Lech Walesa speaks truth to power. He started doing that on Aug. 14, 1980. That was the day a 30- something electrician climbed a barricade at a Polish shipyard and gave a speech to striking workers that eventually fueled a peaceful national revolution.
Walesa’s accomplishment is the stuff of legend. For a decade, he battled Communist Party bosses in behalf of trade unionists. He went to jail. He got out. He kept right on talking until he tore a huge hole in the Iron Curtain. Now 62, the guy not only has a Nobel Peace Prize, he spent five years as the first democratically elected president of Poland.
So when Walesa talks – as he did in Denver on Friday – it’s worth paying close attention.
Walesa’s world can’t be reduced to the political sound bites we’re used to. The United States’ emergence from the Cold War as the world’s only super power has not been a full-fledged victory, Walesa said through a translator before a Friday night speech at Regis University.
“Actually,” Walesa said “the image of the United States right now is the worst possible. Until the downfall of communism, the United States used to be the ultimate hope and ultimate refuge for the rest of the world. … The rest of the world was always confident that the United States would come to the rescue and find some solution to the difficulties. However, the recent situation in the world – with events like Iraq and similar ones – has caused a situation in which we have been deprived of this ultimate refuge.”
Such talk might make you might think Walesa opposed the invasion of Iraq. He did not. He’s glad Poland sent troops to Iraq to help the U.S. What bothered him was America’s unwillingness to build an international coalition.
It can no longer just be our way or the highway.
“The United States must be, should be, the leader of the world,” Walesa said. “But being the leader doesn’t mean replacing the others. It doesn’t mean being the policeman of the world. Instead, it means being the teacher of the world.
“It doesn’t just mean providing the natural resources. It means providing the world with leadership. Right now, there is no American leadership.”
Walesa’s view of world history starkly counterpoints the jingoism that infects so much of recent American foreign policy. Walesa wants world leaders to form a more militant version of the United Nations, one with global security power to stop territorial conflicts, racism and ethnic cleansing, and terrorism. He’s talking about sharing international interests, and here’s why: Politically, Walesa accomplished the impossible, then got chaos.
“Everyone was fed up with the communist system,” he said. “But no one could foresee that it would come to an end.”
When Walesa’s Solidarity party took power in Poland in 1990, “the transformation was costly.” The entire Polish economy and those of several other communist states “collapsed” almost overnight, Walesa said. “We were hoping that the U.S. would suggest a new generation of Marshall Plan” like the U.S.-financed recovery program that rebuilt Europe after World War II.
It didn’t happen.
Right now, Walesa said, the fate of a popular uprising against a quasi-communist Belarus depends on Western support. The United States and Europe have to back protesters trying to overturn a rigged presidential election. But even if they succeed, the need for help doesn’t end.
Developing a communist system from a capitalist system is like taking live fish from an aquarium and making fish soup, he joked. Developing capitalism from communism was like taking dead fish from the soup and trying to bring them back to life in an aquarium.
Walesa still believes in free markets. He speaks in behalf of “globalization.” But as with everything else, his vision is hardly the American stereotype. Ever a union man, Walesa sees the world as an equilateral triangle of interests with workers on one side, owners of production facilities on the second side and government administrators on the third.
“The union says what it wants,” Walesa says. “The capitalists say what they are willing to give. And the administrators say how they are going to govern to make it realistic.”
Ah, if it were only that simple.
Better than most, Lech Walesa knows it is not.
Jim Spencer’s column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. He can be reached at 303-820-1771 or jspencer@denverpost.com.
