Solidarity Movement

Solidarity began in September 1980 at the Lenin Shipyards, and although it was a Polish trade union federation originally led by Lech Wałęsa, it in fact constituted a broad anticommunist social movement. It rapidly changed into an umbrella organization under which a broad range of political and social groups united in opposition to the communist regime.

At Solidarity's first national congress in 1981, a program calling for an active Solidarity role in reforming Poland's political and economic systems was adopted. The government attempted to destroy the organization with the martial law of 1981 and several years of repression. The organization was forced underground until the late 1980s. During its underground phase, Solidarity lost much of its original cohesion as tactical and philosophical disagreements split the movement into factions. The radical elements, convinced that an evolutionary approach to democratization was impossible, created the organization called Fighting Solidarity in 1982. Ultimately, however, Wałęsa's moderate faction prevailed. Favoring negotiation and compromise with the Polish United Workers' Party, the moderates created the Citizens'Committee, which represented Solidarity at the Round Table Talks and brought about the election triumph of June 1989. A coalition government led by Solidarity was formed and in December Wałęsa was elected president. The organization not only had regained its legal status as a trade union but also had become an effective political movement that installed Eastern Europe's first post-communist government.

The defeat of the ruling Polish United Workers' Party in the June 1989 parliamentary elections removed Solidarity's most important unifying force, that is, the common enemy. By the time of the local elections of 1990, Solidarity had divided, and a number of small parties had appeared. Since 1989 Solidarity has become a more traditional trade union and has assumed less and less importance on the political scene of Poland. A political arm was founded in 1996 as Solidarity Electoral Action won the Polish parliamentary election in 1997 but lost the following 2001 election. Currently Solidarity has little political influence on modern Polish politics.

The survival of Solidarity was an unprecedented event not only in Poland, a satellite state of the USSR ruled by a one-party communist regime, but in the whole of the Eastern Bloc. It meant a break in the strong position of the communist Polish United Workers' Party and the broader Soviet communist regime in the Eastern Bloc.

Solidarity's influence led to the intensification and spread of anticommunist ideals and movements throughout the countries of the Eastern Bloc, weakening their communist governments and causing the peaceful anticommunist counterrevolutions in Central and Eastern Europe. Solidarity's example was in various ways repeated by opposition groups throughout the Eastern countries, leading to the communist Eastern Bloc's dismantling and contributing to the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.