides had greater freedom to manoeuvre than during the heady days of the confrontation between the Communists and Solidarity in 1981. At the end of the decade the opposition movement was operating in an environment in which society at large was exhausted after a decade of economic stagnation. The clandestine movement's leadership was not under pressure from its supporters to make demands which would push the Communists against the wall. The strikes at the end of the 1980s, both in the Gdansk shipyard and in the coal mines in the south, had been desultory and poorly supported. More importantly, the authorities were aware that Moscow was ready to give them more freedom to resolve the political impasse than ever before. Mikhail Gorbachev had indicated that in the event of a crisis the leadership would be on its own. The Soviets did not intend to intervene militarily as they had threatened to do against Solidarity 10 years earlier. Reform and change were on the agenda. Gorbachev wanted to install like-minded leadership in all the Communist countries. Also, the role of the Poland's Catholic bishops should not be underestimated. Backed by Pope John Paul II in the Vatican, they had acted as intermediaries between government and opposition and worked tirelessly for social peace and for a reconciliation between the two sides. From the autumn of 1987 onwards, with the Church acting as an intermediary, the two sides started detailed and discreet negotiations as to the political framework which would allow the poisonous legacy of martial law to be put aside and legalise the clandestine opposition. The Church was a credible partner for both sides. For Solidarity it represented a conduit for dialogue with the authorities. Moreover, the Church had always spoken up for human rights. The Communist authorities saw that the Church invariably acted as a restraining influence on the radicals in Solidarity. Its word could be trusted. The Pope's prestige in his home country strengthened the bishops' position. Abroad, the Pope could influence leaders in the West to ease sanctions against Poland in response to liberalisation at home. This was an important element in the authorities' thinking.
It was this confluence of factors which led to the round table negotiations in February 1989 and to the power-sharing deal which opened the way to what were, in effect, free elections in June of that year. But this outcome would have been impossible had it not been for an evolution of thinking about politics in Poland, on both sides of the divide, from the end of the 1960s onward. It was in 1970 that the authorities fired on shipyard workers demonstrating against cuts in the standard of living. The crisis led to a change in the Communist leadership. The trauma meant that the new Communist Party leader Edward Gierek resolved never to use firearms to put down protests. In 1976, demonstrating workers were beaten and imprisoned but not fired on. Gierek also ruled out the use of force to settle mass strikes in 1980, and the resulting negotiations led to the establishment of the Solidarity. The events of 1970 shaped the fledgling opposition in the following decade. One of its leaders, Jacek Kuroń, coined the slogan, ‘Don't burn down [Communist Party] committees but work to establish your own’. The memory of the tragic events of 1970 and the abandonment of violence as a political tool, together with the appeal for the construction of a parallel civil society, determined the peaceful nature of the Solidarity movement. In the wider sphere, the experience of Soviet intervention in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 taught the opposition that an outright challenge to Soviet power could also have tragic consequences. This meant that the leaders of the Solidarity movement were constantly aware that they should not go too far in provoking the Soviets, in what Jadwiga Staniszkis, the Polish sociologist, called the ‘self-limiting revolution’. This was a message which Lech Wałȩsa, the Solidarity leader and former shipyard worker, and veteran of the 1970 demonstrations, understood very well. Even though the imposition of martial law by the Communists in December 1981 drove Solidarity underground, its non-violent ideology, supported by the influential Catholic Church, defined the movement's unremitting search for a dialogue with the authorities and led to the round table negotiations.
The negotiations resulted in elections in June 1989 which saw the resounding defeat of the authorities by Solidarity. But the spirit of compromise held and led to the formation of a coalition with the Communists led by Tadeusz Mazowiecki, a Catholic intellectual and top Solidarity adviser. The post of Minister of Defence was retained by the Communists, as was that of Interior Minister. This was Czesław Kiszczak, who had directed the fight against Solidarity since 1980. General Wojciech Jaruzelski, who had introduced martial law in 1981, was elected president by the new parliament. It was this new government which set in train the painful economic reforms which put the country on a growth trajectory. It was also Krzysztof Skubiszewski, the foreign minister in this government, who authored policies towards Poland's neighbours which established good mutual relations despite the territorial claims and historic enmities which might have wrought havoc in the region. This did not happen. But it could have. It happened only a few years later in the Balkan Wars of Yugoslav Succession. Skubiszewski could not have achieved this alone without the groundwork which had been laid by the opposition and its non-violent ideology, which included respect for national aspirations and the primacy of dialogue as a means of settling disputes.
