A Strong Move Toward the Center : Poland’s Reforms Are Not Too Little, Perhaps Not Too Late

The accord approved last week in Poland between Solidarity leader Lech Walesa and the government may be perceived as a sudden shift of political alliances. The pro-reform groups, alienated from the political system, now may join it to pursue their economic and political goals. For the government, it is perhaps the last chance to maintain some control over the troubled country and to get the economy going. But the Communist leadership must pay a high price for getting this chance. Not only must it now share power with its foes but also face alienation of its own political base.

Since 1987, several waves of labor unrest have struck Poland. Originally aimed at economic demands, the strikes turned more political, with demand No. 1 being the legalization of Solidarity. (“There is no bread without freedom, there is no freedom without Solidarity . . . . “) A new generation entered the Polish political arena: workers too young to have experienced the turmoil of 1980-81 as active participants, but old enough to remember those days and to be attracted by Solidarity’s promise, and too deprived of decent living standards to remain calm.

The regime had a dilemma: Talk to Lech Walesa, the historical leader, matured and respected worldwide, or deal with the emerging leadership of the second generation, radical and unpredictable. They wisely elected the former.

Mutual distrust made the beginning of negotiations painful and disappointing. But the two factions overcame this barrier, motivated, I’d like to believe, by their commitment to seek solutions to Poland’s enormous social, political and economic problems. The disastrous shape of the economy caused the recent outbreaks of labor unrest and forced the regime to reconsider its policies. The necessity of fundamental economic reforms has been apparent since 1980. The experts--pro-regime, anti-regime and foreign--were advocating the same: less a command and more a market economy.

Nevertheless, all the attempts to put the economy on its feet failed. The Jaruzelski regime was constrained by its own political base. The support for the post-martial law political order in Poland was coming not only from the party and state bureaucracy, but also, to some extent, from people living outside the major industrial centers, in rural or semi-rural areas, quite often unskilled workers or workers in technologically backward industries, retirees and poorer peasants. To be sure, most of them supported the regime not because it was Communist, but because it was perceived, for better or worse, as a source of law and order.

The same groups opposed the economic reforms: the bureaucracy, because reforms would threaten their privileges; the others, because they didn’t feel competitive enough to survive in an economy regulated by market mechanisms with unavoidable differentiation of income and, very likely, significant unemployment. Those groups demanded from the state economic protection in exchange for political support.

Other social groups such as skilled workers, technicians, professionals and intellectuals concentrated in major industrial and cultural centers, as well as many better-off farmers, were ready to accept consequences of far-reaching economic reforms but were demanding political reforms as well. This has been the social base of Solidarity, and, in general, the opposition.

The government and Solidarity have moved toward each other, creating something that Poland has lacked for so many years--a political center. But this also means that their fragile consensus faces from the very beginning a powerful opposition from the left and the right.

On the one hand, the official trade union, which lost its monopolistic position, voices its disappointment using populist demagoguery and demanding economic concessions on issues on which Solidarity is willing to compromise with the government (for instance, anti-inflation indexing of wages).

On the other hand, some Solidarity members and activists perceive the Warsaw accords as a deal struck by their own Establishment with its Communist counterparts. For them, such a deal is nothing but a betrayal of Solidarity’s ideas.

Both dissatisfied extremes appeal to the same popular base: economically weaker social groups, the have-nots. The former would like to see Poland moving toward some sort of authoritarian, populist dictatorship; the latter advocate vague ideas of “working-class democracy.”

Nobody in Poland expects any economic miracle overnight. The Warsaw accords create only political pre-conditions for economic reforms. Solidarity remains in the opposition to the Communists and their allies (United Peasant Party and Democratic Party). But they have reached some consensus concerning the rules of the game, both in politics and in economy.

If this consensus is broken because of some internal or external pressures, or if the Polish people are forced to wait too long for any improvement in their standards of living, the people may seek much more radical solutions. Any outburst of violence in Poland or a continuing political stalemate will doom the future of Poland. But this also would be a very serious blow to any reforms in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and to the new detente between West and East. Recent Polish reforms exceed anything that has been proposed within the Soviet Bloc. The reforms are not “too little.” Let’s hope that they don’t come too late.