Chapter 3

MARTIAL LAW AND THE ORIGINS OF POLISH DEMOCRACY

I admit to having always had a soft spot in my heart for Poland. Most students of Eastern Europe of my generation do. Throughout the Cold War, the Poles more than any other nation maintained their fiery nationalism and hatred of communism. Moscow was never able to crush their spirit.

They were rewarded for their steadfastness in 1989 when Solidarity led them to freedom. Now, standing in the courtyard of the Presidential Palace in 2001, I felt a tremendous surge of emotion as I witnessed what Poland had become.

We were in Warsaw for President Bush’s state visit. During the arrival ceremony we listened, as was customary, to the playing of the American and Polish national anthems. Then the flags were raised—the Stars and Stripes and the red and white horizontal bars of Poland. The NATO banner stood alongside them. I was overwhelmed and tears flowed freely down my face. Poland was now an American ally in a Europe that was finally whole, free, and at peace.

A few minutes later, we watched as Polish troops paraded in front of the president to honor him. They were goose-stepping in the tradition of the armies of the Warsaw Pact. As each row passed, heads tilted to the side—also a feature of Soviet bloc armies—the president saluted the troops of the NATO alliance, who looked more at home in their past than in the present. I chuckled to myself and pointed it out to a couple of others standing nearby. No one else seemed to get the irony. And, of course, it didn’t matter. Poland was now a reliable ally and a stable democracy, even if some of its military traditions needed reform.

The Long Road to a Free Poland

Poland, perhaps more than any other country, exemplified the tragedy of Europe’s division after World War II. It had always been the most restive member of the Soviet bloc. Passionate nationalism, deep Catholicism, and fierce if sometimes passive resistance to Moscow’s dominance always made the Poles, well, difficult.

The hostility between the Russian and the Polish peoples was long-standing, driven by wars and political settlements that continually altered the borders between them over centuries. Poland sometimes had the upper hand, even installing a Polish prince as tsar during times of Russian weakness in the early 1600s. When Russia eventually emerged stronger under the Romanov dynasty, it retaliated by taking Polish territory and forcibly integrating large chunks of it into the Russian Empire. Back and forth it went, sealing a historical narrative of distrust and animosity.

The modern version of this instability grew out of the events leading to the start of World War II. In 1932, Poland signed a nonaggression pact with Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union, and two years later did the same with Nazi Germany. But the pacts were not honored, and in 1939, Poland was invaded from the west by Germany and from the east by the Soviet Union. Years of brutality against the population ensued, mostly at the hands of the Germans. But the Soviet Union did its part. In one of the most infamous incidents, twenty-two thousand Polish army officers and civil servants were massacred near the Katyn Forest region in Russia. The Soviets attributed the crime to the Nazis. But every Pole knew what Mikhail Gorbachev would finally admit in 1990, that the Katyn massacre had been perpetrated by the Soviet secret police.

Despite the brutality and the long odds, the Polish resistance fought gamely against the Nazis, even taking control of Warsaw in August 1944. The Nazis retook the capital in October and burned the city to the ground, rounding up and executing ordinary citizens and resistance fighters alike. Soviet forces were marching rapidly westward at the time but did not reach the city in time to prevent the German massacre. Or, many believe, the Red Army chose to wait, condemning the population to Nazi atrocities and making easier the pacification of the population upon “liberation.” The Soviets took Warsaw in January 1945 and the rest of Poland by March.

When the final peace settlement was sealed at Potsdam between the victorious Allies a few months later, the facts on the ground in Poland favored Stalin. The Western Allies tried to insist on free elections, but the fate of Poland was sealed. In 1947, Soviet-sponsored “elections” were won by Bolesław Bierut, who quickly declared that Poland had become the Communist People’s Republic of Poland. In 1955, Poland became a founding member of the Soviet military alliance, the Warsaw Pact. Its integration into the Soviet bloc was now complete.

Yet, for the next three decades, Poland remained a thorn in the Kremlin’s side, constantly producing crises between the Polish people and the communist rulers. The only tool that the party could use was to bring relative prosperity to the population. It did so, but largely by borrowing money from Western Europe and the United States. By 1970, that strategy began to unravel as loans came due and the real economy began to shrink. Strikes and food riots broke out in Gdańsk in December, leading to many deaths when the authorities used force to restore order.

Fearing for stability, the West continued to ply Poland with loans, forgiving some, rescheduling others, and allowing the country to continue to build up debt. But by 1980 the country owed more than $18 billion, almost as much as its entire GDP. Foreign sources of funding were slowly drying up and the largesse that had kept wages high was unsustainable. Depressed wages and soaring prices for basic goods—up 60 percent or more on certain items—fueled protests across the country. Now the party was out of money and face-to-face with a restive and angry population.

Throughout the summer of 1980, strikes and work stoppages multiplied. The government reacted with wage increases that it could not afford, but even that did not contain the “rolling” labor actions that were paralyzing the country. When eighty thousand workers joined a strike in Lublin, the army had to be called in to maintain basic services.

Then the regime made a fatal mistake in Gdańsk, long the hotbed of worker activism at the ironically named Lenin Shipyard. Anna Walentynowicz, a popular crane operator, was fired five months before her retirement. Led by Bogdan Borusewicz and an electrician named Lech Wałęsa, the Gdańsk shipyard workers began striking. Within days, two hundred factories had joined the strike committee, setting out demands and insisting on the right to have independent trade unions and to strike. As the labor actions spread, the government tried intimidation first, arresting leaders of the dissident organizations and declaring that the strikes were political, not just economic. But the chaos continued, and on August 24 the communist government agreed to negotiate.

The Gdańsk Agreement of August 31 contained breathtaking concessions. In addition to allowing independent trade unions, it pledged new legislation allowing the right to strike without reprisals. It also called for greater safeguards for press freedoms, increases in pay, and improved working conditions. Employees would be allowed to take Saturdays off, and Sunday mass would be broadcast into workplaces over loudspeakers. The agreement was meant to give the communist government breathing room. The hard-line but incompetent premier, Edward Gierek, was dismissed. His successor, Stanisław Kania, promised to honor the agreements, noting ominously, however, that “antisocialist elements” were turning the country’s problems to their own purpose. We know now that at the same time these agreements were struck, the National Defense Committee was developing an action plan for the implementation of martial law.

