The Defeat of Solidarity

I strongly recommend this work as one of the finest studies of "the missing link" in democracy-building in post-Communist eastern Europe. The author's thesis is that "little people don't matter" - democracy is "too serious a business" to be left to the herd - echoes the political elitism which has always dominated this region, reinforced by contemporary "money first" free market Western pseudo-democracy.

Which brings me to two relatively mild critiques of Ost's presentation. Precisely because we're dealing with central Europe and aristocratic notions that persisted all through the "Peoples' Republic," Polish intellectuals still carried a residue of class snobbery, no matter how temporarily infatuated with Solidarity in 1980. They were thus primed by class culture to eventually turn away from the workers. Only alluded to in Ost's work, but of equal importance, was the wining and dining of these people on their Western junkets, filling their heads with schemes of personal enrichment, leading them to believe that the privileges pushed on them on these Western visits would continue to be theirs back home if they followed said advisors. A pure case of "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," without the redeeming epiphany. The experience of Solidarity's leadership in the halls of the West is quite similar to that of the African National Congress of South Africa, as given in William Gumede's "Thabo Mbeki and the Soul of the ANC." In both cases the "vanguard leadership" of a radical, grass-roots organization was separated from its base in the name of furthering Western interests, to the lasting harm of the people they purported to lead.

Another aspect of Ost's work is his excellent description of how and why the Polish working class turned from the liberals to embrace a nationalist-"family values" platform that has nothing to do with their economic plight. But Ost tends to glide over the fact that the nationalist right could so easily take up this slack precisely because of its deep roots in Poland. Poland is like Ireland, in its wedding of underdog nationalism to Catholicism, and as in Ireland the Church has taken on itself the task of keeping a poor population content with its economic lot while turning anger elsewhere. There is nothing post-Communist in this, as witness Jan Gross' "Fear," describing how violent anti-Semitism wracked Poland across all class lines in the mid-1940s. Because of the deep-seated nature of Catholic nationalism it was poised to take over the social base of Poland, much more so than in Czechoslovakia or Hungary, unless liberals and social democrats could offer a competing ideal. The tragedy in Poland, as Ost so ably describes, was that they could have - but didn't want to.