Rethinking Solidarity: New Approaches to Poland in the 1980s

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Brief Description

In a recent journalistic forum, the editor of a prominent Polish journal asked writers for their take on the history of Solidarność (Solidarity) – the labor union and social movement widely credited with bringing Communism to a negotiated end in Poland in the 1980s. Were they moved? Engaged? Inspired? Or were they, in fact, bored? Had histories of Solidarity congealed into a stale national mythology, obscuring more than they revealed? Could they have any useful lessons for Poles born after 1989, facing a new and different set of challenges? “I honestly doubt it,” the editor confessed. This roundtable takes as its starting point what we might call the “skeptical turn” toward Solidarity and its legacy in recent Polish discourse, exploring new historical approaches to Solidarity and the decade in which it arose. Among other things, it will ask: What role does memory of the movement play today in Poland and elsewhere? What can be learned by examining Solidarity from new angles, such as histories of neoliberalism, gender, or antisemitism? Should we seek to re-position Solidarity in histories of Poland and/or Eastern Europe the 1980s - and how might that challenge other narratives about this period?

Sub Unit

• History: 1945-1990

Chair

• Anna Muller, U of Michigan, Dearborn

Roundtable Speakers

• Malgorzata Fidelis, U of Illinois at Chicago

• Marcin Kościelniak, Jagiellonian U (Poland)

• Katherine Lebow, U of Oxford (UK)

• Brian Porter-Szucs, U of Michigan