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

SIX: Solidarity, Democracy, and Neocorporatism

SIX Solidarity, Democracy, and Neocorporatism We have to save what's most dear Of the plenty already here. Build an ark before the flood! -Jacek Kaczmarski, "Noah's Ark," March 1981 By the end of 1980, Solidarity had begun to look for a political solution to the crisis. Any solution had to preserve the right of Solidarity to exist as a legal, autonomous trade union, while guaranteeing the Party the ability (and legitimacy) to continue to exercise the "leading role" in the state. The first was necessary because a mobilized society demanded it; the second was necessary because the Party and the Soviet Union required it. The argument of this chapter is that Solidarity, in its attempt to find a political solution, inexorably gravitated toward a neocorporatist arrangement with the state. Neocorporatism was, and perhaps still is, a viable democratic alternative within state socialist society. Yet even if Solidarity always pushed in this direction, it never fully committed itself to a corporatist solution. For one thing, it was unwilling to break completely with the program of societal democratization, and it was wary of involvement in the political realm, which had always been the Party's turf. And partially because of this reluctance, Solidarity itself did not fully understand what it was striving toward. Even when its lingering anti-political orientation dissipated rapidly after August 1981, Solidarity still did not have a language or model to explain where it was headed. It only knew that parliamentary democracy was unattainable and that societal independence was indispensable. That this combination can lead only to neocorporatism was demonstrated by Solidarity's own 113 114 / Solidarity, Democracy, and Neocorporatism practice. But "neocorporatism" is my concept, not theirs; and they developed a similar model too late to gain wide appeal. The solution revealed itself in practice, but was barely acknowledged in theory. The most explicit corporatist proposal to appear in print was published on the very day martial law was imposed.' This theoretical gap contributed to a polarization of views in Solidarity's last months. For since the only widely known political alternative was state pluralism, or electoral democracy, many regional activists after August 1981 began demanding that Solidarity give up its original mission and work to overthrow the Party. Wal~sa and others tried to fight this trend, but lacking a model of their own, they were not very successful. This led to WaI~sa's loss of control over the union in the final weeks before martial law. The theoretical model is therefore quite crucial. If Solidarity had better understood the inexorable direction of its practice, it might have been better able to influence the ultimate outcome. As we will see in the next chapter, the opposition of the late 1980s seemed to understand it much better.2 Neocorporatism and Democracy Corporatism refers to a political arrangement whereby diverse interests of civil society come to be represented in the polity without obtaining power through electoral contest. Philippe Schmitter describes it as an "institutional arrangement for linking the associationally organized interests of civil society with the decisional structures of the state." 3 It entails a special relationship between one or more societal organizations and the state, wherein the government gives each organization, as the officially recognized representative of certain social interests, special influence in the determination and implementation of public policy in a given sphere. Schmitter has proposed the following generic definition of corporatism : a system of interest representation in which the constituent units are organized into a limited number of singular, compulsory, noncompetitive , hierarchically ordered and functionally differentiated categories, recognized or licensed (if not created) by the state and Solidarity, Democracy, and Neocorporatism / 115 granted a deliberate representational monopoly within their respective categories in exchange for observing certain controls on their selection of leaders and articulation of demands and supports .4 In other words, a few societal interest groups are given special influence by the state in return for agreeing to defend the state. Schmitter distinguishes between two very different kinds ofcorporatism: state and societal. Societal corporatism (or neocorporatism) obtains where the privileged status of certain key interest groups is forced on the state from below, by independent societal institutions, and is established de jure (i.e., legally and institutionally). Ifcorporate status is granted from above, with the organizations themselves "created" rather than "recognized " by the state, and dependent solely on the will of the state, Schmitter calls the result state corporatism...