The other Poland Ti Ti

mothy Garton Ash

Where I am, is Germany', Thomas L. Mann once modestly declared, dur- ,° his exile from Hitler's Germany. Last peek there gathered in Paris a group of :les who could with justice say 'where we NieL' is Poland'. They included the Polish nicl!,l'el poet, Czeslaw Milosz, the wil°0Pher Leszek Kolakowski, and the in- th."eetual elite of those who have found %,erriselves in involuntary exile since the „„ar. They met, as their predecessors have met for a century and a half, under the eyes fa4the last kings of Poland in a house of ii,"ecl splendour on the bank of the Seine. atti'eY met to discuss the state of the nation °I-18 themselves, and to explain it to the a time when most of the world is 'ening to General Jaruzelski, and greeting his Measures of 'normalisation' — or soi- iis4/ 'liberalisation' — I think we should trpitell to them, for at least two reasons. ust, because what they have to say is in- Se,ilsicallY interesting and often beautiful. pri(mid, because they represent the 'other rjh'and' not only in the sense that Mann "resented the 'other Germany'. As the flourishing underground cultural life bears witness, thousands of Poles living in Poland look to this exiled intellectual elite for their standards and inspiration. They look to it for the norms against which they measure the so-called 'normality' of post-`war' Poland. This spiritual government-in-exile is therefore more representative of the Polish people than Mann ever was of the Germans under Nazism; and obviously it is more representative than Jaruzelski's government. Unless the democratic criteria of 'what the people would like us to do' is quite irrelevant to our foreign policy, as would seem too often to be the case (with West Germany's Ostpolitik, for example, or with Mr Reagan's munificence to Central American dictators), and so long as Polish public opinion is gagged, we must listen to

them.

What do they say? To begin with, Kolakowski brilliantly gives us the measure of those 16 months of overground Solidari- ty which ended one year ago. It was a revolution, but a revolution fundamentally different from its modern European predecessors. Solidarity never attempted to

take over the state. Its leaders from the start determined to make a 'self-limiting' revolu- tion. Because of the Soviet presence, there were certain things they would not demand. It was in some ways a conservative revolu- tion: a revolution which demanded a restoration. This revolution killed nobody. Solidarity was not a Peace movement, but it was a supremely peaceful movement. The killing was done by the state. It was a workers' revolution, the first workers' revolution in history to advance against a socialist state under the sign of the Cross, with the blessing of the Pope. So much, said Kolakowski, for the ineluctable laws of historical development laid down by Karl Marx!

`But it failed,' you object? Well, as Orwell once remarked, all revolutions are failures, but they are not all the same failure. After a year of martial law one can see at least two lasting changes which are confounding the regime's hopes of 'nor- malisation' a la Kadar or Husak. The first is the terminal condition of the Party. Of course for most of its life the Polish United Workers' Party has been neither united nor the workers'. For a long time almost nobody has believed the ideology according to which the Party represents the working class, and the failure which inevitably belongs to that class. But that ideology is still as vital to a Leninist party as majestic clothes are to a king. In the Solidarity period those clothes were finally removed: and only in fable can a king in the altogether command popular respect. Then, by resorting to naked force to preserve the Party's monopoly of power, Jaruzelski himself dealt the death-blow to the Party's legitimacy. As Kolakowski observes, if a comparable military takeover happened in Moscow, this would be the end of Soviet communism as we know it. Now, so far there are few signs that the Polish Party will be able effectively to' wield even the limited powers that are returned to it, let alone to regain popular credibility. For the second lasting achievement of Solidarity is a revolutionary transformation of popular consciousness, a transformation which is not to be measured by participa- tion in street demonstrations.

