Poland Institutionalizes Compromise

The recently concluded round-table negotiations between the Polish authorities, the Roman Catholic Church and the Solidarity trade union are nothing short of a historic breakthrough in the Soviet bloc.

The agreement, which has brought about the legalization of Solidarity, comes at a crucial time for Poland. The economy has been stagnant for a decade and the people unmotivated to work. Political life also has been deadlocked.

Clearly the Poles could not have successfully negotiated this settlement were it not for Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s enlightened leadership in the Soviet Union. Significantly, the Soviet press did not register any judgment, positive or negative, about the conclusion of the Polish talks. This was important confirmation of the new Soviet leadership’s willingness to allow Eastern Europeans more leeway in shaping their own domestic affairs. The limits once posed by the Brezhnev Doctrine are now unclear. Gorbachev seems to have come to the conclusion that a stable Eastern Europe, and a stable Poland in particular, is essential to the Soviet Union’s long-term security.

With its chronic crises, Poland has been a source of unending worry for Moscow. The last Polish crisis, the Solidarity period (1980-81), not only threatened the Soviet Union in a geostrategic sense (after all, Poland lies between the Soviet Union and its crucial ally, East Germany), but also gave the Soviets pause about the viability of their own system. If economic crisis in Poland could serve as the catalyst for a free trade-union movement, was the same not possible in the Soviet Union? And what did this mean in terms of the competitiveness of the Soviet system vis-a-vis the United States, a Western Europe soon to have a single integrated market in 1992 or a Japan, which by some measures already has a larger economy than the Soviet Union?

Paradoxically, Gorbachev’s granting of greater domestic sovereignty to Eastern Europe has not brought far-reaching changes to the region as a whole. Leaders of the Brezhnev mold, such as East Germany’s Erich Honecker, Bulgaria’s Todor Zhivkov and Romania’s Nicolae Ceausescu, have used their greater autonomy to resist the sort of reform to which the Polish and Soviet leaderships have committed themselves. In Czechoslovakia, the man responsible for ending the Prague Spring, Gustav Husak, has retired. His replacement, Milos Jakes, casts a more benign image, but seems lacking in reformist imagination. The only other country in the bloc in which the reformist urge is clearly ascendent is Hungary. A Budapest daily, the Hungarian Nation, described the Polish settlement as an “agreement of historic dimensions.” The Hungarian party has granted permission for the formation of a broad range of independent groups, including trade unions, and, most notably, political parties. In this respect, Hungarian reform could prove more radical than Polish. The round-table agreement did not authorize the formation of new political parties.

For the moment, however, the Polish settlement represents the most important political compromise reached in Eastern Europe since 1945. The final result was beyond the imagination of the Solidarity team when they first sat down to talk. Undoubtedly they would have settled for merely the relegalization of Solidarity. Remarkably they walked away with an agreement that included a transformation of the Polish political system.

This agreement goes well beyond the Gdansk accord that created Solidarity in 1980. That earlier agreement was a limited recognition of the right of independent groups to exist. In the new scheme of things Solidarity and other opposition groups will have the ability to actually sit in parliament and contest policy from within the state. The new Senate will have the power to veto legislation initiated by the lower house. Thus the settlement cedes a place within the citadels of power to the opposition, thus explicitly recognizing a role for it in ruling the country.

It is through the Senate that Solidarity will have the greatest chance of exercising strong influence. Here it may well win a majority of the 100 seats in the upcoming June elections and thus possess an effective veto over party policy. While this may seem a risky step for the party, it is actually quite prudent. One crucial reason why the Gdansk accord ultimately failed was that no established rules of the game ever emerged to resolve disputes between Solidarity and the authorities. All disputes had to be resolved on the basis of ad hoc negotiations, often under highly polarized and extremely contentious circumstances. Allowing Solidarity to contest party policy by parliamentary means establishes an institutional mechanism to promote political compromise.

This will not in itself quickly solve Poland’s problems, but it does create political procedures by which Poles, both party and opposition, can begin to rebuild Poland’s moribund economy and overcome its debilitating deadlock. We may well be witnessing the postwar rebirth of politics as politics in Poland.