The Polish debate

E.P. Thompson replies to Timothy Garton Ash

I'm sorry, a long time has passed since you addressed an `open letter' to me in this journal (21 August). The delay is not altogether my fault, since you neglected to send me a copy of the letter.

Your letter is made up, in about equal parts, of fair questions and comment, of misrepresentation, and of ideological blind- sight. You are right to take me to task for my facile acceptance of the authenticity of the peace demonstrations in Romania in November and December of last year. My information is better now. Even if Soviet weaponry came under criticism, as well as NATO weaponry, you are right to say that the demonstrations were 'staged', and for President Ceausescu's own reasons. The tap was turned on, and then it was turned off, and scarcely a trickle of any spon- taneous movement remains.

But the argument of your letter turns upon Poland; and, here, while your facts are often wrong and your quotations wrested out of context, some of your ques- tions are fair. You are wholly wrong when you say that not a single 'unofficial person' from END travelled to Warsaw while Solidarity was overground. I trust that you will not expect me to name names or occa- sions. As it happens, one of the first British visitors to the Hotel Morski in Gdansk, ear- ly in September 1980, carried in his pocket a message of solidarity with Solidarity, which I had moved at a packed END public meeting in Newcastle-on-Tyne a few days before. This visitor, John Taylor — a tem- porarily unemployed WEA tutor travelling on his own savings and not, as Trybuna Ludu was subsequently to fulminate, a `wealthy businessman' — moved in to Solidarity's Gdansk headquarters to help in any way he could (he assisted Solidarity to obtain some of their first printing equip- ment) until he was told by the Polish authorities to leave five months later. His account will be found in Five Months with Solidarity (Wildwood, 1981).

What John Taylor found was that Solidarity was preoccupied, twenty-four hours a day, with its work as a union. `Foreign affairs' or disarmament were not on its agenda, and (as you say) the matter of the Warsaw Pact was a question too sen- sitive to add to that agenda. This was what other visitors, supporters of CND or END or Western peace movements, found in that first year: for example, Dennis McShane, Solidarity (Spokesman, 1981). (You will notice that I am only citing published and readily available sources.) This 'self-limiting' (your own phrase) character of Solidarity's agenda was understood and respected by END. We never attempted to intervene, nor (unlike some Western cold warriors) to thrust our recipes upon them, and, despite the tenor of your argument, we never claimed Solidarity as a part of the 'peace movement'. Those of us who gave our public support to the movement did so as trade unionists and as supporters of civil rights, and without con- ditions. We have never said, 'if you support the peace movement, we will support you'. It is true that we saw also injthe Polish renewal, with its opening to more fluent communication with Western 'movements, a pre-figurement of a process that will blur the edges of the blocs, although the term `objectively' (which provokes your scorn) is not mine but M. Balibar's. Despite all that has happened in the past ten months, I refuse to accept that this opening has been finally closed.

We did, however, with insufficient vigour, offer a public argument. This was that the right response by Western democracy to the Polish crisis was to relax military tension in Central Europe (in several statements we tried to disinter the bones of the Rapacki Plan), to stop leaning on the Eastern bloc with plans for Cruise and Pershing II, and to afford the Polish nation more space for autonomy. Our pro- posals met with little response within Poland, and we did not pretend that they did. In Solidarity's last open months more interest in this dialogue was shown. Y°11 state, with your habitual over-confidence, that Solidarity 'to the end scruPulouslY refrained from attacking any aspect of Poland's defence policy". In fact the matter was debated, briefly, at Solidarity's last open Congress, when Bogdan Lis (who is now the underground leader of the Gdansk district) argued for a cut in the arras budget, disclaimed any particular criticism of either bloc, and concluded: 'We will always be against armaments, whether is the West or East.' (Guardian, 2 October 1981). An official Solidarity delegation took part in the huge Amsterdam peapeacedemonstration, a few weeks before martial law shut the gates. I don't think that the Western peace movements did enough to keep those gates NATO open. But failure does not necessanlY disprove an argument: it may only that forces are unequal. NA1`.', also signally failed to keep them open. It I,' my view that Reagan, Weinberger an u Thatcher, with their bluster and political capitalisation of the Polish crisis, dtel great deal to thrust the gates shut. you disagree. You argue that 'the dramatic war- pings addressed to the Kremlin by NATO and Western leaders' did a great deal „ hold back (in December 1980) the hal!" million Warsaw Pact troops on Poland s frontiers. How do you know? These were not the only warnings addressed to the Kremlin: there were warnings also from the Yugoslav government, from the Italian Communist Party, from the Western Pete movement. There was even a warning " E. P. Thompson (Guardian, letters, December, 1980) that 'Soviet or Warsaw power action in Poland would have the most disastrous repercussions on the

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pean peace movement'.

