"Now & Then": The rise and fall of a national myth
The Solidarity trade union of 1980 had all the makings of becoming the next Polish national myth, and going one step further in becoming a real actor of history, and not just an incident of it. That trade union, as most political writers will tell you, was not simply a trade union, but the combination of a national liberation movement, a political party, a syndicalist utopia and a peace movement. In many ways, it was the closest Poland has ever come to generating a social force that in a deep sense represented the political institutionalization of the nation itself.
That was not surprising in 1980. The trade union that then was established under the still-existing communist system was itself the product of many years of resistance against communism by the intelligentsia, combined with the history of spontaneous worker protest and strikes that had every so often punctuated the post-war history of Poland. As the only effective national political force, it attracted 10 million people seeking an outlet for their opposition to the communist system. For a brief moment it appeared as if Poland was heading for a final squaring of the circle: how to live freely under a communist system, or how to have a revolution without a revolution, to coin the phrase of a well-known dissident writer.
Poland's Solidarity movement of the 1980s was mythical in other senses, too. It possessed a charismatic leader in the form of Lech Wałęsa, whose leadership was as democratic as the movement itself: in other words, not at all. Wałęsa established his position as leader purely by his ability to achieve results, and the members of the union were more than happy to surrender to his authority. Secondly, the movement was inextricably linked with the Roman Catholic Church and the pope. Pictures of the period show the red logo lettering of the union inevitably close to devotional pictures of Jan Paweł II, mirroring the national conflation of Polishness with catholicism. Thirdly, Solidarity symbolized the continuation of 19th century and wartime resistance to the subordination of Polish statehood to foreign powers. For many Poles, Solidarity's legitimacy derived precisely from its symbolic opposition to Soviet domination and East German hegemony in the West. For all these reasons, capped by the martyrological destruction of Solidarity as a public institution by the communist authorities in 1981 under martial law, Solidarity in 1982 was at the apogee of its mythical status, complete with martyrs and victims fallen in the name of the struggle against communism and Soviet domination. Yet it was from that moment that the decline of the Solidarity myth commenced.
The very fact that Solidarity after 1982 had to function illegally underground meant that it ceased to be a mass movement, and instead became an increasingly faction-ridden and fragmented protest organization, hampered by the impossibility of effective leadership. Paradoxically, when there had been freedom to do so, Solidarity in 1980-1981 remained relatively uncontested in its role as the de facto organization of national protest. In the underground, it had to compete for influence with other organizations, some more or less radical than the union leadership, others defining themselves in categories completely different than union ones. By the time of the round table talks with the then communist authorities of 1989, which led to the dismantling of the communist system, its role as political leader of democratic Poland was less a function of popular support, and more the result that the communist authorities themselves had deemed the fragmented and weakened organization to be an appropriate partner for negotiations.
Solidarity never recovered from its failure to consummate its mythical status through being at the head of a cathartic overthrow of communism. The nature of the round table talks, which led to a negotiated arrival of democracy, was that Solidarity was denied a symbolic crowning of its historical mission: there was no Polish storming of the bastille. Instead the union (as it then became) was forced to become another actor in Polish politics, buffeted by compromise and led by increasingly incompetent leaders. Its second failing was its failure to square another historical circle: defending the introduction of capitalism while protecting the interests of its increasingly working-class membership. While paradox was possible under communism when there was no responsibility, the competing demands of new social groups meant that Solidarity was torn by new internal tensions. Solidarity's final fall was under the Solidarity Election Action (AWS) government of Jerzy Buzek in 1997-2001, when the leadership of Marian Krzaklewski sought to combine the demands of a trade union agenda with that of running the country in the national interest; confused the power of the trade union with the personal power of Krzaklewski himself; and failed to straddle the competing demands of a free-market Freedom Union (UW) party led by Leszek Balcerowicz - and the amalgam of radicals, socialists and simply confused that constituted AWS.
Last week's demonstrations of Solidarity outside the Parliament and prime minister's chancellery marked the final symbolic collapse of the Solidarity myth: no longer a magnificent symbol, but now a demented beer-swilling rabble, looking for a fight, chanting "down with communism" in a last desperate attempt to restore its lost legitimacy. The next day, the streets having been swept of the rubbish left behind, Varsovians were going about their normal business, the demonstration forgotten, and the myth discarded.
Marek Matraszek is the Warsaw director of CEC Government Relations. He can be e-mailed at director@cec.com.pl
