"The triumph of Poland's Solidarity trade union movement in 1989 stands out as one of the most consequential victories for human freedom of this or any other century.  Not only did it liberate the Polish people from the yoke of communism, but it set in motion the events leading to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of communism in Central Europe and the Soviet Union, and the end of the Cold War."

So opened the tribute of the National Endowment for Democracy at the first presentation ten years ago of its Democracy Service Medal to Lech Walesa and Lane Kirkland.  The occasion was the tenth anniversary of the Round Table Agreement that sealed Solidarity's triumph and opened a new page in human history.  It was a moving occasion in many respects, not least because Lane Kirkland was too ill to attend - he passed away just a few months later - and Lech Walesa skipped a White House dinner to be at his bedside, as touching an expression of solidarity as I've ever seen.

And so here we are now on the twentieth anniversary of the Round Table Agreement, discussing the relationship of the Solidarity experience to the future of democratization in the world.  Let me start by pointing out the obvious: The rise of Solidarity in 1980 immediately preceded and helped shape the thinking of the nascent democracy-support effort in this country, which got underway with Ronald Reagan's Westminster Address in 1982 and the creation of the NED the following year.  It was also the most consequential aspect of the third wave of democratization, the global expansion of democracy that transformed not just the communist world but Latin America, Asia, and Africa as well.  Though that expansion has largely ground to a halt in the current decade as authoritarian governments have become much more adept at thwarting democratic progress, Solidarity continues to inspire grassroots democracy movements in every region.  It is a model of what is possible if workers, intellectuals, and civil society activists can come together in a movement of mass resistance to dictatorship.

The most notable contribution of Solidarity, aside from precipitating the unraveling of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, has been the introduction of a new concept of incremental democratic enlargement, based on the idea of building on the gains in one country to extend support and solidarity to democracy movements in contiguous countries and beyond.  In the NED we call this cross-border work, and it had its origins, at least in our own thinking and programs, in a conference that was sponsored by the Polish-Czech-Slovak Solidarity Foundation in Wroclaw in early November of 1989.

That conference was the culmination of collaborative meetings and joint activities of Solidarity and the Workers' Defense Committee in Poland and the Charter 77 dissidents in Czechoslovakia that began in October 1981, shortly before the declaration of Martial Law, and continued throughout the 1980s with gatherings on the "green border" of Poland and Czechoslovakia in the Karkonosze Mountains.  The purpose of the Wroclaw conference was to support from the base of the new Polish democracy the dissident movement in Czechoslovakia in the hope that a similar breakthrough could be achieved there.  Vaclav Havel was later to credit the conference and the cultural festival that accompanied it with helping to inspire the Velvet Revolution that occurred less than two weeks later.

It became clear to me from the many discussions I had with Polish activists in the aftermath of 1989 that they had a very firm and clearly thought through determination to support democracy in Poland's immediate neighborhood and in the larger geopolitical sphere that once constituted the Soviet Bloc.  This determination was partly based on moral considerations, since these activists had received support in their struggle from the NED, the AFL-CIO and others in the U.S. and Europe and felt an obligation to extend similar support to those still striving for democracy.  But they also had political and strategic reasons for engaging in cross-border solidarity.  Poland, I was told, lived in a dangerous neighborhood, and the lessons of history taught that its own democracy would not be secure if it was not buttressed and protected by compatible democracies in the Visegrad countries to the south and in Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic countries to the east and north.
 And so cross-border work was born, and it has continued to expand ever since.  The Polish-Czech-Slovak Solidarity Foundation went from providing support for desktop publishing in the Czech Republic and Slovakia to providing similar aid in Ukraine and Belarus, and today it works in Russia, Moldova, the Caucasus and Central Asia.  Other Polish groups also engage in cross-border work, from the Foundation for Education for Democracy, an outgrowth of the Solidarity Teachers Union which provides training in civic education for teachers and NGO leaders throughout the former Soviet Union, to the East European Democratic Center which supports local media in Ukraine and Central Asia.

Many other countries in the region now also provide cross-border aid, from People in Need in the Czech Republic which aids NGOs and free media not just in Russia, Belarus, Moldova and other countries in the post-communist region but as far afield as Cuba and Iraq, to People in Peril in Slovakia, the Ukrainian Lion Society in Lviv and the Youth Human Rights Group in Kharkiv which work in Belarus, Russia, and elsewhere in Eurasia, to groups in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia that work in Belarus, and even the Ljubljana-based Slovene Philanthropy which trains teachers and volunteers in Chechnya and Ossetia.  These Central European partners have a unique ability to develop programs in difficult places like Crimea, Kaliningrad, Transnistria, North Ossetia, and Chechnya that are often inaccessible to institutions based in Western Europe and the United States.

In addition, these cross-border programs from Poland and Central Europe have directly encouraged the respective governments in the region, as well as private organizations like the Polish American Freedom Foundation, to launch their own democracy-building cross-border efforts.  These government efforts, in turn, led the Poles and Swedes to develop the Eastern Partnership Program, the institutionalized forum through which the European Union now engages with the EU's eastern neighbors (Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, Belarus, Armenia, and Azerbaijan), negotiating visa and trade agreements and strategic partnerships and even providing cross-border NGO assistance.

