1 00:00:00,060 --> 00:00:04,200 Thank you very much, Nicole. Well, we like our keynote speaker. 2 00:00:04,320 --> 00:00:21,510 My thoughts are constantly torn between Poland 25 years ago and Ukraine 25 minutes ago, when, by the way, 3 00:00:21,570 --> 00:00:30,270 for those of you who haven't got the news, they've just agreed to release Yulia Tymoshenko, which is very encouraging news. 4 00:00:31,470 --> 00:00:37,320 And I thought I would start just by a couple of reflections on the difference between these two, 5 00:00:37,650 --> 00:00:45,550 because I think it's quite an interesting place to start or the connection between them. Kiev the last week. 6 00:00:45,570 --> 00:01:00,210 And elsewhere in Ukraine, brutal, arbitrary slaughter by militias, snipers and massive violence on both sides. 7 00:01:00,720 --> 00:01:11,280 Scenes that, as Alex suggested, make television crews saliva because they recognise them as being like revolution. 8 00:01:11,580 --> 00:01:16,680 That's what revolution looks like in Poland in 1989. 9 00:01:17,690 --> 00:01:29,280 Completely different atmosphere. None of the iconography of revolution that is familiar to most people, which only comes later in 1989. 10 00:01:29,300 --> 00:01:34,190 Elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe. But was there in Poland ten years before? 11 00:01:34,430 --> 00:01:37,720 In 1980? 81. But. 12 00:01:38,900 --> 00:01:42,110 This Roundtable table dialogue object. 13 00:01:42,740 --> 00:01:47,840 By the way, for those of you who haven't seen it, you can still see it in a wing of the presidential palace. 14 00:01:48,320 --> 00:01:53,540 And it is a very parallel Polish People's Republic piece of carpentry. 15 00:01:54,170 --> 00:01:58,160 It's not quite plastic wood, but it feels like fashion forward. 16 00:01:59,690 --> 00:02:06,679 A lot of quiet humour about what was happening, 17 00:02:06,680 --> 00:02:12,020 a sense there was a sense of lightness about these events despite the seriousness of what was going on. 18 00:02:12,260 --> 00:02:18,950 I have my notebook from a political self-determination with representatives of the people, 19 00:02:19,940 --> 00:02:24,340 comes with the round table, comes with the Orange Revolution ten years ago, 20 00:02:24,950 --> 00:02:34,280 and you descend from a round table into a morass of corruption and darkness and let us hope the country not comes out of it. 21 00:02:35,060 --> 00:02:43,730 But the other point to make about what's happened in Ukraine in this relation to Poland is the fact that the EU, 22 00:02:44,210 --> 00:02:48,110 the European Union, has finally paid so much attention to Ukraine. 23 00:02:48,440 --> 00:02:49,459 The fact that the German, 24 00:02:49,460 --> 00:03:01,510 French and Poland that the foreign ministers spent two days in Kiev is a direct result of the independence of Poland regained after 1989. 25 00:03:01,940 --> 00:03:09,530 And the fact that Poland has a quite distinctive and quite forceful foreign policy towards 26 00:03:09,530 --> 00:03:16,910 its eastern neighbours and for power inside the European Union to bring others on board, 27 00:03:17,660 --> 00:03:26,570 for example, Germany and France. So that's just a reflection on the connection between these two events 25 minutes ago and 25 years ago. 28 00:03:27,410 --> 00:03:32,420 Now, in terms of 25 years ago and how we assessed it today, 29 00:03:33,440 --> 00:03:40,310 I'm afraid a hopeless respondent to our keynote speaker because I agree with almost everything he said. 30 00:03:41,450 --> 00:03:43,490 So I get to try to disagree with myself, 31 00:03:44,030 --> 00:03:56,000 or at least to imagine what a disagreement with myself might be out of 25 years is, as it were, the span of revisionism. 32 00:03:56,390 --> 00:04:01,910 Right? This is when revisionists come along after 20 or 25 years and they revise the 33 00:04:01,910 --> 00:04:06,649 conventional wisdom which people like the keynote speaker and myself have advanced, 34 00:04:06,650 --> 00:04:15,320 namely that this was a peaceful, self-limiting revolution of a unique and unprecedented time, 35 00:04:16,250 --> 00:04:21,830 albeit building on elements that had been present before. 36 00:04:22,100 --> 00:04:25,309 We should not forget Spain. We should not forget Portugal. 37 00:04:25,310 --> 00:04:29,150 We should not forget the Philippines. We should not forget Chile. 38 00:04:29,480 --> 00:04:40,040 We should not forget the learning process in the whole of East Central Europe, but nonetheless, in its realisation unprecedented. 39 00:04:40,280 --> 00:04:41,870 When was the revolution? 