Triggering Communism's Collapse: Perceptions and Power in Poland's Transition (review)

Almost no one any longer remembers 6 February 1989, the day the Round Table negotiations began in Poland. The Round Table discussions and the ensuing agreement led, in a remarkably short time, to changes that brought an end to the Communist monopoly on power in Poland, followed soon thereafter by the collapse of Communism throughout the former Soviet bloc. Yet today, some seventeen years after the stunning changes of 1989, a great deal of ambivalence—even embarrassment—exists in Poland about the Round Table. Marjorie Castle's Triggering Communism's Collapse: Perceptions and Power in Poland's Transition attempts to come to grips with this interesting paradox. Castle provides a theoretical framework that helps her to explain why the pact-based transition did not live up to the expectations of the stakeholders—that is, the Communist party and the democratic opposition. Her analysis does not indulge in the usual hype surrounding the Polish transition and subsequent "shock therapy" that, according to its architect, Leszek Balcerowicz, was intended to ease the economic pain of transition and minimize elite corruption. Castle argues that the Round Table compromise created new power relationships, but she does not see the transition as essentially corrective in nature.

Castle views the Round Table as just one pact (albeit the most important) in a long series of pacts, an event forced by economic crises going back to 1956, as well as part of an external power realignment brought on by the restructuring of Soviet foreign policy under Mikhail Gorbachev. The wave of strikes in Poland in 1988 demanding the return of Solidarity triggered calls for negotiations. Although the strikes in 1988 never achieved the intensity of the August 1980 strikes that resulted in the creation of the Solidarity trade union, Solidarity in the late 1980s was still a formidable underground force, perhaps more symbolic than real, a force with which the regime had to contend. Solidarity's enormous and unexpected electoral victory in the aftermath of the Round Table—a victory that paved the way for the formation of the first non-Communist government behind the Iron Curtain in a power-sharing arrangement—testified to the union's continued strength. Castle characterizes the Round Table as a pact based on misperceptions that led to something new.

Andrzej Celiński, a former adviser to Lech Wałęsa, has argued that the pact resulted from many of the same factors that enabled the two sides to come to the negotiating table in the first place. The regime could no longer count on fraternal economic assistance or military support, and it had to fend for itself with perestroika in full swing in the Soviet Union. Castle notes that the Polish Communist authorities seem to have underestimated their hold on power and resources inside Poland. This point is questionable. Documents now available show that General Wojciech Jaruzelski and his aides made a generally accurate assessment of the opposition's strength and gave the go-ahead for preliminary planning to impose martial law. Although the plans were never implemented, the preparations that went on suggest an unusual state of readiness that left open a wide range of options. The regime had the power of the military and a bloated security apparatus behind it. By all indications, the authorities believed that they would be able to hold out for some time. Documents stored at the Instytut Pamięci Narodowej (IPN—Institute of National Remembrance) reveal that Jaruzelski and Internal Affairs Minister Czesław Kiszczak had enlisted 85,000 security agents in their struggle against Solidarity, more than at the height of Stalinism.

Although Solidarity by the late 1980s was no longer the immense labor-based movement it once had been, it was gaining strength and brought to the bargaining table more than just "moral capital." Solidarity had demonstrated that it could deliver the badly needed financial aid from the West to get Poland back on its feet and to facilitate far-reaching reform of the economy...