Still, the government had shown weakness and the newly empowered labor unions were not about to relieve the pressure. A single national labor organization was formed at a meeting in Gdańsk on September 17, and just to drive home the point, a one-hour work stoppage, a “warning strike,” paralyzed the country again.

The history of what transpired after that is murky and there are competing versions of Poland’s road to martial law. Did Polish communist leaders declare the state of emergency to preempt a Soviet invasion? Or did the Poles themselves simply decide to put an end to domestic unrest?

Clearly, the rise of an independent trade union, a key element of a potentially independent civil society, got the dreaded attention of Moscow. Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet foreign minister, reportedly said that “we simply cannot and must not lose Poland.” The implication was, of course, that if the Polish government was too weak or too stupid to act, Moscow might have to do so in its stead.

And it was easy to see that the Communist Party of Poland was in chaos at every level. The Party’s first secretaries in eighteen of forty-nine provinces were ousted on November 22. A few days later, the governments across Eastern Europe began issuing denunciations of the developments in Poland. This was reminiscent of the rhetoric employed by Warsaw Pact states against the regime of Alexander Dubček in Prague in 1968 that was seen as too compliant and insufficiently tough to defend party control.

The United States was sensing too that a repeat of the invasion of Czechoslovakia might be in the offing. President Carter sent a hotline message to Brezhnev saying that the United States would not exploit the issue but warning against Soviet action. When the Warsaw Pact convened an extraordinary meeting in Moscow on how to deal with the crisis, the ground was clearly being laid for intervention. Reportedly, the Polish leaders told Soviet leaders at that meeting that they would prevent a change to the constitutional order by whatever means necessary. They were trying to buy time to solve the crisis themselves.

But the troubles did not abate. Indeed, before the ink could dry on one agreement between the government and the unions, it would break down, only to be followed by another pact, and another. Perhaps to bring order, but more likely to prepare for the army’s intervention, General Wojciech Jaruzelski was appointed prime minister. Ross Johnson of the Rand Corporation and one of America’s best experts on Poland noted that there was a kind of creeping coup. “Every day another ministry falls under the control of a general,” he told me.

The government, though, seemed to be torn between a desire to end the crisis by accommodation and increasing pressure to end the insurgency by force. The plans for a state of emergency continued to mature and harassment of Solidarity leaders accelerated. And yet on March 30, 1981, the Polish government reached an agreement with Solidarity and secured a promise from Lech Wałęsa to postpone the general strike scheduled for the next day. The political events and efforts at compromise were unfolding against a backdrop of increasing chaos.

The same indecision that characterized the party leadership was evident within Solidarity as well. Some members of the union argued for cooperation with what they saw as an increasingly compliant government. Others, though, believed that the communists could not be trusted and pressed for doubling down on confrontation.

The West too seemed uncertain of what to do. Hoping to avoid the complete breakdown of order in Poland, Western governments agreed to allow more time for the repayment of billions of dollars in Polish debts.

The Communist Party continued to waver as the crises worsened, sending contradictory signals and indeed experiencing internal radicalization not unlike that challenging the leadership of Solidarity. At the end of an Extraordinary Plenum of the party in July 1981, only four of the previously selected eleven members of the Politburo remained. Jaruzelski was among those selected to remain.

By the fall, it was clear that neither the economic nor the political crises were abating. Solidarity had moved well beyond the agenda of workers’ economic rights to an avowedly political agenda, calling in September for free elections at the local and national levels. Everyone in the country seemed to know that martial law was being prepared and becoming more likely. But Solidarity was now unwilling to pull back. And the leadership could likely not have done so in any case. Even more radical elements were emerging. A group calling itself the “Self-Governing Republic Clubs—Freedom, Justice, and Independence” announced on November 30 that it would no longer agree to “one more attempt to preserve the monopoly of a narrow elite for party power.”1 That attack on the monopoly of power of the Communist Party was likely the last straw for Warsaw and certainly for Moscow.

The sense that the country was reaching a point of no return came to a crescendo in the first half of December. Comments by Lech Wałęsa were leaked and broadcast nationwide. In them, he advocated for confrontation with the regime. He would say that the remarks were taken out of context, but now the hardest-line elements had what they needed: “evidence” that Solidarity was interested in the revolutionary overthrow of the communist regime.

The middle ground had collapsed on both sides. Moscow was very much present too—anxious and hovering and insisting on action of some kind to stop the erosion of communist authority. And so Jaruzelski took the step that most had come to expect: Martial law was declared late on December 12, 1981. Before the public announcement the next morning, Wałęsa, Solidarity activists, and other opposition figures, including reformist communists, were rounded up—several thousand in all—and imprisoned. The military took over and basic rights were suspended. Meetings were banned, curfews were imposed, and the only available news came from one government channel. The Kremlin orchestrated a statement of support for Poland’s leaders from socialist countries across the Warsaw Pact.

Protests spread across hundreds of enterprises, but the army was now in control. Six thousand soldiers in tanks and armored vehicles backed up “citizens’ militias,” the party’s paramilitary force, known as ZOMO, and they took over striking factories in cities across the country. In Silesia, nine miners were killed and scores were injured there and in other places. It did not take long for resistance to collapse, with the last of the strikes called off at the Piast coal mine on December 28. Trade unions, including Solidarity, were banned on October 8, 1982, by an act of parliament.

The comprehensive siege did not last long. Pope John Paul II visited the country in June 1982, obtaining the release of thousands of prisoners and amnesty for them. And the world recognized Lech Wałęsa, who had been released from prison in November 1982, with the Nobel Peace Prize. Martial law formally ended in July 1983.