How do you or I know which warniqs may have been attended to? The A7llY Telegraph, in a remarkable editorial just over a year ago, attributed Soviet milttarY restraint to the Soviet leaders' fear of alienating the peace movement. It is not a claim which we would ever make ourselved. But you wish to bully readers — w. hatever Polish opinion you can reach Into believing that your answer must be rilc only right one. You say, with satisfaction; that you have met 'more supporters. of Reagan in Warsaw than in West Berlin ; This may, in recent months, be true. If r_ must add 'alas!', and if I repeat that sortie_ Polish trade unionists and democrats lla.vc

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been looking to the 'wrong friends' in the West, this is part of a public and open argue, ment which we, in the Western peace rri0v t ment, are entitled to put. We do not presents it as a Polish argument, but as our own. Itt h possible to admire the courage of polish democrats, and to express unconditionba_ solidarity with them in their democratic c!th jectives, but at the same time to argue wl„ road.about their analysis and their irlter136., tional alliances. Solidarity is not a one-w9Y It is at this point that you pass over t°_. misrepresentation. You cite a half-sentenc' Of Mine in which I say that martial law was 'a Polish solution', and go on indignantly

to document the Soviet pressure brought

Von the Jaruzelski regime. I cannot con- ceive why you should suppose that I need Persuading of this. To say that Soviet Pressure was mediated through (and also Partly shielded by) Jaruzelski is not an , apologists' phrase': it is a plain statement of Political fact. I regard martial law as a condition of enthroned anarchy, and a con- fession of total political bankruptcy: but if Soviet want to know the difference between oviet intervention and this present Polish In, lerval, you need only ask a Czech. Nor is the situation in Poland today to be regard- ed, even in the short run, as a settled episode.

You also cite an article which I wrote in was the Times five days after martial law proclaimed in which I said: 'General hruzelski is a patriot: he has pledged n ,lMself to avoid bloodshed.' I have a pro- hletn here, in my technique as a writer. I ad always supposed that irony was an available resource of English letters, from at least the time of Chaucer, and that one !night presume a reading public sensitive to Its reception. This assumption has betrayed me into many difficulties in translation, and now I am finding that the privilege of irony is refused by English readers also, who ilitYrha ps have been bludgeoned into insensi- ._ by the prose of Private Eye, Auberon Waugh and the Militant Tendency of Right or Left). If you read that article again with can- rut', and with Professor I. A. Richards's four kinds of meaning in mind, you will see en), at it commences with a long passage (in- kin:1418 your chosen citation) of bitter (nnnY, mocking the conventional wisdom -ven with which some part of our press (including the Financial Times) had r dived the news of martial law. The con- funsion which I reach, in the immediately ]lowing paragraph, is that none of this wish-fulfilling wisdom 'can survive even o

ne week of martial law'.

b„I'cni may defend that misrepresentation ti; Plea of generational insensibility to A ne, but your next misrepresentation is in- "e.fensible. You cite me as writing, in Exter- ;1Tistn and the Cold War, that Solidarity eta° features (Catholicism, nationalism, 0,!.) 'which might wrinkle the nose of a

, _ you

grist', and then proceed to offer this .44 a straight statement of my own wrinkled- 1,t,) sed opinions. For pity's sake, permit me me° Place the citation in its context: Solidarity's life-cycle is one of the most remarkable and authentic examples of self- activity in history, and without doubt the Most massive and purposive working-class Movement in any advanced society since the Second World War. To be sure, it had certain features which might wrinkle the nose of a Purist: it was nationalist, Catholic, Predominantly male, and in its last months over-confident. Its internationalist perspec- tives were confined and confused. But my Point, at this moment, is that an analysis of the contemporary crisis in terms of the global

class struggle which cannot find any place for this astonishing episode of class struggle has somehow lost its way. Can the struggle have been between the wrong classes and in the wrong part of the globe?

