The Polish Round Table and the Fall of Communism
Poland's government and the banned Solidarity trade union sat down at a round table in Warsaw in February 1989 and negotiated for two months. The table was literally round, and deliberately so: it had no head, and it seated the government of a one-party state opposite an organisation it had outlawed under martial law in 1981. Solidarity had begun in the Gdańsk shipyards in August 1980 and had reached ten million members — a quarter of the population — before General Jaruzelski suppressed it. It survived underground through the decade with the Church's protection and Western support. What brought the government to the table was economic collapse and a wave of strikes in 1988 it could not buy off, and the knowledge that Gorbachev would not send troops. The agreement of April 1989 was meant to be a controlled opening. Solidarity would be legalised; a new senate would be freely elected; and in the lower house, the Sejm, 65 per cent of seats were reserved for the ruling coalition and 35 per cent contested. The June election destroyed the arithmetic. Solidarity won 99 of 100 senate seats and every contested seat in the Sejm, and the government's own candidates on an unopposed national list failed to reach the required votes. Two coalition parties then defected, and Tadeusz Mazowiecki became the first non-communist prime minister in the bloc in August 1989. Hungary opened its border that summer, the Berlin Wall fell in November, and every other government followed within months. The table itself is in the presidential palace. Negotiating a way out is the Polish contribution to how 1989 happened.
- Year: 1989 CE
- Category: Political