The Polish Communist Party, or, more accurately, the Polish military, had asserted control and the “uprising” was over. Poland’s leaders were anxious to return to something resembling normalcy. They needed help from the West and knew it. The leadership in Warsaw and, more important, in Moscow, could afford to be generous. The “constitutional order” in Poland had been preserved.

In one of history’s great ironies, though, this dark moment for freedom in Poland laid the groundwork for communism’s undoing when a democratic opening—Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms—came. The opposition’s organizational capacity survived underground between 1981 and 1989, gaining strength and nurtured by an unlikely international troika: Lane Kirkland mobilized the AFL-CIO using a network of American and European NGOs, Ronald Reagan turned to the CIA to help covertly, and the Polish Pope’s “divisions” of local Catholic priests became foot soldiers for change.

How Many Divisions Does the Pope Have?

When Harry Truman mentioned the Catholic Church in Poland, Josef Stalin famously and sarcastically asked that question. History would show that the answer was, “A lot.”

Some have called it a miracle that Pope John Paul II emerged as leader of the Catholic faith in the late 1970s. The Polish cardinal Karol Józef Wojtyła was the first non-Italian Pope in more than four hundred years. And he ascended at a time of growing Polish nationalism and anti-Soviet resentment. His first visit to his homeland as Pope, in June 1979, was a sensation. The economy was worsening, discontent was rising, and the crowds were immense. He provided spiritual inspiration to Poland’s drive for freedom, and to the institutional power of village priests who rallied the faithful against communist rule.

Workers were the second element of Poland’s rich institutional landscape. We have seen that strikes and work stoppages were for decades a potent weapon against the regime. In the late 1970s, the AFL-CIO began providing financial support to a Polish organization called the Committee for Workers’ Defense, a forerunner of Solidarity. Ironically, workers were central to the communist mythology. They were in Marxist lore the “vanguard of the revolution.” But in the end their true champion would turn out to be the independent trade unions of the free world. The AFL-CIO’s head, Lane Kirkland, was a staunch anticommunist who became enthralled with Solidarity’s cause and went on to serve as one of its greatest advocates in the West.

After the summer of strikes in 1980, the Carter administration became concerned that the AFL-CIO’s growing support for Solidarity would provoke a backlash from Soviet hard-liners, who would use the excuse of American meddling to intervene on behalf of their beleaguered comrades. U.S. officials urged Kirkland to keep a low profile, and he did, but he never wavered in his support.

Kirkland believed Solidarity embodied the kind of popular outpouring that had brought down many authoritarian regimes in the past. “History moves when civil society reaches a critical point,” he later said. “It is not decided in the foreign ministries or in the palaces of power but on the streets and in the workplaces. And when a critical mass has been reached, then there is nothing you can do unless you are willing to kill and slaughter and put the whole country in chains.”

The imposition of martial law in December 1981 was an attempt to do exactly that—to put the genie of Solidarity back into the bottle and to restore communist authority once and for all. But instead, the events convinced Solidarity’s international supporters of the need to do more.

The third element of the troika, the CIA, began providing significant sums of money—hundreds of thousands of dollars—to several Polish groups, mainly run by Poles in exile. They in turn supported organizations that were trying to subvert the communist regime from within the country. Instead of lethal aid, the CIA provided the means for Solidarity to tell its story and rally its supporters. The assistance included printing materials to publish leaflets and journals, communication equipment to circumvent the ban on meetings, and financial support to the families of political prisoners. The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) also provided support openly to a range of groups associated with the Polish opposition—even during the period of martial law. As a result of these efforts, Poland had a strong indigenous movement at the ready when Gorbachev began to encourage change in Eastern Europe.

The Pope returned to Poland for his third visit in June 1987. He held prayers alongside one and a half million worshippers in Gdańsk. On the very same day, and only a few hundred miles away, President Reagan was standing at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, challenging Mr. Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.” The Polish people were about to dismantle their communist regime—peacefully.

When Brent Scowcroft called after the 1988 election to offer me the job as the White House Soviet specialist, he made a firm but understated pitch. “A lot is happening with Gorbachev,” he said. “This could be an interesting time and the president needs someone to help him sort it out.”

A month or so later when George H. W. Bush assumed office in January 1989, it was pretty clear that the times would be not just interesting, but historic. Still, when I took up my role as director for Soviet and East European affairs, we were feeling our way. How much would Mikhail Gorbachev tolerate? It was one thing to pronounce, as the Soviet leaders had done in December 1988, that the countries of the socialist brotherhood could go their own way. It was quite another to see that “their own way” might mean the end of communist rule in the Soviet bloc.

I followed events hour by hour. But even as one of the closest observers in the American government, I was shocked at how quickly Soviet and communist power collapsed in the summer and fall of 1989.

The year before the Bush administration arrived in Washington had been an extraordinary one in Eastern Europe. Throughout 1988, Solidarity had sparred with the government, calling and suspending strikes as it positioned itself for the upcoming Round Table talks, during which the authorities had agreed to sit down with the opposition. Protests throughout 1988 weakened the hand of a government that seemed powerless to do anything about the deteriorating economy. Once again, price hikes—40 percent on food, 50 percent on rents, and 60 percent on fuel—helped to mobilize the population. Intellectuals within universities, workers within shipyards and mines, and churchgoers in villages repeatedly took to the streets to demand change.

Though the government kept insisting that it would not negotiate fundamental changes like the legalization of independent trade unions, it was clearly running out of options. The Polish Communist Party needed Lech Wałęsa more than he needed them. Finally, the members of the Party Plenum said the magic words: They were prepared to accept pluralism in the trade union movement. The shocked reaction of the official trade union leader, who complained of feeling “bitterness and dissatisfaction,” said it all. Solidarity had won the right to negotiate with the government on an equal, if not better, footing.

The talks began on February 6, 1989, just two weeks after George H. W. Bush took office. The president welcomed the negotiations, noting the importance of national reconciliation. I followed every twist and turn of the talks, frankly surprised at how rapidly they were moving to conclusion. When on April 5 the parties announced agreement, we were ready with a response from the White House. Actually, we were a little too ready.

