Adam Michnik
On air with General Jaruzelski (right) in 1992.
“Democracy does not claim infallibility. Weapons can be replaced by arguments”
Michnik (left) on the campaign trail in 1989 with Lech Walesa at the Gdansk shipyards.
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A
thoughtful insurgent
From inside
his feverish lookout, a tiny office cluttered with paper in Warsaw, Adam Michnik,
54, has never stopped being a dissident. With his fine, acerbic writing, he opposes
populism and criticizes Catholics seeking to set up a new moral order. And he does
it with humour. His newspaper has become Poland’s leading daily because, he says,
“I haven’t managed to drive it completely into bankruptcy.”
In 1989, he founded Gazeta Wyborcza (“Electoral Gazette”), “the first free daily
between the Elbe and Vladivostok,” to support the independent trade union Solidarity
during the first free elections in the history of the communist bloc. The Berlin
Wall was still standing. Right from the start, the newspaper declared its independence
from political movements and trends. Michnik, who was elected to parliament, advocated
“shock therapy” for Poland—a radical overhaul of the economy—and urged everyone to
take part in building democracy. That is when he parted ways with Lech Walesa, the
historic leader of Solidarity and future president.
For Michnik, thought and insurrection have always gone together. He was a student
leader in 1968, a co-founder of the KOR (Workers’ Defence Committee) and an adviser
to Solidarity. Altogether, he spent six years behind bars. His struggle and achievements
have earned him many rewards.
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“The
old split between left and right ended with the anti-communist revolution” |
Whether
as a dissident or editor-in-chief of Poland’s leading daily newspaper, Adam Michnik
has never ceased to stir up debate. How does he see democracy in Europe, over a decade
after the fall of the Soviet empire?
After the coming
to power in 1989 of the Eastern Bloc’s first non-communist government since World
War II, Poland was quick to learn the game of democracy.
Twelve years after the “Velvet Revolution,” most of Central and Eastern European
countries are democracies. But democracy here is ailing. First, because our democratic
structures are young, weak, lacking in tradition or a political culture. But also
because western democracy is ailing. In both places, corruption is inherent to the
system. In the Polish, Czech, Hungarian and Slovak democracies, this scourge has
happened on a more serious scale than in western countries, where democracy has struck
deeper roots. But the nature of the problem is the same. And corruption remains the
overriding challenge to the democratic order.
Was it this “normality” of a western-style democracy that you aspired to when
you were in the underground opposition?
Not really! But all is not lost! Thank God we have a free press. We can expose a
scandal every day. It’s a complex struggle. But when all is said and done, I would
rather suffer corruption in democracy than corruption in dictatorship. Our role at
the Gazeta, where I’m editor in chief, is, of course, to defend freedom and truth,
but also to exercise the power of the press. We keep a close eye on the government.
We fuel the debate on democratic values, national traditions, the legacy of history,
tolerance. We also think of the excluded: the poor, religious and ethnic minorities.
For us, working at the Gazeta is a way of pursuing what we did in the democratic
opposition during communism.
Once, the dissidents of Central and Eastern Europe made their voices heard in
the West. This is no longer the case.
Because our fight has become an everyday struggle! We’re no longer talking about
the “final reckoning.” During the dictatorship, the main difference between us and
revolutionary movements was that we, the anti-communist opposition, did not harbour
any illusions about the “utopia of a perfect society.”
Personally, I believe in The Unperfect Society, to borrow the title of a book by
Milovan Djilas. That’s why I don’t feel any great disillusion. Maybe you idealists
in the West do! But Western intellectuals have made a specialty of placing their
hopes in the Viet Cong, Fidel Castro, Mao Zedong, the Soviet Union, the Sandinistas
of Nicaragua and I don’t know what else. Our movement—that of Czechoslovakia’s Vaclav
Havel, Russia’s Andreï Sakharov, Solidarity—did not strive for utopia. What
we wanted was a return to “normality.” Of course, we idealized western democracy.
Today we’re more familiar with the system and its weaknesses. But that hasn’t kept
us from fighting, in the moral sense of the term, against corruption, unemployment
and poverty, and for the construction of a fairer system. But one specific feature
of that struggle is that it will never be over. It is endless, like Sisyphus in hell,
constantly pushing his huge boulder up to an unreachable hilltop.