40 00:04:42,500 --> 00:04:55,489 Answer It was a cumulative revolution we have at least to look at for ten years from summer 1980 to late 1989 or the beginning of 1990, 41 00:04:55,490 --> 00:05:08,300 when the process is complete, only to call not just Hungary and Czechoslovakia, but, as you said, crucially, East Germany joins the process, 42 00:05:08,750 --> 00:05:15,680 therefore transforming the geopolitical context from the point of view of Moscow for Poland, 43 00:05:16,760 --> 00:05:31,360 of a revolution which indeed offers a new default model of revolution that of 1989 to supplant that of 1789, 44 00:05:32,210 --> 00:05:36,590 which is not to say that people do not have recourse to violence. 45 00:05:37,070 --> 00:05:48,710 It is only to say that the default model since then has been that of some kind of peaceful revolution of mass mobilisation, ending with a negation. 46 00:05:50,750 --> 00:06:01,790 And it is no accident that the Orange Revolution started very strongly with that model in mind and even the recent events think all of that. 47 00:06:01,790 --> 00:06:06,020 My dog started with that model in mind and then became something else. 48 00:06:06,650 --> 00:06:11,990 Okay, so what would revisionism look like? 49 00:06:12,680 --> 00:06:19,820 What would a revisionist say? And of course, there are many people who do challenge this view of what happened and its significance. 50 00:06:20,930 --> 00:06:29,870 What I think about this, I would say that three ways or two ways in which with the subcategory in which I might 51 00:06:29,870 --> 00:06:35,930 be compelled to change my mind about an interpretation I've advanced for many years. 52 00:06:36,720 --> 00:06:43,530 And the first. It would be if my mind changed, and the second would be if the facts changed. 53 00:06:45,630 --> 00:06:52,380 That's to say, if I suddenly became converted to religious fundamentalism, that I would try to reinterpret 1989, 54 00:06:52,680 --> 00:07:04,350 seeing it the way that the good Lord sense that is, and I hope I can then return to the facts when the facts change, said John Maynard Keynes. 55 00:07:05,610 --> 00:07:09,430 I did. I changed my mind. I don't know about you. 56 00:07:10,800 --> 00:07:15,270 The historians facts of two distinct kinds. 57 00:07:16,290 --> 00:07:26,730 They are the facts of evidence brought to light by new sources and the fact of consequence 58 00:07:27,240 --> 00:07:33,750 what are seen as long term consequences in the light of which we change our interpretation. 59 00:07:35,580 --> 00:07:39,580 Let me take those two intact facts. 60 00:07:39,960 --> 00:07:45,810 In terms of new evidence. I'll be very interested to hear that if you start on this. 61 00:07:46,770 --> 00:07:57,220 I would submit that there is relatively little that really substantially changes our understanding of what happened in 1989. 62 00:07:57,240 --> 00:08:05,550 There is a for those of you who want to write a doctorate about this superb documentation of the round table, 63 00:08:06,220 --> 00:08:09,320 I think five or six volumes I could only manage physics. 64 00:08:11,840 --> 00:08:17,130 If there is a mass of material, of course, from Soviet and East European archives. 65 00:08:18,240 --> 00:08:27,000 It's remarkable how little actually this changes our understanding of what happened at the time, 66 00:08:27,000 --> 00:08:32,100 partly because so much was known at the time, except in one important respect. 67 00:08:33,390 --> 00:08:47,190 The Soviet sources. The papers of the people close to Gorbachev and Gorbachev himself indicate how far that private thinking had gone. 68 00:08:48,720 --> 00:08:59,850 That is to say, even though publicly they were very cautious in what they said and were still essentially endorsing some version of reform socialism. 69 00:09:00,690 --> 00:09:12,179 It is clear that in private they had accepted or largely accepted that things might 70 00:09:12,180 --> 00:09:17,880 go even further than they wished and that they would not resist it with force. 71 00:09:18,660 --> 00:09:31,180 Right. This produces a truck for historical interpretation, because then what was done, 72 00:09:31,180 --> 00:09:36,940 particularly by the solidarity side in the negotiations of the round table, 73 00:09:37,570 --> 00:09:45,910 the many compromises they made are interpreted in the light of what we know now. 74 00:09:46,930 --> 00:09:56,649 That is to say, it seems to us now that it was inevitable that the Soviet Union would give up without a shot 75 00:09:56,650 --> 00:10:02,770 fired and anchor the external empire and simply reflect Poland becoming a liberal democracy, 76 00:10:02,770 --> 00:10:04,240 a member of the European Union. 