The Mazowiecki government entered a power-sharing deal with the Communists. This saw them relinquish power in exchange for guarantees that there would be no revenge and that the new democratic system would include the post-Communists. It survived for just over a year. For the next 15 years successive governments respected the spirit of the round table, and an effort to question that arrangement by the right-wing government headed by the Law and Justice Party elected in 2005 was resoundingly rejected by voters in 2007.
The story of this peaceful transition in Poland is remarkable. The values of tolerance, non-violence, respect for opponents and simple ability to forgive if not forget help to explain why it was that the Soviet empire collapsed with such a minimal loss of life. The story is worth recalling as it represents a major boost to the values represented by a European Union, which is based on the idea of post-conflict reconciliation.
But is this experience useful for other societies and their rulers who might want to seek a peaceful way out of a tyrannical regime? Several years ago in Poland, at the height of the right-wing government which after 2005 sought to question the achievement of the peaceful transition in 1989, the architects of the round table wrote an open letter to the army leaders in Burma, appealing to them to take the road of dialogue and to abandon repression. The letter, which defended the tolerant values of 1989, was directed as much to the Burmese junta as to Poland's rulers. There was no follow-up despite the best intentions of the late Bronisław Geremek, the former Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs and MEP and one of the architects of the round table, who always hoped that the Polish transition model could be implemented elsewhere. The appeal fell on deaf ears both in Burma as well as in the Polish government of the time.
Working back from the Polish experience the question arises: What are the conditions which have to be in place for peaceful regime change from tyranny to a democracy?
First, the rulers have to realise that change is needed. In Poland at the end of the 1980s the authorities saw that repeated attempts to reform the economy and bring about growth had failed and that concessions to the opposition were necessary if any improvement was to be achieved. Representatives of those in authority at the time now claim that they did what they did because they realised that the old system was finished. ‘We knew the game was up’, says one. If truth be told, at the time they were looking for ways of reviving the system and a power-sharing deal which would spread the responsibility for the pain which economic reforms would initially bring. In the event it was Solidarity which took the brunt of popular dissatisfaction for the shock therapy administered at the beginning of 1990 by Leszek Balcerowicz, the Finance Minister.
Second, the opposition leadership has to be able to guarantee rulers a measure of immunity from persecution for past repression. In Poland there was an unspoken understanding that the functionaries of the Communist regime would not be made to suffer. Indeed the democratic framework which was established left a place for a post-Communist political party which became for the most part the party of those who had been involved with the former regime. Its aim, as much as anything else, was to defend its members against revanchist attempts. The secret-police apparatus made the transition without much change and in the following months security men were able to destroy files they felt would be prejudicial to their interests. A purge of the service was conducted when Solidarity activists were brought in to look at personnel records, and security officials who were deemed to have been ‘too energetic’ in pursuing the opposition were dismissed. But the underlying assumption was that the country needed an experienced security service. There was no suggestion of getting rid of everyone and starting anew. The same assumption underlay changes in the foreign service as well as in the government administration. New people were recruited but the bulk of officialdom stayed in place.
Third, there has to be external pressure for change on both sides. Domestic actors have to know that a rapprochement will be rewarded while failure to agree will mean that there will be no improvement in the country's foreign relations. Foreign countries should not, however, overrate their ability to engineer domestic change. External pressure can only slow down or accelerate processes happening at home, but the main drivers of social change are always domestic. In the Polish case the country's foreign debt and sanctions in place throughout the 1980s meant that a rapprochement with Western countries, including the United States, was seen as essential by the Communists. Liberalisation was the price the authorities were unable and unwilling to pay throughout the decade. After the change Poland's external debt was cut in half by the Paris Club of debtor countries. There was also pressure for change from the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev, which contrasted directly with Moscow's stance in 1980-1981 and in the following years. At that time the Soviet Union had first threatened a Warsaw Pact military invasion and then demanded a crackdown by the Polish authorities alone. After the imposition of martial law there was constant pressure from the Soviet leadership against liberalising moves.