Marlin Fitzwater, the White House spokesman, was about to hold his noon briefing. We gave him a prepared statement applauding the outcome of the Round Table negotiations. Unfortunately, the actual participants had broken for dinner and had not yet concluded the agreement. No one seemed to notice, though, and a few hours later the talks were indeed finished.

Solidarity was legalized under the agreement and new elections were set for June. The Round Table accords stipulated that 65 percent of the seats in the Sejm (the parliament) were reserved for the United Workers’ Party (the communists) and their affiliated groups. The upper house, the Senate, had no such limitation.

In assessing the situation, we expected a slow and relatively orderly transition based on the blueprint laid out that April day. There might, we thought, be a slight non-communist majority in the Senate, but the communists would lead the government. Eventually, perhaps in the next election, the democratic forces would triumph once and for all. It was to be what political scientists call a “pacted transition,” with the old regime essentially negotiating itself out of power.

The Polish people had other ideas. In the actual election, Solidarity won virtually every available seat in the lower house. In the newly created Senate, it won ninety-nine out of one hundred seats. The communists, on the other hand, could not even fill their uncontested seats, because none received more than 50 percent of the vote.

In the second round, Solidarity agreed to modify the election rule and urged their followers to vote for reform-minded communists, but with only minimal success. More astonishingly, Jaruzelski ran unopposed for the new post of president and still managed only a one-vote margin. He, in turn, asked another communist general, Czesław Kiszczak, to form a government. Protests erupted, and with Solidarity voicing its opposition to him, he could not do so. Though Solidarity wanted to observe the Round Table formula, the inevitability of a coalition led by the labor union was growing.

When President Bush arrived in Poland a month after the election, the political situation was still chaotic. Wałęsa asked the president to talk to Jaruzelski and urge him to accept the presidency. The general was a proud man, Wałęsa explained, and, stung by the election results, was reluctant to serve. The Round Table accords provided certainty—the communists, Solidarity, and Moscow were all on board. Wałęsa said publicly that he did not want Poland to have the “Chinese experience” (meaning Tiananmen Square), a point that he reiterated to President Bush.

But the accords were being overtaken by events and the sentiments of the Polish people, who were fed up with the communists and Moscow’s yoke. Everyone hoped that the communists might hold on with just enough votes, counting, of course, their coalition partners, to fulfill the terms of the agreement. That too was not to be.

On the second day of the president’s trip, the American ambassador held a lovely lunch in his spectacular garden to honor George Bush and members of the Polish government. Lech Wałęsa was not present, having overseen the dramatic events of the president’s visit to Gdańsk the day before. But there was significant representation from Solidarity as well as from the Polish government. The only observably odd note came during the toasts. President Bush toasted the Polish and American people: nothing strange there. But Jaruzelski toasted “the ladies.” What was that? I thought. The Polish legislator sitting next to me explained that President Jaruzelski did not want to risk being rebuffed by his countrymen if he dared raise a glass to “the Polish people.”

But the real drama was unfolding in hushed conversations on the sidelines of the lunch. The American delegation, including the president, did not know that a deal was being struck that would nail shut communism’s coffin.

The Polish Communist Party had, since the rigged elections of 1947, had non-communist coalition partners. The actions of the Peasant Party and another small party (the so-called Democratic Party) didn’t really matter, since the communists were in complete control. They were in no sense independent, voting compliantly with the party for forty years. It was a coalition in name only.

In the new circumstances, though, these “minor” parties suddenly found a new role. A month after their consultations at the American ambassador’s residence that day, they defected to Solidarity’s side and agreed to take part in a non-communist coalition proposed by Wałęsa. It was, in fact, a kind of constitutional coup d’état. That is what the Poles were doing while most of us dined on a scrumptious meal on a warm Warsaw summer day.

The communists would have to accept the inevitable: They could no longer govern Poland alone. On August 19, one of the founders of Solidarity, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, was asked to form a government. Jaruzelski agreed to become president but was effectively without power.

The world held its breath to see what Moscow would do. Mazowiecki had been careful to reaffirm Poland’s obligations to the Warsaw Pact and to leave the communists in charge of both the Defense Ministry and the Interior Ministry. In several interviews, he made clear that he wanted good relations with Moscow.

He did not have cause for worry. Mikhail Gorbachev, not Leonid Brezhnev, was in charge in the Kremlin. In his UN speech in 1988, Gorbachev had disavowed the Brezhnev Doctrine that defended the right of the Soviet Union to intervene in the internal affairs of countries of the socialist bloc—by force if necessary.

When Izvestiya published a statement on August 20 saying that Moscow would “wait and see” in relations with the new Polish government, it was clear that Gorbachev would keep his promise. For good measure, the Soviet government newspaper added that the communist party of Poland was now associated with crisis and failure and would have to rebuild itself.

Two days later, Mieczysław Rakowski, the outgoing communist prime minister, reportedly called Gorbachev for advice and was told to allow the Solidarity-led coalition to go forward. Poland was free.

Democracy Prevails

There was palpable excitement that September in Washington as we anticipated the visit of Leszek Balcerowicz, Poland’s deputy prime minister. Balcerowicz was highly respected in the West and serving simultaneously as the finance minister. The new government was coming to terms with the challenges it faced. The communists were gone, and the economic woes, accumulated over decades, now belonged to the new democratic government.

Several weeks before the meetings were to begin, Jan Nowak, an iconic Polish American leader who had headed Radio Free Europe for Eastern Europe, came to see me. He had just returned from Warsaw, where he had met the Mazowiecki government.

Jan was one of my favorite interlocutors. He was small in stature and more than eighty years old. But he was a giant to me, one of those extraordinary men, like my mentor and professor, Josef Korbel, who had survived both the Nazis and the communists by fleeing to the United States. Yet, like Korbel, he had never really left his country or his countrymen behind. Jan was a fierce fighter for their liberty and dignity.

