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It is an honor for me to be speaking here today with Czesław who I have met in the past because his work in some of the undergrounds I have such an enormous respect for, as well as with the other participants in that crucial struggle for the liberation of this country. The story of nonviolent liberation in the 20th century came in my life about ten years ago. I was a television producer and asked to be an executive producer of a television series called “A force more powerful” which told stories of six major nonviolent liberation movements in the 20th century including that of Solidarity here in Poland. And when the television series was premiered in year 2000, we asked Lech Walesa to speak at the premiere event in Washington D.C., and in the moments before he went on to speak I was talking with him, we had enough 15 minutes to speak, and he had seen the excerpt, a segment of our television series on Solidarity and objected to one point that was covered in our segment. He mentioned that and I responded, and he said something and I said something, and I suddenly realized after few minutes that I was having an argument with the leader of Solidarity about some aspect of the Solidarity movement. Then I had the next insight which was - this man knew how to conduct an argument, he knew how to frame a proposition, and put it persistently. And that was a key to his success and the success of his colleagues from the Solidarity movement. What I am going to do in the next few minutes is to identify a number of strategic factors that in our assessment of the success of the Solidarity movement were absolutely critical to producing that success, and which can and should be emulated by other nonviolent movements around the world today. Those movements in the 20th century were more numerous than many of us might imagine. We are familiar with the Ghandi’s leadership of the Indian independence movement, he the great innovator in the use of nonviolent tactics, such as strikes, boycotts, civil disobedience, as well as mass marches and demonstrations. We may be less familiar with the extraordinary and successful use of nonviolent resistance against the Nazis in the WWII by the Danish and the Dutch particularly; we’re familiar with the civil rights revolution in the United States headed by Martin Luther King, Jr., and his fellow Afro-American leaders; we’re familiar with the people power movement in the Philippines in 1986; the nonviolent rising nationally against the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet in Chile in the late 1980s; the primarily nonviolent anti-Apertheid movement in the South Africa in 1980s; the nonviolent movements which swapped through Eastern Europe in 1981 and in 1990, and in Mongolia. But of all of those movements and the ones that would follow in the 20th century in Serbia and Georgia and Ukraine, and those of us who represent the organization International Center on Non-Violent Conflicts, which exists to distribute universally the knowledge of how to develop and apply nonviolent strategies, often focus on Poland as having been extraordinary representative and successful in developing and using the nonviolent strategies. The innovations of solidarity were for the purpose of to overall important strategic dimensions in the development of non-violent movement. One is engaging and winning the contest for legitimacy in representing the nation that is always going on between the civilian base movement and the regime for the system of injustice which imposes. The second is the struggle to make the authoritarian control, so costly that the existing system essentially dissolves, which is what happened in our judgment here in Poland. When we review the experience of Solidarity there are in my judgment seven critical strategic factors which become very clear as key to its success which should be promulgated by other non violent movements around the world. By the way, there are twenty or thirty active non –violent movements in variety of societies in Asia, in Africa, in the Middle East and elsewhere. The first of those critical strategic factors was what many Poles themselves call self organization. The ideas of Leszek Kulakowski, Adam Michnik and Jacek Kuron in their writings in the 1960s and in the 1970s who identified the failure of forminism and the failure of violent insurrection tactics as a force for change in Poland prompted them to identify organizing citizen initiatives challenging the monopoly of the state; organizing life independently; obviously to the workers defense committees in the mid 1970s. That concept of self organization which Michnik and others noticed was present in much of Ghandi’s work in India. It was brought even to the greater level of development in the activity of Polish dissidents in 1970s. that had never have been in the previous non-violent movement, and then led to the shipyard in 1980. It was notable how much conscious planning there was, and consideration and assessment of what tactic should be used building on hard one experience in 1970, 1976 and earlier. No planning could be successful unless previous failures are learnt from. That may seem simple and obvious to us – there are so many examples of non-violent movements which are not successful because somehow they believed they can do the things through a spontaneous combustion rather than through careful strategic planning. Poland had the great fortune of having a Pope who came to visit in 1979 and the enormous planning of civil society had to go through to anticipate and to make that visit successful was in some ways a dry run; in some ways a trail for what later followed in the work of Solidarity. So planning as the second key strategic factor. And the third one is unity, a coalition of unity. A movement to be successful has to represent the full scope of the society in whose name it wishes to speak; to claim to represent the people. That means intellectuals, of course, it means workers clearly, students, farmers, town’s people. All those walks of life were represented just in the people who came to assist the inter-factory strike committee of shipyard strikers in 1980. There was a cross-section of the Polish society that was mobilized and then very vigorously saw when the Solidarity was legalized. The fourth factor, which is absolutely crucial on the development of the civic movement, is nonviolent discipline. To deprive the regime of an excuse for quick oppression. And also to demonstrate to moderates in the authoritarian regime that you can manage your movement, that you can deliver on promises, that you are competent. In the opposition to the attempted theft of the presidential elections in Ukraine, it was determined after the fact that members of the Ukrainian secret service and the army were extraordinarily impressed with the amazing discipline of the oppositionists in the street and how extremely well they were organized. So what that movement was doing was becoming an effective negotiating partner, becoming a force not only representing the people but also exhibiting qualities that those who were not so sure about their loyalty to the regime could identify with. The fifth strategic factor that we feel Solidarity did extraordinarily good job was having what members of Solidarity call self-limiting goals. Following a path of implemental progression its brilliant decision making in the midst of Gdansk shipyard strike to insist primarily on the right to a free trade union, not to larger and more ambitious political goals. This movement which was beginning to exhibit so much popular support showed so much tactical improvisational brilliance to stand down from the temptation of asking for more - the tremendous contrast, for example, to what the students in Tiananmen square nine years later did not to. These students managed to organize the demonstration of half a million people in Tiananmen square and push the regime even to allowing its leaders to go on television for a joined discussion seen by Chinese people. They did not ask, however, for something that the regime could be willing to give them; they asked for the full democratic rights. Instead of realizing that the first responsibility was to protect and grow the non-violent movement, they didn’t know that the downshift has role to accelerate in the non violent movement. Then two more strategic factors, one is a selection of non-violent tactics to frame the regime’s choice of how to respond to you, so that the easiest choice the regime can make, gives you an opportunity for more room to operate. The seventh important strategic factor, to learn how to exploit the external constrains that the regime faces in terms of its relations with the outside world which affect its perceived legitimacy inside and outside country as well as its material support that can expect to have in the future. We often go back when we describe the work of Solidarity to that moment when Lech Walesa was arrested when the Martial law was imposed, and when he said to his captors at that moment: You will come back to us on your knees. There‘s lots of ways of interpreting that but it was a prophecy in a sense that came true. But I like to ask the question who was the us he was referring to? Was it Solidarity? It was in part, but it also was the Polish people because Solidarity has the success in representing the people in representing the aspirations of the people, in summoning the hearts of the Polish people supported – was what made it powerful. I am often recall of what Vaclav Havel had said in his essay “The power of the powerless” in 1990s. : “If you are living under authoritarian government and you say nothing, you are living a lie. When you decide to say something, when you decide to speak the truth, you are living in the truth. And the greatest threat to the system based on lies is distributing the truth.” That’s how the hearts of people are won, that’s I think what Solidarity did. And that’s the emotional key to its success. |