Fourth, the two sides need a mediating institution which is equally credible to both, whose patriotic credentials cannot be impugned and which is trusted by society at large. In the Polish case this was the Catholic Church, which had been seen by the Communists as a stabilising institution since the beginning of the 1970s. During the Solidarity period the Church was intimately involved in efforts to establish a modus vivendi between the Communist Party and the trade union movement. After the imposition of martial law the bishops worked tirelessly to ameliorate repression, calm the popular mood, intervene with the authorities on human rights issues and, in some cases, help the underground movement to survive by providing hiding places for funds and propaganda materials. Churches became places where independent intellectual and artistic activities could take place. In a word, the Church was credible to both sides and played a very important role in facilitating the dialogue which led to the round table. Of course the fact that Pope John Paul II, Karol Wojtyła, the former Archbishop of Kraków, was a Pole was important. Wojtyła's heart was entirely behind Solidarity and he fully understood the limitations under which the actors of the drama were operating. His role was to give the dialogue support, international visibility and credibility. But he also allowed the Polish bishops to get intimately involved in a political process for change in a Soviet Bloc country. One wonders if a non-Polish Pope would have given the Polish bishops as much leeway. In the event they played a crucial role in bringing about peaceful change.
Fifth, it is less clear whether the very fact of the existence of a political opposition before the change is an essential part of the process. It might be argued that opposition helps to produce an alternative elite which then has the credibility to take over the reins of power and effectively run the country after the change. Also, the very fact of being staffed by opposition figures gives the new regime a credibility which enables it to propose painful economic reforms and guarantee the deal which has allowed the change to take place. Poland certainly had a strong opposition whose origins dated back to the student demonstrations of 1968 and were then bolstered by the Solidarity activists who came to the fore after 1980. This was important in the process leading up to the agreement with the Communists in 1989. But how important was this ‘alternative’ elite in providing cadres for running the country after 1989? Other Eastern European countries which emerged from a one-party state had much smaller oppositions. In some it was non-existent. And yet they managed to recruit new officials or find old ones happy to work under the new regime. Probably the regime shift brought about a generational change in such countries. Officials who came in after 1989 were significantly younger than their predecessors.
The question remains of how useful all this can be in persuading repressive regimes to liberalise. Certainly the conditions which determined Poland's peaceful transition will never be duplicated. But there are certain salient features which should be born in mind. Change is likely when ruling elites come to the conclusion that their economies are running out of steam and they face the risk of having popular unrest sweep them out of power in an uncontrolled revolt. Opposition leaders have to be able to persuade rulers that they have an exit option which will enable them to survive, at home or abroad, and to an extent enjoy the fruits of their ill-gotten gains. The promise of a power-sharing deal can also be tempting for lower-rank officials. There has to be pressure from abroad, but this has to respect domestic realities. Foreign powers must not expect to be able to engineer change by their efforts alone. Both rulers and the ruled at home have to know that foreign governments and public opinion are interested in what is going on and are ready to reward a favourable outcome. Finally, a strong mediator, credible to both sides, needs to be in place to move the actors into positions where dialogue is possible.
However, unlikely it is that the process described above can be repeated elsewhere, this example of a transition path deserves to be remembered and analysed. The events of 1989 in Poland and elsewhere had all the makings of a miracle as wonderful and unexpected as they were. But they came about as the result of concrete social processes and the activities of individuals who were brave and far-sighted enough to ensure that the common good transcended personal prejudice and vindictive motivation. Now that former Soviet states from Eastern Europe, like Poland, are members of the European Union, they can promote the experience of 1989 as their contribution to the EU's values and seek to ensure that the EU remains ‘a common good’.