THE DEFEAT OF SOLIDARITY. Anger and politics in postcommunist Europe. By David Ost. 238pp. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. $39.95; distributed in the UK by NBN. Pounds 21.95. - 0 8014 4318 0
Twenty-five years ago, shipyard workers in Gdansk went on strike, and changed the world. In Communist Poland, a working class turned against the working-class State. Its trade union, Solidarity, soon boasted 10 million members, and brought together the Catholic Church, intellectuals and workers.
In the Communist world, it was the model of a new civil society. Driven underground by martial law in 1981, Solidarity re-emerged with perestroika, and negotiated its way to power in 1989. Today, Poland is a member of NATO and the European Union, and an unexpected international presence. During last winter's Orange Revolution in Ukraine, Poland led the European Union into the fray, scoring the EU's first foreign policy success. In this summer's French debate over the European constitution, both proponents and opponents played the Polish card. Supporters warned that a defeat would marginalize France, and create a "Polish Europe", Opponents invoked the "Polish plumber", the skilled worker who would take French jobs if the constitution passed.
The Polish Government enterprisingly turned the plumber into a tourism coup, publishing posters of a ponytailed proletarian with large tools, who promised to stay in Poland if the French would come to visit. Yet, as David Ost points out in The Defeat of Solidarity: Anger and politics in postcommunist Europe, it has been more grit than glamour for Polish workers since 1989. The first Solidarity governments pursued a programme of "shock therapy", radical marketizing reforms.
Even as prices and unemployment skyrocketed, the Solidarity trade union did not establish itself, Ost maintains, as a defender of workers' interests. Its forays into politics in the 1990s revealed, argues Ost, an inappropriate interest in culture and religion rather than class. Union leaders were convinced, wrongly in Ost's view, that class conflict had to be suppressed in the name of economic reform. Workers were thus removed from the revolution they had made, and condemned to be the losers of economic reform. Today, Polish labour is indeed competitive in European markets, but joblessness at home has reached 20 per cent.
Ost wishes to use the Polish case to make a general case for social democracy.
He maintains that class is necessary for thriving participatory democracy, in that it allows the poor to articulate their emotions as interests, and press legitimate claims within the system. Ost stresses that economic anger, his central sociological concept, should be translated into economic interests that can be addressed by policies. Political leaders have the responsibility to describe the anger of workers so as to create a self-conscious working class, and to direct the anger to its proper target: upper classes who can afford to pay taxes for redistributive policies. If parties teach workers that their interests are economic, then economic anger can be addressed by redistribution and democracy can be reinforced. If, on the other hand, workers are told that their interests are cultural, they choose the wrong enemy: the historical example Ost has in mind are the Jews. The class frame brings social democracy, the nationalist or religious frame does not.
Ost is to be praised for venturing this kind of argument, ideational and normative, in the traditions of Eastern European thought about civil society.
He avoids both the optimistic liberal ("transitions to democracy") and the pessimistic conservative ("ancient nationalisms") schools of thought which have so impoverished discussions of Eastern Europe with their duelling determinisms.
His book is personal, the result of repeated visits to Polish factories and mines, real knowledge of Polish mental habits, and familiarity with the abundant Polish sociological literature. It is also the work of a man who once saw Solidarity as a possible inspiration for the Western Left, and who has now come to see it rather as a cautionary tale of globalization. Indeed, the argument seems relevant in an American context, where the conservative voting of patriotic workers is a cause of distress on the Left, and perhaps dangerous to democracy.
