Thirty years after Solidarity, world yet to wake up

GDANSK, Poland, Aug 28 AFP Three decades after Polish trade union Solidarity rocked the Soviet bloc, the world has yet to come to terms with the end of the Cold War, the movement’s iconic founder Lech Walesa says.

“Solidarity brought to an end a period of division, paving the way for the unification of Germany and of Europe,” Walesa told AFP in an interview in the Baltic port city of Gdansk, where the union was born.A watershed August 31, 1980 deal between Poland’s regime and strikers at the city’s Lenin shipyard led by electrician Walesa allowed the creation of the first free labour union in the communist bloc.

The authorities backtracked in 1981 and imposed martial law to crush Solidarity, which had snowballed into a movement of 10 million members, or over one Pole in four.

Solidarity kept alive underground and returned to the spotlight in 1989, negotiating an election deal with the regime and scoring a victory that was to speed the demise of the entire bloc over the next two years.The problem, Walesa claimed, is that the world has failed to keep up.“We still have structures left over from the old days which still need to be reorganised and updated,” he said, pointing to NATO which lacks its Cold War-era Warsaw Pact adversary. He also cited a system of “capitalism which looks at the money and not the man”.

“As long as we don’t do anything about this, we’ll be working on the basis of an outmoded vision and the world won’t safe,” he said.Europeans, meanwhile, need to get their act together once and for all, he insisted.“They have to understand that the nation state’s finished.

In many fields there’s no France, no Poland, be it ecology, information or the economy,” he said, adding: “Every state has a different health service or tax system. That can’t go on!”

“And there’s no Europe without Turkey,” the fervent Catholic said, brushing aside French and German wariness about letting the Muslim-majority nation of 75 million into the 27-nation European Union.

Walesa gave up the helm of Solidarity after becoming post-World War II Poland’s first democratically-elected president in December 1990.After one term, he lost office to ex-communist Aleksander Kwasniewski in a knife-edge 1995 poll, and saw his popularity wither.