You often sing the praises of grey…
The world of dictatorship was in black and white. It was a struggle between Good
and Evil, between total Truth versus absolute Lies. You had to be an idiot or a hoodlum
to dare be against it. Democracy is qualitatively different. It’s a world of clashing
viewpoints, fragmentary and conflicting interests where the overriding colour is
grey. It’s an endless search for compromise, eternal imperfection… Democracy does
not claim infallibility. Weapons can be replaced by arguments. It’s an alternative
to civil war. In that sense, the Basques’ terrorist attacks against the Spanish state,
which is a perfectly democratic state, are unacceptable.
Twenty years ago, on December 13, 1981, General Jaruzelski declared martial law.
You and thousands of other people were arrested. What gave you the courage to act
and keep on going?
For my generation, the road to freedom began in 1968. While students in Paris and
Berkeley were rejecting bourgeois democracy, we in Prague or Warsaw were fighting
for a freedom that only the bourgeois order could guarantee. In appearance, everything
divided us.
But something brought us together: the need to rebel stemming from the conviction
that, as long as the world is the way it is, it’s worth not dying a peaceful death
in your bed. Here, we were the first generation able to build projects for the future
and those projects were not groundless, as subsequent events showed. The situation
did change after a few years. Many factors came into play at the same time. Poland
was going through a deep economic crisis. The changes taking place in the Soviet
Union also had an impact. Lastly, the communist nomenklatura itself was evolving,
becoming more pragmatic. It was the end of the utopian dream, and it enabled us to
dismantle the dictatorship by negotiation. The “round table” [negotiations between
the government, the opposition and the Church in 1989] was our great contribution
to 20th-century history! Admit that it is extremely rare to see opposition forces
and leaders of the dictatorship—put another way, prisoners and their guards—sitting
down at the same table to negotiate a decolonization and democratization pact. That
did not happen in Franco’s Spain, Honecker’s East Germany, Pinochet’s Chile or even
in Kadar’s Hungary.
Talking together to bring a country out of dictatorship is a good way to learn
about democratic compromise.
Today in Poland, no political force openly contests the democratic order. When they’re
in power, it’s clear for all the parties, whether they’re post-communist, right-wing
or centre-right, that democracy is a stable, reassuring system.
Often after a period of dictatorship, a free press is tempted to settle scores
and take some kind of revenge. Did that happen in Poland?
We played our role and helped to shed light on some of the dictatorship’s criminal
secrets. But our philosophy is just the opposite of the spirit of revenge. We’re
for reconciliation, because it’s impossible to take a step ahead when you’re looking
back. To move from dictatorship to democracy, we campaigned for compromise and national
reconciliation: with neither reprisals, nor winners and losers. Reform in Poland
would have been impossible without that social consensus, without dialogue and compromise.
The way I see it, “decommunization,” discrimination against former civil servants
or party activists, would have been anti-democratic. On the other hand, we wanted
the truth to come out, and felt that task was up to historians and journalists, rather
than prosecutors and police officers. Amnesty doesn’t mean amnesia.
Is that why you wanted to broach a dialogue with General Jaruzelski?
I wanted to behave like a normal human being in a free country: I had been his unrelenting
opponent, his prisoner, but I was interested in what he had to say. He’s an intelligent
man and Poland’s roads to freedom sometimes took very different courses. Some went
through prison, others through the corridors of power. Deep down, I’m convinced Jaruzelski
is a Polish patriot and a partisan of democracy. He’s not a cynic. He didn’t want
to turn communism into a rampaging chauvinism, like Serbia’s Milosevic or Croatia’s
Tudjman, who ripped the Balkans apart in the 1990s. He didn’t want to build his own
identity by stirring up hatred among others, those who belong to a different ethnic
group, religion or class. No. I’m sure he always wanted to build a non-ethnic, secular
Poland. That is very similar to what we’ve always stood for at the Gazeta: a state
for all citizens.
We must reject one camp’s domination over another, with endless settlings of scores.
Our country must make room for everybody. That’s the only way to build a sovereign,
democratic state.
