Cross-border solidarity – Solidarnosc’s other contribution to democracy

Poland’s Solidarity union movement made history by precipitating the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. No small achievement.

But it should also be credited with developing the concept and practice of incremental democratic enlargement, said Carl Gershman, president of the National Endowment for Democracy. “Building on the gains in one country to extend support and solidarity to democracy movements in contiguous countries and beyond” – what the NED terms cross-border work – originated in the Polish-Czech-Slovak Solidarity

The Polish-Czech-Slovak Solidarity Foundation meetings continued throughout the 1980s on the “green border” in the Karkonosze Mountains.

Foundation in Wroclaw in November, 1989, he recalled at a symposium on Solidarity and the Future of Democratization.

That initiative brought together activists from Poland’s Workers’ Defense Committee and Czechoslovakia’s Charter 77 dissidents, including Vaclav Havel. In the aftermath of 1989, Polish activists were determined to support democracy in the country’s immediate neighborhood and in the larger geopolitical sphere of the former 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… 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.

That commitment is also reflected in the work of pro-democracy groups from the former Soviet bloc, including People in Need in the Czech Republic and People in Peril in Slovakia, while cross-border democratic solidarity has also spread to other regions around the world.  The Institute for Democracy in South Africa works to consolidate democracy in South Africa. But, notes Gershman, it 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.” Similarly, groups like the Kampala-based East and Horn of Africa Human Rights Defenders Network and the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy act as important regional hubs for promoting democracy and human rights.

• As Arch Puddington’s excellent biography of AFL-CIO leader Lane Kirkland notes, international solidarity was a critical factor in sustaining the strike action that forced the Communist regime to negotiate a settlement with Solidarnosc. “Foreign assistance, particularly from the AFL-CIO and the National Endowment for Democracy, was critical; without a strike fund, miners and other workers would not have agreed to make the financial sacrifices demanded by a work stoppage,” he states.
• The stress on incremental democratization is also noteworthy. “A democratic revolution must be done in a gradual process,” the Workers’ Defense Committee’s Jacek Kuron told the NED. Precipitate or overnight change without establishing democratic institutions and culture will simply establish a state as “artificial” as the authoritarian regime it replaces.