`Normalisation' is the attempt to return a European society to Soviet norms which are fundamentally alien to it, first by terror, and then by material compensation (bread and circuses against the loss of freedom). 'Normalisation' is thus an at- tempt to reimpose abnormality. Poland before August 1980 was in many ways a sur- really abnormal country; Solidarity, an at- tempt to restore some normality. Its theme- song, 'So that Poland should be Poland', meant also, so that newspapers should be newspapers (and not propaganda sheets), so that managers should be managers (chosen for competence, not corruption), so that law courts should be courts of law, so that elections should be elections, and so on. Of course there is no unanimity about the precise shape that a normal Poland would take: such unanimity is a hallmark of abnormality! Nor can Polish norms be simply equated with 'Western' norms (which are anyway defined very differently in different western countries). Solidarity's programme was a combination of elements from the liberal, conservative and socialist traditions, the originality of which is hardly appreciated in the West. The extraordinary role of the Church, too, finds no equivalent in the West — but also no Polish unanimi- ty. In Paris there are spirited polemics against the prescriptive identification of `being Polish' with 'being Catholic', and the dangers of Catholic nationalism. For a few, a normal Poland should be a kind of vast edition of the Vatican State (at least so long as the Pope is Polish), for others the return to normality should mean the return of the Church to being just a Church.

The visions of the other Poland are thus diverse. But the operative fact is that such visions exist, not only on paper, elaborated and enriched in a century and a half of literature dedicated to the national cause, but now also in the hearts and minds of millions of Solidarity members. They have not forgotten the experience of normality, which, paradoxically, the revolution gave them: the normality of being free to say in the factory what they said at home, without fearing the sack, for example, or the nor- mality of having newspapers which contain- ed news. The object of 'normalisation' is to slash popular expectations, to depress aspirations; but in Poland those aspirations

are sustained and buoyed up by a whole counter-culture, in the underground, in the spiritual government-in-exile, and under the protective mantle of the Church. 'The struggle of man against power is the strug- gle of memory against forgetting,' Milan Kundera wrote out of the bitter Czech ex- perience after 1968. 'Normalisation' prescribes organised forgetting. The Solidarity period was a 'dream', a sophisticated apologist for the Jaruzelski regime wrote recently in the Guardian, from which Poland has 'awoken'. But the Poles are refusing to forget. They continue to view the actions of the regime through this enlarged frame of reference.

The West, however, is forgetting. If you have followed the day-to-day reporting over the last year, you will have noticed how the frame of reference has shrunk, so that we are back to judging Poland by Soviet bloc standards, and pinning our hopes (and credits) on so-called 'liberals' within the Party 'leadership. Thus the suspension of martial law, which, measured against the aspirations of most Poles, is but a reduction of a few degrees in the per- mafrost, can look like a thaw.

At first glance the most encouraging part of the suspension is the 'end of internment'. But it is well to remember that in the last year Poland has acquired more than 3,500 political prisoners — not up to Soviet or East German standards, it is true, yet still a firm sign that, as General Jaruzelski assures us, there will be no return to. the bad prac- tices of before August 1980 (when there were only a handful of political prisoners). These political prisoners, mostly sentenced for taking part in Solidarity protests since 13 December, have not been amnestied. There is, however, the possibility of in- dividual acts of pardon. Moreover, Church sources confirm that the regime is preparing a large trial against activists of the former Workers' Defence Committee (KOR), whom it will attempt to present as the 'ex- tremists' who forced the Polish workers in- to revolution against their will (for it cannot be that the workers wanted revolt against a workers' state, can it?). It is therefore pro- bable that some of the most important former Solidarity leaders and advisers will indeed no longer be interned, but instead charged with conspiracy against the State.

Further, one should remember the thousands of workers who have merely

The Spectator 18 December 1982 been sacked for participating in Solidatl protests in the year of 'war'. They al unemployed: but since, as every schoolbl knows, there is no unemployment i1,1„,n socialist state, they receive no unenli ment benefit. They are therefore dePetlueii on charity channelled through the Chatc or on funds collected by undergrow la Solidarity.