Soon Poland will join the European Union. But Europe is in crisis, and has botched
reforms considered necessary to expand and integrate newcomers.
The debates in the European Union pit two fundamentally different views against each
other: the idea of a Europe of Nations defended by de Gaulle [president of France
from 1959 to 1969], and the notion of a federal Europe of regions that Denis de Rougemont1
put forward in his book Open letter to Europeans. I and the people of my generation
are closest to the Gaullist position. Each nation’s culture has something sacred
about it in its heart. And for my generation, that sacred something is independence.
We have a hard time letting go of that. Although we’re told it’s worth the sacrifice,
our emotions stand in the way. More generally, the fall of communism has led to a
thaw in Western Europe. Beneath the ice, we have seen both flowers and signs of decay
appear: crises that jeopardize the cohesiveness of states and of Europe.
Western democracies are facing other problems, such as the weakening of traditional
intermediaries—trade unions, political parties—between government and the people.
It’s as though heads of state now find themselves alone in front of television and
its omnipotence.
We’re seeing the same phenomenon in Poland and don’t have any solutions to fight
it. It strengthens politicians’ temptation to offer populist recipes, and we’re afraid
of being swept away by this groundswell. But it goes further than the simple perverse
effect of television or the triumph of a certain nihilism. Politics itself is undergoing
an upheaval. The old split between left and right has had its day. That rift, which
was created by the French Revolution, came to an end with the anti-communist revolution.
Today, the new fault line runs between those who defend the idea of an open, multicultural
society based on human rights and the rights of citizens, and those who are rebuilding
walls around a closed society, stone by stone. Whether we are talking about the Maastricht2
treaty or NATO intervention in Kosovo, traditional political divisions no longer
fit in with the new world’s real needs. This can be seen with all the major issues:
which Europe should be built? What should be religion’s role in public life? What
is the right vision of the state: an ethnic state, a religious state or the opposite,
a citizens’ state? What policy should be adopted towards asylum-seekers or immigration?
Recently, a debate over the Jedwabne massacre has rocked Poland. A historian revealed
that the 1,600 Jews in this village under German occupation in 1941 were slaughtered
by their own neighbours. In Poland, this debate has been as violent as the Dreyfus3
affair in France. It has deeply divided families and the country. And there again,
the fault line does not run along the old rift between left and right, but between
advocates of an open and a closed Poland.
The vision that everyone has of the nation in Europe has also come into play. Are
we eternally innocent victims or accomplices in the subjugation of others, whether
they were Ukrainians, Jews or even Germans, against whom we practised a form of ethnic
cleansing after World War II. The defenders of an “eternally innocent” Poland include
right-wing extremists, post-communists and bishops. It’s a dangerous concept. The
Serbs have always considered themselves eternal victims as well. Today they’re paying
the price.
“Anti-globalization” demonstrations also reflect a whole range of opinions. How
do you interpret them?
What is globalization? Internet, mobile phones, open borders? I’m afraid that fear
is leading new volunteers to enlist under the banner of new ideological crusades.
These people say they’re “pro-poor,” but they are not campaigning to open up the
markets of rich countries in Europe and America to products from the developing world.
They’re not debating reform of the IMF or the World Bank. That would be too specific,
too down to earth. Like Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Joschka Fischer and Rudi Dutschke in
1968, they’re fighting in the name of certain revolutionary-communist, anarchist,
situationist, Maoist or Trotskyist utopias. I can understand them. But today we are
well aware of these utopias’ genuine nature: they’re stupid. To me, the anti-globalization
movement is more the symptom of a crisis of thought.
1. A thinker
and writer, Denis de Rougemont (1906-1985) promoted “dialogue between cultures” and
supported a federal Europe.
2. Signed in Maastricht on February 7, 1992, implemented on January 1, 1993. The
Maastricht treaty led to the creation of a single currency and strengthened the European
Union’s powers.
3. In 1894, the French officer Captain Alfred Dreyfus was arrested on false charges
of espionage. The “Dreyfus affair” deeply divided France and fuelled anti-Semitism.
Many intellectuals came to the defence of Dreyfus, including the writer Emile Zola,
who wrote his famous article J’Accuse. |
