Recently, the European Parliament condemned the Polish government’s attempt to strip Bronislaw Geremek of his parliamentary mandate. A leader of Solidarity, a former political prisoner, and the foreign minister responsible for Poland’s accession to Nato, Geremek refused to sign yet another declaration that he had not been a communist secret police agent. The European Union parliamentarians called the Polish government’s actions a witch-hunt, and Geremek declared Poland’s “lustration law a threat to civil liberties. In response, Polish Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski accused Geremek of “damaging his fatherland and “provoking an anti-Polish affair. The same phrases were used by the communists when Geremek criticized their misrule. What is happening in Poland, the country where communism’s downfall began? Every revolution has two phases. First comes a struggle for freedom, then a struggle for power. The first makes the human spirit soar and brings out the best in people. The second unleashes the worst: envy, intrigue, greed, suspicion, and the urge for revenge. The Polish Solidarity revolution followed an unusual course. Solidarity, pushed underground when martial law was declared in December 1981, survived seven years of repression and then returned in 1989 on the wave of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s “perestroika. During the Round Table negotiations that brought about the end of communist rule, a compromise was reached between the reform wing of the communist government and Solidarity. This cleared a path to the peaceful dismantling of communist dictatorship throughout the Soviet bloc. Solidarity adopted a philosophy of compromise rather than revenge, and embraced the idea of a Poland for everyone rather than a state divided between omnipotent winners and oppressed losers. Since 1989, governments changed, but the state remained stable; even the post-communists approved the rules of parliamentary democracy and a market economy. But not everyone accepted this path. Today, Poland is ruled by a coalition of post-Solidarity revanchists, post-communist provincial troublemakers, the heirs of pre-World War II chauvinists, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic groups, and the milieu of Radio Maryja, the spokesmen for ethno-clerical fundamentalism. Worrying signs are everywhere: the authority of the courts is undermined, the independence of the Constitutional Tribunal is attacked, the civil service is corrupted, and prosecutors are politicized. Everyday social life is being repressively regulated. Why is this happening? Every successful revolution creates winners and losers. Poland’s revolution brought civil rights along with increased criminality, a market economy along with failed enterprises and high unemployment, and the formation of a dynamic middle class along with increased income inequality. It opened Poland to Europe, but also brought a fear of foreigners and an invasion of Western mass culture. For the losers of Poland’s revolution of 1989, freedom is a great uncertainty. The Solidarity workers at giant enterprises have become victims of the freedoms they won. In the prison world of communism, a person was the property of the state, but the state took care of one’s existence. In the world of freedom, nobody provides care. It is in this anxious atmosphere that the current coalition rules, combining US President George W. Bush’s conservative nostrums with the centralizing practices of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Solidarity veterans believed that the dictatorship’s demise would be followed by their own reign. However, guilty communists were not punished, and virtuous Solidarity activists were not rewarded. So feelings of injustice gave rise to resentment, envy, and a destructive energy focused on revenge against former enemies and old friends who seemed successful. The losers refused to admit that the achievement of freedom was Poland’s greatest success in 300 years. For them, Poland remained a country ruled by the communist security apparatus. Such a Poland required a moral revolution in which crimes would be punished, virtue rewarded, and injustice redeemed. The means chosen by these losers’ parties after they won the general election in 2005 was a great purge. “Lustration, according to early estimates, is expected to affect 700,000 people and take 17 years to complete. A list of names found in the reports of the security services is to be prepared and made public. Moreover, it is now the duty of every one of the 700,000 people subjected to lustration to declare that he or she did not collaborate with the security services. Those who refuse or file a false declaration are to be fired and banned from working in their profession for 10 years. Cardinal Dziwisz of Cracow reminds us that there can be no place “for retribution, revenge, lack of respect for human dignity, and reckless accusations. Never since the fall of communism has a Catholic cardinal used such strong words of condemnation. Should lustration have taken place at the beginning of Poland’s transformation? The goal of the peaceful revolution was freedom, sovereignty, and economic reform, not a hunt for suspected or real secret police agents. If a hunt for agents had been organized in 1990, neither Leszek Balcerowicz’s economic reforms nor the establishment of a state governed by law would have been possible. Poland would not be in Nato or the EU. Today, two Polands confront each other. A Poland of suspicion, fear, and revenge is fighting a Poland of hope, courage, and dialogue. This second Poland – of openness and tolerance, of John Paul II and Czeslaw Milosz, of my friends from the underground and from prison – must prevail. I believe that Poles will once again defend their right to be treated with dignity. The second phase of the Polish revolution must not be permitted to consume either its father, the will to freedom, or its child, the democratic state. Adam Michnik, a former leader of Solidarity, is editor-in-chief of the daily Gazeta Wyborcza. THE DAILY STAR publishes this commentary in collaboration with Project Syndicate © (www.project-syndicate.org).
Poland's revolution is consuming its democratic child
