Offers a fresh perspective on recent human rights history by reconstructing debates around dissent and human rights across four countries.

This book provides a groundbreaking analysis of democratization in Poland by placing Solidarity in the context of the major democratic upheavals of modernity: the French and American Revolutions. This study undertakes the first full historical comparison of the Polish movement with the ideals and institutions of democracy achieved in the last three centuries.

This collection's materials trace Solidarity's emergence from the strike movement of July-August 1980 and the formation of strike committees in the factories and shipyards of Lublin, Gdansk, Szczecin, Jastrzebie, and Warsaw. Through these documents, the reader/scholar can trace the stages in the history of Solidarity--from the individual strike committees to the inter-factory strike committee and finally, to the founding congress of Solidarity as a self-governing national trade union, independent of the Communist party. The trade union movement quickly became a medium of mass civic opposition to the Communist regime. The workers of the Baltic shipyards were joined by intellectuals from the Catholic clubs and KOR--Komitet obrony robotnikow (Committee to Defend Workers)--as well as students, who eventually conducted their own mass strikes in support of the Solidarity movement and founded NZS--Niezale_ne zrzeszenie studentów (Independent Students' Association)--in October 1980. The Solidarity collection contains materials on all these allies, and on the activities of the Catholic Church in Poland and its interactions with the Polish Pope (John Paul II) in Rome. The collection includes minutes of meetings at the regional and national levels, organizational statutes and constitutions, proclamations and manifestos, brochures, pamphlets, posters, and correspondence. These materials vividly reflect the period: the constant struggle between centralization and local autonomy; the reformist proposals of the opposition; and the rise of Lech Walesa to the leadership of the national movement. The collection also documents the role of the party-state and its institutions, especially the courts, the Ministry of the Interior, the local police, and the Polish United Workers' Party--the ruling Communist party of Poland. The documentation of the opposition movement in Poland allows scholars to better understand this most important political crisis in late socialist Eastern Europe. Martial law was imposed in December 1981, under General Wojciech Jaruzelski; Solidarity activists were arrested or otherwise punished, yet they continued to resist the military dictatorship until elections brought them into the government in 1989. The Polish opposition played a crucial role in the end of Soviet rule in Eastern Europe and eventually, the complete collapse of the Soviet Union. The documents from this remarkable Warsaw collection will be of interest to scholars of democratization and opposition movements, and to those studying the politics of late Leninist party-states. They also chart the rise of human rights and the ascendancy of an autonomous civil society in a state which, since its inception after World War II, had tried various tactics to establish a one-party monopoly on politics and ideas.

This book is a collection of essays which span three decades, capping research into the Polish Solidarity movement and its impact on social change. The major one reports on the author's 1981 study on the formation of the Solidarity movement and trade union, one of two research projects on Solidarity carried out at the time. The idea of debating (deliberative) democracy fostered by Solidarity proved an unfulfilled utopia. It was abandoned by the new political elite and by Poles, who used freedom to develop individual, ambitious and aggressive career paths in order to attain West-European living standards. While Polish religiosity and the Catholic Church, led by Pope John Paul II, vitally promoted peaceable resistance to communism, now the Church has morphed into an anti-democratic political and cultural actor.

During the 20th century, a variety of social movements and civil society groups stepped into the arena of international politics. This volume collects innovative research on international solidarity movements in Belgium and the Netherlands, and places these movements prominently in debates about the history of globalization, transnational activism, and international politics.

In the last year the world has been electrified as one Soviet bloc government after another has collapsed. But ten years before the events of the past year came the first successful challenge to the Leninist state--the shipworker's strike in Gdansk, which led to the first free trade union in the communist world. Here is a fascinating history of the Solidarity movement.