That August afternoon on the third floor of the Old Executive Office Building, Jan pleaded for resources for the Solidarity-led government. He used a hard sell. The United States had stood by Poland during all those years of captivity: Now we had to stand by his native land in freedom. Those words were so powerful and resonated with me. The Poles had powerful friends in the U.S. Congress too. Senators George Mitchell and Bob Dole were just two who represented the bipartisan support that Poland enjoyed.

Both American politics and faithfulness to American values were on Poland’s side. But I knew that we had budget limitations and worried that we could never live up to the Marshall Plan–like expectations that East Europeans would have. It was with some trepidation, therefore, that I prepared for the National Security Council meeting that would take place to finalize the offer that President Bush would make to the new Polish government.

I held a meeting of the assistant secretaries from around the government to review the bidding. The State Department proposed a series of visits and perhaps a donor conference for Poland; Agriculture proposed more food aid; Treasury took a hard line, insisting that, at most, Poland might receive several hundred million dollars from the IMF after a long series of negotiations; and the Commerce Department proposed to take a trade mission to Warsaw. That’s right: at this moment of historic change, a trade mission made up of CEOs.

My colleague and the head of my directorate, Bob Blackwill, a strong proponent of robust aid, was out of town. I knew that Bob would have been furious at the pittance that we were about to propose, and frankly I was just embarrassed. So I broke ranks and went to see Bob Gates, the deputy national security adviser. “Bob,” I said, “the Cold War is ending and we are proposing to hold a trade show in Warsaw.” I knew I had Bob’s support when he chuckled. He too was a Soviet specialist and didn’t want to let the historic moment pass. He encouraged me to come up with something bigger—outside of the “interagency” process.

One of the ideas floating around Washington was to have the IMF grant Poland a “standby” loan of $1 billion. The number needed to be very large because the Poles would use the confidence that it implied to go ahead and “float” the złoty (in other words, let the currency find its true market value) as a crucial first step to market reform. But if Polish people panicked and made a run on the banks in an effort to protect their savings, there would be widespread chaos.

Jeffrey Sachs at Harvard had been a strong advocate for standby loans and had used our academic connections to get in touch with me. We talked through the mechanism and the likely resistance from the Treasury Department, which would, at the very least, argue that this could not be done quickly. The U.S. Treasury would say it could not support the loan before the IMF concluded negotiations. That would take months. We had a few days.

I knew well that I didn’t have the credibility to put an economic proposal before the president that Treasury would oppose. But I knew someone who did, my colleagues from Stanford: Michael Boskin, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, and John Taylor, a senior member of the council.

Armed with Bob Gates’s permission to circumvent the process, I went to see Mike and John. “Is there any evidence that these standby facilities work?” They agreed that they could in some cases. Israel had been one such example. I explained that I needed a paper for the president to that effect. Thanks to Mike and John, President Bush had the argument before him prior to the NSC meeting.

I thought, though, that I had better inform the secretaries that the president would want to raise the idea of a standby loan. Secretary James Baker at State was delighted. I tried to reach Secretary Nicholas Brady, but his staff failed to connect us. When the meeting took place, the treasury secretary was not prepared for the argument. He said that he was not in principle opposed, citing the fact that he himself had mentioned the possibility of a standby loan. But it just couldn’t be done quickly. If we broke process here, he argued, “we would have to do it for everyone, including Argentina!”

Secretary Baker spoke next, and he was prepared. “The Cold War didn’t begin in Argentina and it won’t end there,” he countered. That was the winning argument and the United States settled on a kind of compromise. We would make the announcement before Poland’s negotiations were complete, but disbursement would await final agreement between the IMF and Warsaw. The U.S. portion was to be $200 million in an internationally supported package. (The money, by the way, was never needed because the currency float was orderly and successful.)

Poland would receive further aid too. Congress seemed to try to outdo the president by offering an aid package several times larger than his original proposal. Given the nation’s budget difficulties, this set off a confrontation between the White House and Capitol Hill. Jim Baker accused the Congress of politically motivated efforts to embarrass the president. To say that the response of the United States to this great historical moment was messy is an understatement. As Brent Scowcroft, then the national security adviser, has noted, most of us agreed more with the Congress than with our own administration. But we did what we could, and the Poles received significant help. And the aid provided a strong signal of support from Europe and the United States. It was not exactly the Marshall Plan, but it did help the new government pursue economic reform in a timely fashion.

In fact, one of the most successful endeavors was actually quite small in absolute dollar terms. The idea, which took root just as the changes in Poland were beginning to unfold, was for an enterprise fund to provide seed grants to small businesses across the country. It was intended as a kind of venture capital investment to bypass the communist government and help loosen the reins of the centrally controlled economy. In essence, the U.S. government would provide capital to private bakeries, auto shops, hair salons, and other entrepreneurial activities for a small stake in the enterprises. An independent international board of Poles and distinguished Americans would oversee the program.

President Bush first mentioned the idea in a speech in April 1989, and he reiterated it during his address to the Polish parliament in July 1989. But in a sign of how quickly events were changing on the ground, by the time the proposal was approved by Congress, Solidarity had already taken control of the government. The Polish American Enterprise Fund was nevertheless granted $240 million to begin making investments, and it continued to operate throughout the 1990s.

Years later when I was back at Stanford, I received a call from an NSC staff member in the Clinton administration. The United States, it seemed, had a dilemma. The Enterprise Fund had not only not lost money, it had made money: The original $240 million investment was worth nearly $300 million. Should the Poles repay it?

I asked President Bush and Brent Scowcroft. They said that we hadn’t really expected to be repaid. (Brent said, “Who makes money on foreign assistance?”) We should probably just consider the “profits” to be a grant. The bulk of the principal should be repaid to the U.S. Treasury, and the rest should go to the Poles. President Clinton agreed. Warsaw graciously used the funds to continue its work and venture enterprises in other, less fortunate East European countries.

U.S. assistance and that of the European Union (EU) certainly played a role in stabilizing the Polish economy and ultimately its political system. Poland’s story reminds us that targeted international assistance can ease transition. But without committed and competent indigenous leaders and a favorable institutional landscape, success can be elusive.