In the fall, on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the Wroclaw conference, activists from the Visegrad and Baltic countries will gather in Lviv with their counterparts in the Eastern Partnership countries to share experiences and to develop common strategies for aiding democracy in the these countries and drawing them closer to Europe.  It will thereby symbolize and celebrate the progress of cross-border work and its steady expansion and movement to the east.  I might also note that an added benefit of this cross-border work is that it enables the NED to continue supporting the NGO sector in the democracies of Central Europe, helping them to develop new skills and capabilities long after they have moved beyond receiving direct support for democracy work in their own countries.

Significantly, the idea of cross-border work has also spread to other countries around the world.  The Institute for Democracy in South Africa, which is the largest democracy assistance organization working to consolidate democracy in South Africa, also aids democratic forces in Zimbabwe and unions in Swaziland, conducts election violence mitigation work in Nigeria, and helped establish a civilian police with a new policing law in the Congo.  The foundation stone in its building reads "These are the foundations of democracy -- struggle, solidarity, social justice."  The Kampala-based East and Horn of Africa Human Rights Defenders Network provides support and refuge for human rights defenders and journalists from 12 countries, and there are groups in Senegal, Liberia, and even the Congo that aid human rights activists in Guinea, Angola, Congo Brazzaville, and Sierra Leone.  There is now a Taiwan Foundation for Democracy that is drawing together networks of Asian democrats, and the Philippines-based Southeast Asia Press Alliance that supports press freedom throughout Southeast Asia, including in Burma.

And so an idea that was started in Poland is steadily spreading throughout the world.

When we began collaborating with our Polish friends twenty years ago on cross-border work, I was gratified that there was so much political and programmatic compatibility. This compatibility seemed perfectly natural.  The NED had a mission of promoting democracy globally, and our Polish friends, as I have already explained, felt compelled to join with us for both moral and political reasons in the effort to expand democracy beyond Poland's borders.

What I did not understand at the time was that this compatibility had even deeper roots in the respective histories and identities of our two countries.  The United States, as I have always believed, is an exceptional country, based on the idea of individual liberty and equality for all.  I have frequently quoted George Washington's statement, on the eve of his first inauguration, that "the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of the republican model are justly considered as deeply , perhaps as finally, staked on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people."  And I have also quoted Abraham Lincoln to that effect as well, not least when he said that he hated the "monstrous injustice" of slavery "because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world" and "enables the enemies of free institutions with plausibility to taunt us as hypocrites."

What I did not realize, though, is that Poland is also based on an idea, and not a very different one at that.  This idea derives, as the Georgetown professor Andrzej Kaminski has written, and as I have been reminded by my colleague at the NED Rodger Potocki, from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth of the 16th and 17th centuries, which also included Belarus and Ukraine.  Its political system was, in effect, a constitutional monarchy, where the king was elected by nobles and constrained by the Commonwealth parliament or Sejm, where a pact was negotiated with the king that included a bill of rights and a near-unprecedented guarantee of religious tolerance, and where a common, religiously and linguistically diverse civil society shared the multicultural spirit of this regional Commonwealth.  From this point of view, the cross-border work that seemed to come so naturally to our Polish friends was not a new invention, or an activity dictated solely by self-interest, but a return to a shared history of an earlier era following a long interregnum of occupation, partition, authoritarianism and war.

This same outlook and value system was also recovered, before the rise of Solidarity, by the emigre journal Kultura edited by Jerzy Giedroyc and founded shortly after World War II.  Its basic thrust, under the rubric of its "eastern policy," was that there could be no independent and democratic Poland without an independent and democratic Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania.  It was on the basis of this "eastern policy" that a democratic Poland was later to abandon all territorial claims to Lviv, Vilnius, and Hrodna (Grodno), and that a Polish delegation consisting of Solidarity activists Zbigniew Janas, Adam Michnik, and Bogdan Borusewicz, attended the first Rukh Congress in Kyiv in September 1989. It was the only foreign delegation to attend that historic Congress.

The foreign policy of newly democratic Poland was spelled out by Foreign Minister Bronislaw Geremek in an address to the Polish Institute of International Affairs two months after Giedroyc's death in September 2000.  Speaking of Kultura, Geremek said that the people gathered around Giedroyc "presented a radically different concept" from the official wartime policies of the Polish government.  "While opting for the Western direction of foreign policy," he said, "they believed that in the world that emerged after World War II the Polish national idea could only be the idea of liberty for all the other nations in the region."  It was this "Polish national idea," this "idea of liberty," that became the consensus program of the Polish opposition intelligentsia in the 1980s, that was embraced by the Church, not least by Pope John Paul II, and which was adopted by Solidarity and thereby embedded in a mass popular movement.  And it was also this Polish national idea that, in the decade after the triumph of Solidarity in 1989, became the basis for the pioneering cross-border work of the Polish NGOs.

Understanding Poland in this way puts the partnership between the NED and Polish NGOs, between Lane Kirkland and Lech Walesa, and between the United States and Poland into a new and deeper context.  We are both countries based on an idea, and we both see our identity, our security, and our future based upon the defense and the expansion of freedom in the world in the contemporary era.  May that partnership grow, may it anchor in shared values the sometimes strained transatlantic relationship of Europe and the United States, and may it provide a foundation for the defense of democracy in the very troubled times in which we live.

 

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Giving Solidarity to the World
Remarks by Carl Gershman, President of the National Endowment for Democracy
At the symposium "Solidarity and the Future of Democratization"
May 19, 2009.  Georgetown University Washington, D.C.