Seen from Moscow, then, General Jam' zelski still shows a healthy desire t° force through a normalisation like Kaciar and Husak. But the performance is pr;, foundly unsatisfactory. He has certain', broken the back of Solidarity as a nati°/1:5 wide organisation. However Solidarity still effectively organised in the large ,e,- fa. tories where it was strongest. Solidarib'e dues are regularly collected, while 's boycott of the new official trade unic'„.10 almost total. The Workers' Commissions l the last years of Franco's Spain showed Ih,,ar. such a factory-based organisation can s'",f vive for a longer period in conditionsbuic conspiracy. Jaruzelski has scored a ric)ta,

' success in winning the qualfied fierc

Primate Glemp; but Glemp is to' criticised by a large part of the clergy believe that the Church must not CO1"(i promise in its defence of human rights, °of must keep alive the ethical values .rig Solidarity. The Pope, they add, was saYhler something to us when he canonised Fall'ed Kolbe. Moreover, even Glemp has exacvtiv, a price. The Krakow Catholic weellie Tygodnik Powszechny, for instance is 3 f, to print articles which could not aPPear,.°0 ficially in any other socialist state (e% of possibly in Hungary). In this first Phase. ni `normalisation', the phase of terrorisa from above, the regime has failed to bre the back of civil society. As a Hungarian official elegantly the pressed it, Poland has not experiencedvith `catharsis' which Hungary experienced me the Russian invasion in 1956. At the. sad of time, Poland has no prospect of the klirtde material compensation which the tight 'I in Hungarian economy was able to bring of the favourable world economic climate the 1960s. Jaruzelski has neither the bread nor the circuses to compensate the poles of their loss of freedom, so the second Phasein. his 'normalisation' is likely to be the complete as the first. If one looks 3`,01 three major post-war crises in as'-cr Europe — Hungary in 1956, Czecliosot vakia in 1968, and Poland in 1980 c)rcr sees that the Soviet Union has been Pits gressively more successful in disguisillgoil intervention, but the prospects of sueceacti 'normalisation' have become less in successive case. In Poland they are al,f°,4 nil. In the New Year it is not only Poland law which will be suspended, but. P°''-of. itself: a country neither normalised no not mal, materially worse off than most O the neighbours, spiritually — despite bettall off deep depression — still arguably trite than any of them. On past form the regntil will muddle through a few more years' the next popular rebellion will once 3g

remind a forgetful world of the existence of the other Poland.

Here, Polish intellectuals look at western reactions with a kind of melancholy irony born of long experience. It is not merely the question of immediate government policies, although there is a clear consensus on that. 'In a country which lacks medicines and food, the police are equipped with the most modern electronic equipment,' the poet Czeslaw Milosz remarked in an aside, 'which shows how they use western credits.' The consensus here is overwhelmingly for the continuance of western economic sanc- tions against the Polish and Soviet regimes. There is evidence that this spiritual govern- ment-in-exile represents a large constituency in Poland, on this question as on others. If western governments wish to reward General Jaruzelski's 'liberalisation' with new credits, they cannot legitimately pre- tend that they are acceding to the wishes of the majority of the Polish people. We can- not know with certainty what the majority of the Polish people want, but one thing we can know with certainty is that a minister like Mieczyslaw F. Rakowski does not represent them better than Czeslaw Milosz does.

Beyond the immediate questions .of policy, however, there is something we can do which costs nothing except a little in- tellectual effort. This is to refuse the deliberate distortion of reassuring port- manteau words like 'normalisation'. By keeping the inverted commas we remind ourselves that the sense of these words is also inverted: 'normalisation' is the nega- tion of normality. Otherwise we become unwitting accomplices in that massive deception on which the Soviet system is built. State-organised lying is quite as im- portant for this system as state-ordered repression. As Solzhenitzyn wrote in his 1970 Nobel speech, 'Between the lie and violence, there is the most intimate, most natural, fundamental link: violence can on- ly be maintained by the lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence.' And he went on to make a prophecy: 'Once the lie has been dispersed, the nakedness of violence will be revealed in all its repulsiveness, and violence, become decrepit, will come crashing down.'

The truth of the first part of that pro- phecy has been validated by events in Poland in the last two years. The truth of the second part has yet to be confirmed.