I ask again — did you consciously misrepresent me, or has your generation lost the capacity to read? Surely it is not possible to read this paragraph as a whole without realising, first, that I am taking the mickey out of one or two Marxist grand theorists, and second, that it is an expres- sion of profound humility before the historical experience of Solidarnosc? I am, after all, a historian of working-class movements, with one or two yardsticks in my memory, and my commitment to working-class movements and to trade unionism has been somewhat more long- lasting (and perhaps less suspect) than some of Solidarity's most vocal and self- advertising Western admirers.

I will allow that you do care, in earnest, about civil and trade union rights, and that you are as anxious abut Poland's and Solidarity's future as I am now. I hope you are also concerned about these rights on this side of the Cold War divide: for exam- ple, in Turkey. But what would you have us do? We have conducted an open argument, both with official and with some 'dissident' voices in the East. We have given our advice that Europe has no future, except nuclear war, unless forces making for democracy and forces making for peace can recognise each other and learn to act together. We signalled that a military take-over in Poland would be 'a devastating defeat for peace'. And we, with Solidarity, suffered that political defeat. Defeat need not be final: it proves that our strategy is difficult (which we knew) but not that it is impossible.

It is not I but you, and a host of inter- preters like you, who presume to speak for voiceless thousands in the East. What you do is select from various voices those 'dissi- dent' voices which are locked into a hostili- ty to their own Communist regimes so im- placable that they view the entire globe in an inverted image, mistake Reagan for Tom Paine, and suppose that Western nuclear arms are, in some never-explained way, in-

'They say you pay through the nose for a De Lorean.'

struments of liberation. These often are honourable and selfless persons, who are entitled to their place in the European discourse. But you have no right to select these voices only, and to suppress the diver- sity of Eastern political conversation, silen- cing that intermediate discourse which is looking, between the two armed blocs, for a transcontinental Third Way.

In doing this, you help to confirm these persons in an ideological blindsight like your own. You help to bend against each other those very forces which, if acting in mutual solidarity, might liberate Europe from her bonds. And the rulers of both sides still stand in need of these rival bond- ing forces, of fear and ideological rancour, both for internal political control and to keep in their stations their client states. It was a little infelicitous in you to write, in the year of the 'Falklands Factor' and of the Victory Parade, that 'Brezhnev needs the bonding effect of militarism and na- tionalism a great deal more than Mrs That- cher does'. Perhaps. But if the Soviet Union had elections and Gallup polls, I doubt whether the 'Afghanistan Factor' would show up so strongly.

What puzzles me most is why writers of your ideological persuasion so ardently wish movements of self-liberation, or, in- deed, independent peace movements in the East to fail. It is not only that you wish to show that the perspective of a Third Way is difficult, or to puncture my rhetoric. It is more than that. You have got yourself into an ideological lock in which it is necessary for the lesson of the ineluctable adversary posture of the two blocs to be repeatedly confirmed. It is as if, should nations or peoples begin to move out of this Manichaean framework and search for alternatives, then the entire globe would suffer an identity crisis. As it is doing now.

In this you resemble your opposite numbers, the guardians of ideological orthodoxy in Izvestia or Rude Pravo. It amuses me that the arguments of END are viewed with equal distaste in the Ministries of Defence on both sides; and that my own Beyond the Cold War can only circulate on the other side in samizdat. But now that in- dependent and non-aligned peace movements are showing vitality in the East — and very certainly in East Germany and Hungary — is it not time for you to put your scorn on the ground (at least for a lit- tle while) and try to help?

You ask me other questions, but my space has run out. You will find that our continuing dialogue with Charter 77 and with Solidarnosc will be reported regularly in END Bulletin. You asked me whether if END should be confined to Western Europe only — we would continue to agitate for unilateral nuclear disarmament. The answer, briefly, is 'yes'. My main reasons for this, which are absolute and un- qualified, are set forward in a lecture which I delivered at the end of September in Budapest.

Yours sincerely, Edward Thompson