Solidarity and the Politics of Anti-Politics: Opposition and Reform in Poland since 1968

Preface

Preface It was one of the most interesting places in the world in the late 1970s-that's how Poland seemed to me, anyway. The traditional state socialist system of the Soviet bloc was in desperate need of political reform, but only in Poland was there any real evidence of reform. Elsewhere change seemed precluded by the prevailing Brezhnev model of institutionalized boredom and stagnation. I had spent the fall of 1975 as an undergraduate exchange student studying in Moscow, and this was both an unforgettably enriching experience and enough to convince me that the USSR was not the place to return to if I was serious about studying political change in the Soviet bloc. I started learning Polish from a Russian textbook-a kind of "Polish Made Easy" for Russian speakers-and first visited Poland when my Moscow semester came to an end. A further visit in 1977 convinced me that this was precisely the place I wanted to understand up close. What I found so interesting about Poland was the appearance of a very new kind of political opposition. Emerging from student circles of the 1960s, this opposition sought to build a new type of society, yet was well aware of all the troubles created by those who had tried to build new types of societies in the past. This was a new kind of radicalism, whose main asset was its very wariness of radicalism. It held out the hope of a democratic transformation that would result in a more participatory system than is common in the West, yet avoid the usual authoritarian traps into which radical movements have typically fallen in the past. The fact that the government tolerated the opposition, or at least refrained from using its full repressive apparatus against it, only made the situation more interesting. Poland seemed to be both in the forefront of political reform efforts in the Soviet bloc and a kind of test case for the possibility of radical political reform in general. For these reasons, I decided to focus on Poland in my graduate studies. By the time I finished my courses and was ready to begin "field work," Poland of course had become more interesting than ever, as Solidarity was founded in August 1980. vii viii / Preface I developed many of the ideas for the book during a long stay in Poland in 1981-1982, as I kept notes for my dissertation and wrote articles for the weekly newspaper, In These Times. This book began as my doctoral dissertation, although it has been completely revised and substantially enlarged. The dissertation mostly concerned Solidarity in 1980-1981. When first working on these sections in the mid-1980s, there seemed to be nothing wrong in speaking about the union in the past tense. As late as 1987, that is how the union was referred to even by most of its activists. By the time I was preparing the manuscript for publication, however, everything started happening again. I wrote Chapter Seven in the fall of 1988. In retrospect, this proved to be the crucial period leading up to the relegalization of Solidarity in April 1989; at the time, it was unclear whether it would lead to anything. I submitted the first draft of the finished book in January 1989-on the very day the ruling Party voted to accept the return of Solidarity. When it came time to edit the manuscript, I had to decide whether to rewrite Chapters Seven and Eight so as to take account oflater events. I decided against it, precisely so that the sense of transformation, simultaneously impending and uncertain, could be conveyed. Some people suggested that there was no need to add anything. In these heady days of perestroika , they said, anything written about the present rapidly becomes obsolete-"and a book must end somewhere, after all." I might have been convinced, except that with the signing ofthe Round Table Accord on April 5, 1989, the book suddenly had a natural ending. For I argue that the Solidarity leadership in 1980-81 was pushing precisely for the kind of resolution that the Round Table negotiations brought about. So I've added an Epilog (June 1989) to discuss the final months leading up to the signing of the accord, and then a Postscript (October 1989) to consider the election of a Solidarity prime minister. This new stage, however, when "anti-politics" finally gave way to a new era of politics, is properly the subject of a new...