In this, Poland was blessed with both. Poland’s agriculture was never collectivized, giving farmers an early stake in feeding the country as economic freedom took hold. Small political parties that had meant nothing under communism switched sides at a crucial moment in 1989. Due to the depth of religious conviction among the population, the Catholic Church remained powerful even in Stalinist times. At the moment of the opening this provided John Paul II with the metaphorical “divisions” of village priests that he mobilized on the ground. And Solidarity emerged from events after martial law intact and ready to take up a political mantle when the time came.

The country also had formidable leaders, many of whom had cut their political teeth as members of Solidarity. As such they enjoyed the admiration of the population, reinforcing their willingness to move quickly and decisively on reform. It is no exaggeration to say that Poland’s founding fathers were an extraordinary collection of people whose values and patriotism created the country’s democracy.

Lech Wałęsa will deservedly go down in history as the inspiration for Solidarity and in many ways the father of democratic Poland. A simple man who started out as an advocate for bread-and-butter issues as a labor leader, Wałęsa would become the symbol of freedom for Poles. What he lacked in political sophistication, he made up for in sincerity and authenticity. When I first met him in Gdańsk, I wondered if he could corral all that he had unleashed. It was easy to underestimate him, and early on the communists clearly did. In one of the memorable events in a decade of memorable moments, the party arranged a televised debate between Alfred Miodowicz, the head of the official trade union and an accomplished speaker, and Wałęsa. The ratings were through the roof: A poll in Warsaw found that 78 percent of the population watched as Wałęsa kept Miodowicz on the defensive throughout. That night, Solidarity emerged as a legitimate contender for power—not at all what the party had intended.

And Solidarity would produce other key leaders who did not enjoy Wałęsa’s deep moral authority but nonetheless simply knew how to get the work of the transition done:

Leszek Balcerowicz, the author of the economic reform plan, had been an economics professor and member of the communist party. He joined Solidarity soon after its founding in 1980 as an adviser. His commitment to rapid market reform and tight monetary policies is widely regarded as having smoothed Poland’s economic transition.

If Balcerowicz was the father of Poland’s market economy, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, a journalist, was a fierce defender of individual liberties and a multiparty state, leading to a constitution that protected these basic democratic rights.

Adam Michnik founded Gazeta Wyborcza, which had become Poland’s largest newspaper and a voice for Solidarity, even under martial law. He was a powerful advocate for a free press.

Bronisław Geremek founded in 1987 the Commission for Political Reforms of the Civic Committee, which drafted a plan for Poland’s democratic transition, taking advantage of the breathing space accorded by Mikhail Gorbachev. A quiet and scholarly professor of medieval Polish history, Geremek was in many ways an unlikely father of social and political reform.

These and others like them were deep believers in liberty. They had suffered what seemed to be an irrevocable defeat with the imposition of martial law. But they took advantage of that time to deepen their understanding of democracy’s requirements and to develop uniquely Polish responses to them. As such, Poland was ready to make the transition in 1989 in ways that few countries have been.

A New “Special Relationship”

When President Bush took his first trip to Europe in 2001, one stop was an absolute must—Warsaw. Everyone knew of the “special relationship” with Britain. Poland seemed poised to be a special ally in its own right. America had remained devoted to the country in the darkest days, and now celebrated a bright future with its friend. Poland’s story was quite simply a story of freedom’s triumph.

We seemed to see eye-to-eye with Poland on everything. Sitting in a meeting between President Bush and his Polish counterpart was stress-free and productive. In NATO, Poland brought new energy to the aging alliance, reminding its members to support those still living in tyranny in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Middle East. Poland’s special forces, along with those of Australia and Britain, joined Americans in the initial phase of the invasion of Iraq. The Poles agreed to host missile defense deployments despite Moscow’s resistance. In any meeting with the European Union, whether on climate change or trade, Poland was a friendly voice. The Poles took on hard tasks like trying to help the Ukrainians solve their multiple governance crises. I told President Kwasniewski on one occasion that Poland had become one of America’s most important allies and a real power in European politics.

That assessment of Poland’s foreign policy was accurate. But at home, the democratic political system was struggling to govern. In a sense, the problems were to be expected and were ones that bedevil almost every new democracy. Poland was experiencing political fragmentation, electoral volatility, and fissures in society.

How Many Parties Does a Country Need?

A year after the extraordinary events of 1989, Solidarity, a movement, gave way to the creation of political parties. Fissures emerged within the labor movement as the threat from a common foe, the communists, receded. The splits followed predictable lines: social and religious orthodoxy versus more liberal views; intellectual elites against workers and “common people”; rural interests against those of urban dwellers. Parties were founded representing all of those interests and many more. Former communists who had sufficiently reformist and nationalist credentials found their place in Polish politics, repackaging themselves in center-left parties.

There was even a Polish Beer Lovers’ Party, founded in 1990 by a television star. It had ten thousand members devoted to a philosophy of “live and let live.” The party would eventually attract people with an economic agenda for consumerism. Not surprisingly, this was resented by the original membership that just wanted to enjoy life, and a split ensued, with twelve deputies leaving to form a new parliamentary association.2

The multiplying parties and intense political activity were signs of healthy engagement of the population and elites alike, at least in those early days. But the complexity of the institutional landscape would make governing difficult. In 1991, a hundred organizations fielded candidates, and twenty-nine parties won seats. In the first eighteen months after the first free election there were four prime ministers. The average tenure of a government in the first five years was ten months. The electoral laws were revised in 1993, raising the threshold for party participation to 8 percent. Since then, there have been five or so major parties.

Still, from 1991 to 2015, no party had won a majority and all governments ruled in coalition. And the country’s political landscape has experienced considerable electoral volatility, alternating between center-right and center-left governments. That has made it difficult to sustain a consistent policy course.

Early on, Poland was also rocked by crises related to the treatment of former communists and their role in future governments. Wałęsa himself was accused of “defending the post-communist system” in his appointment of government ministers.

