In the spotlight: Solidarity

European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso called it "one of Poland's greatest gifts to Europe," as numerous other notable guests recognized the movement's influence on the fall of communism in Poland and in Eastern Europe, on the unification of Germany, as well as the latest peaceful revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine.

After an 18 day-long strike in the Gdańsk shipyard the communist government finally gave in and signed an agreement, which led to the establishment of the first free trade union in the Soviet bloc.

Solidarność became much more than a traditional trade union gathering opponents of the communist system and challenging the Party's monopoly in social organizations. Banned after Martial Law the movement stayed underground for most of the 1980s. It re-emerged in 1988 organizing a wave of strikes that forced the government to hold the Round Table talks. The resulting free elections - the first in the Soviet bloc - were a landslide for Solidarity, which won all but one of the seats available to it.

A year later its charismatic leader Lech Wałęsa became Poland's president. After 1989 the movement went back to its original trade-union identity, but later returned on the political scene when in the 1997 elections a coalition of rightist parties under the banners of Solidarność seized power. Today the body that boasts one of the most widely recognized symbols in the world has returned to its roots and now restricts itself solely to trade union affairs.

Michał Pakulniewicz