Poland's Solidarity Movement and the Global Politics of Human Rights

Abstract

In the historiography of human rights, the 1980s feature as little more than an afterthought to the human rights breakthrough of the previous decade. Through an examination of one of the major actors of recent human rights history – Poland's Solidarity movement – Robert Brier challenges this view. Suppressed in 1981, Poland's Solidarity movement was supported by a surprisingly diverse array of international groups: US Cold Warriors, French left-wing intellectuals, trade unionists, Amnesty International, even Chilean opponents of the Pinochet regime. By unpacking the politics and transnational discourses of these groups, Brier demonstrates how precarious the position of human rights in international politics remained well into the 1980s. More importantly, he shows that human rights were a profoundly political and highly contested language, which actors in East and West adopted to redefine their social and political identities in times of momentous cultural and intellectual change.

Introduction: Subversion, Dissent and Opposition in Communist Europe and Beyond

“…In both stories, the existence of multiple frameworks through which such solidarity might be expressed is evident. The signature of the Helsinki Final Act in 1975 and the proliferation of Helsinki Watch Groups internationally provided one common language to speak about repression and contestation (Snyder 2011;Bolton 2012: 27-28), but there were other frameworks through which solidarity could be expressed too: these included Christian associations, humanitarian organizations, professional literary and introduction East Central Europe 50 (2023) 1-13 scientific networks, and, in other cases, trades union activism (Brier 2021;Goddeeris 2010).…”