And the former communists did fare well in the years that followed democratization. Their main party won a plurality in the Sejm in 1993. Its leader, Aleksander Kwasniewski, was a longtime communist and had taken part in the Round Table negotiations on the side of the government. He was later elected as president, replacing Wałęsa.

Tensions remained, though, as the new Poland tried to resolve questions of the past. There were numerous resignations due to charges of corruption and even one charge of conspiring for a military coup. But the hardest cases involved well-regarded figures whose names appeared in archives suggesting that they had maintained steady contact with the secret police during communist rule.

Sometimes the sin had been simply to agree to talk to the secret police or to answer questions when asked, but in the charged atmosphere of the early 1990s, that was enough to brand someone as a collaborator. And sometimes the charges were more substantial and troubling.

In the most notorious episode, in 1992, the interior minister handed over a list of the names of deputies, senators, and civil servants who, according to his ministry, had been “agents” of the security services. The “Portfolio Affair” implicated dozens of people, including some who had been members of anticommunist opposition groups. In the confusion that followed, Wałęsa said that the lists were doctored and called for the resignation of the government of Jan Olszewski. The members of that government, in turn, formed a new party.

These accusations and counteraccusations would dog Polish politics for years to come. In 2007, the Archbishop of Warsaw resigned over revelations that he had cooperated with the secret police during communist rule. A second prominent Catholic clergyman did the same the next day. And several months later, a former minister committed suicide in the face of similar charges.

Poland, like every other country in transition, found it difficult and divisive to find justice for the past and reconcile it with the need to move forward. Poland’s democratic transition was thus not smooth, but it was smoother than most. It is fair to say most Polish leaders in these crucible years were not just committed to democracy; most wanted to anchor the country in a democratic Europe by seeking membership in the European Union. And the high regard and affection that Poles felt for the United States drew them to integration in NATO too, an association that would carry protection from Moscow—just in case.

One of the underestimated factors in the mostly successful transitions in Central and Eastern Europe was the role that the European Union and NATO played as north stars for democratic change. In order to gain membership, those countries had to follow a careful and specific map for institutional reform. Many democratic transitions are heavily influenced by single, overwhelming personalities like Boris Yeltsin in Russia. They never take the next step toward the development of institutions that can withstand the vagaries of particular leaders. In the Russian case, the highly personalized and powerful presidency meant one thing with Boris Yeltsin as its occupant. Vladimir Putin would mean quite another.

In Poland, the lure to be included in NATO and the EU put the emphasis for reform in the right place—on institutional change. The effort to gain membership provided a careful and specific set of requirements for institutional reform.

Poland’s association with the European Union had begun just a few months after Solidarity’s electoral victory with a trade and cooperation pact. Together with Hungary and Czechoslovakia (soon to be two countries, Slovakia and the Czech Republic), Poland formed the Visegrad Group, which sought full integration into European institutions. The same group would simultaneously seek membership in NATO.

The EU accession process forced countries desiring membership to conform domestic legislation to European standards in thirty-one issue areas, or “chapters.” These included economic issues like the freedom of movement of capital and goods, taxation, and agricultural reform. On the political side, everything from consumer and health protection to justice and home affairs to cultural policy had to be reformed and judged consistent with EU requirements. Political institutions were also under scrutiny, and there have been cases of direct intervention from the EU to warn an aspirant that antidemocratic practices can derail the path to membership.3

NATO added yet another set of institutional requirements related to defense but touching on domestic reform. Such was the insistence on “democratic and civilian control” of the military as one foundation of stable democracy.

In 1997, Poland was invited to join NATO. It became a full member of the European Union seven years later, in 2004. After World War II, Poland had been where it first became clear that the Soviet Union would accept only communist governments in Eastern Europe. It took roughly fifty years, but the country was now fully integrated into a democratic continent.

In the twenty or so years since, there has been a good deal of debate about the decision to offer membership in the formerly “Western” institutions to Moscow’s former client states. NATO in particular has drawn fire for moving the battle lines of the Cold War eastward toward Russia’s borders.

But it should be remembered that NATO at the time of its creation had two purposes. One was to stop Stalin’s military forces from threatening the part of Europe that was free of Soviet influence. That was accomplished by a huge conventional force presence and the extended deterrence that American nuclear weapons provided.

That was not, however, NATO’s only purpose. Those who created it believed that it would provide a security umbrella for the reconciliation of old enemies in a democratic peace—in short, to provide a new environment in which France and Germany would never have cause to fight again. Believing deeply in what political scientists now call the “democratic peace,” they thought that an association of free peoples would prevent war.4 This emphasis on liberty as an antidote to conflict was at the heart of a postwar strategy that relied on democratizing Germany and integrating Europe politically and militarily. And it succeeded brilliantly.

The completion of the European project could not be achieved, however, until Central and Eastern Europe could be a part of it. That is why a Europe “whole and free,” as George H. W. Bush put it, required an open door to the new democracies of Europe. That path provided an impetus for domestic reform, and it provided, as the framers of the European institutions had expected, an institutional home for old enemies to become allies. Just as few would have taken the odds on a permanent peace between Germany and France in 1945, many expected open conflict between Hungary and Romania or Turkey and Bulgaria over ethnic and territorial differences that had been submerged under communist rule.

Thanks to its relatively rich institutional profile at the time of the democratic opening—and its integration into Europe—Poland is both fully democratic and fully European. At least as of this writing.

Is Polish Democracy in Danger?

The work of building a stable democracy is never really done. The institutions are constantly challenged, sometimes in small ways, and often in more fundamental tests. The United States has been through Watergate and a contested presidential election in just the last forty years. The institutions were strong enough to withstand the turbulence.

Poland is now going through one of those periods of testing, and its young democratic institutions are most certainly at risk. In part, this is to be expected as a phase in democratic consolidation. Yet that does not fully explain the situation that the Poles face.

Every democracy rests upon a foundation of societal attitudes and values. The genius of democratic institutions is that they can absorb the contest between competing views. The political system permits the expression of all of them in debate, elections, and judicial decisions.

In Poland today, the resurgence of deeply conservative social attitudes, including religious piety, is clashing with evolving and more liberal European values and beliefs. As discontent with the European Union has grown on the continent—even leading Great Britain to exit—Poland too has found its Euroskeptics. Some Poles feel that Europe is too socially liberal and disrespectful of its national traditions. There are those who now want a divorce. Too many Poles feel that wages are not rising fast enough and that inequality is growing. Polish workers who have crossed borders to find work in Germany or Ireland or the UK say that they experience discrimination and prejudice. Disaffected Poles blame their own leaders and they blame Europe.

These circumstances have fostered the emergence of right-wing parties that are strongly nationalistic and religiously fundamentalist. While this is a broader trend across Europe, relatively young democracies like Poland are particularly vulnerable to the rise of populists who can give voice to such grievances. Those leaders have then tended to challenge the fragile institutional order—amassing greater power in the presidency and seeking to weaken other forces.

In October 2015, the populist Law and Justice Party scored a stunning victory in parliamentary elections. For the first time since liberation, a single party holds a majority in the parliament and the presidency under Jarosław Kacyziński. Since taking power, Law and Justice has carried out several popular changes, such as reversing the decision that increased the retirement age. It has raised the child benefit for families with two or more children and increased the minimum wage. These populist policies reflect underlying demographic trends. Poland’s population is declining and aging, and older people are demanding security. And the Catholic Church has long urged the government to encourage couples to have more children.

But other steps are more worrying and could threaten Poland’s democratic constitutional order. The most serious of these has provoked a crisis between the government and the Constitutional Tribunal—one of four judicial institutions. While Poland has a Supreme Court, it does not engage in judicial review as in the United States. That is the role of the Constitutional Tribunal, which judges “the constitutionality of laws.” This means that it is the most important of the judicial institutions in constraining executive power.

The Law and Justice Party first raised eyebrows just after taking power in 2015 when it refused to seat justices legally appointed by the outgoing Civic Platform government. The new leaders compounded their actions by appointing replacements for two additional judges before their terms expired. The Constitutional Tribunal refused to swear them in. This led the president of the tribunal—an ally of the government—to do so over the objection of other members of the court. Poland essentially had two sets of judges.

Law and Justice then moved to modify the tribunal’s operations, eventually passing legislation through the parliament that it dominates. Again, the tribunal reacted, declaring the new laws unconstitutional. There has been a standoff between the government and the tribunal ever since—and this part of the judiciary is essentially not functioning.

In response, the European Union has adopted a resolution calling the actions a “systematic threat to the rule of law in Poland.” Poland is subject to action under Article 7 of the EU treaty, which could sanction the country and suspend its voting rights. Hungary has a veto, however, and its prime minister, Viktor Orbán—a burgeoning political strongman in his own right—has threatened to block any such steps.

There is also a tremendous tug-of-war over the control of state media. The government has created the National Media Council with the right to hire and fire personnel for state television and radio. Saying that private media is too responsive to ratings, officials have argued that state media should instead foster patriotism. There are, they complain, too many shows like Dancing with the Stars.

Many suspect, of course, that this rationale is really a subterfuge. The real purpose is to make the media a mouthpiece for the regime—something that it does clumsily at times.

When visiting Poland in 2015, President Obama reminded the government that it must live up to its democratic principles—a gentle rebuke to the actions of Law and Justice. The state media altered his comments. It appeared as if the president only complimented the Poles on their democracy. Of course, the American press reported the outrage, and so did the free Polish press, much to the embarrassment of the government.

And while private media has been immune so far, many worry that it is only a matter of time until the government encroaches on that space too. A law that would limit foreign ownership (Poland’s three largest private media companies are owned by Germans) is of particular concern. And the government is reducing advertising dollars to these outlets. This goes to the heart of one of the private media’s weaknesses in Poland—indirect dependence on the government for resources. If foreigners cannot own the outlets and the government will not spend on them, the private media could simply wither away.

Still, there are clearly limits to what Law and Justice can do. An effort to outlaw abortion has thus far failed. Poland already has the most restrictive laws in the European Union, but an outright ban drew large protests. Eighty-five thousand Facebook users flooded a page named “Women for Women,” and several hundred people walked out of mass when priests pressed congregations to support the measure.

One scholar of Poland argues that the fight over abortion is not really about abortion but about the role of the church in politics.5 Poles, she argues, are extremely religious, but that does not mean they want the church to dictate policy. If accurate, this would be a watershed development in such a deeply Catholic country.

Poland’s democracy is not likely to be destroyed by the current challenges. Still, the careful balance between state authority and political freedom is once again in play. The country has achieved all of the milestones that we associate with democratic consolidation: repeated peaceful elections; a relatively independent judiciary; civil-military stability; a free press; a vibrant civil society; and respect for human rights.

Yet the current circumstances in Poland remind us that democracy’s development is never a straight line. Rather, it is a step-wise process that will often include steps backward along the way. Some have argued that Poland’s democratic forces became complacent—believing that their democratic consolidation was irreversible. The Civic Platform, it is said, failed to see that the rapidly rising expectations of the population were not being met. And pro-Western leaders failed to see the growing distance between some of the cultural values of Brussels and those of the Polish heartland.

That said, Poland’s democracy is far from lost. I was in Warsaw in June 2016 and participated in a forum with the former foreign minister, Radek Sikorski. The conversation was mostly about geopolitical affairs—but no one seemed reluctant to talk about Poland’s challenges either.

One could see that the independent Polish press and civil society are fighting back, publicly and vigorously. Articles appear daily in the press and on the Internet challenging the policies of the government and calling attention to those that seek to expand its authority. The atmosphere remains open and free for now.

Poland’s history suggests that it can handle the turbulence that it is now experiencing and emerge strongly democratic on the other side. But there is no guarantee, and that is always the case. The defense of democracy is never finished.