77 00:10:04,630 --> 00:10:18,130 And that well, it certainly wasn't evident to anyone at all that we have to avoid what only backs on called the illusions of retrospective deterrence, 78 00:10:18,850 --> 00:10:30,879 the fallacy of believing that what actually happened had to. We have to understand the compromises and there were deep compromises made in 1989 in 79 00:10:30,880 --> 00:10:42,070 the light in the light of the constant concern about the limits of Soviet tolerance. 80 00:10:42,550 --> 00:10:51,910 And if you think I'm just saying that, let me read you just one more passage from my notes written at the time in April 1989, 81 00:10:52,600 --> 00:10:58,149 a conversation with one If I Can Hammock, who as Alexander Small, I mentioned, 82 00:10:58,150 --> 00:11:04,240 is really a key political architect of the whole round table process in which he said, 83 00:11:05,110 --> 00:11:09,760 I quote, Everything depends on what happens in the Soviet Union, 84 00:11:10,330 --> 00:11:23,650 in which he says the huge uncertainty about the Soviet Union, the fear is not so much as it was in 1881 of a direct Soviet dependence. 85 00:11:24,820 --> 00:11:36,219 But in my notes to say this, it is of what actually happened in 1991, a military coup and in April 1989 was already anticipating that. 86 00:11:36,220 --> 00:11:41,710 So to do justice to the compromises made at the round table, 87 00:11:42,070 --> 00:11:49,300 you have to understand what people did not know at the time and how constrained they were. 88 00:11:49,690 --> 00:11:54,580 And this is, of course, the fundamental flaw with what? 89 00:11:55,660 --> 00:12:01,120 What do you mean? Borodai and Andrei Galitsky called the black myth. 90 00:12:02,050 --> 00:12:14,200 The black myth of the round table, the myth of the secret deal made behind closed door between what they called the red and the pink right. 91 00:12:14,800 --> 00:12:22,450 It does not understand what people found to be the really acute constraints at the time. 92 00:12:23,770 --> 00:12:35,620 That seems to be the one really significant major new insight that we have from news sources. 93 00:12:36,880 --> 00:12:52,900 What about the consequences? Well, like our keynote speaker, I think the consequences 25 years on, if one looks at Poland today, largely through. 94 00:12:55,730 --> 00:13:03,379 How right people were to choose the path of peaceful negotiated transition in 95 00:13:03,380 --> 00:13:15,020 1989 with all its objectivity and then subject to the necessary compromises. 96 00:13:16,220 --> 00:13:24,140 But I think there is one lesson to be learned from this experience. 97 00:13:25,280 --> 00:13:28,160 And the lesson, suitably enough, 98 00:13:29,300 --> 00:13:40,520 is about the importance of history itself and facing up to history in such a process of transition in a velvet revolution. 99 00:13:40,940 --> 00:13:45,860 There is what Ernest Kellner called the price of velvet. 100 00:13:47,330 --> 00:13:57,680 The price of velvet is that former power holders who often did very bad things indeed in the past, not only get away scot free, 101 00:13:58,490 --> 00:14:05,230 but to go off to get very rich in the process through the so-called privatisation of the Democrat order. 102 00:14:05,690 --> 00:14:11,420 Simply as we often think about the prominent figures from Communist Poland, 103 00:14:12,920 --> 00:14:20,060 and there is no sense of revolutionary catharsis, there's no storming of the Bastille. 104 00:14:20,720 --> 00:14:25,310 There's not that moment of crisis when people say things have really changed. 105 00:14:26,180 --> 00:14:38,390 On the contrary, if you are a worker who worked, who sacrificed a lot in the ten years of solidarity, where did you end up? 106 00:14:38,400 --> 00:14:50,630 Ten unemployed. And those former communists and Uzbeks, security officers and now living in that business. 107 00:14:50,810 --> 00:14:54,410 And so there is a sense of discontent of historical injustice. 108 00:14:55,190 --> 00:15:02,840 Now, you cannot do anything about that through the legal system if you have a negotiated transition, as indeed in Spain. 109 00:15:03,080 --> 00:15:16,549 That's the deal. What you can do is have some kind of a public symbolic confrontation with the courts, as happened in South Africa, 110 00:15:16,550 --> 00:15:20,930 as we will hear tomorrow from Khalid Bundy in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. 111 00:15:21,410 --> 00:15:25,430 And in a way, what Poland did is to have its reconciliation commission but no truth commission. 112 00:15:26,270 --> 00:15:30,830 Right. So that the roundtable was kind of reconciliation commission, but there was no truth commission. 113 00:15:32,020 --> 00:15:37,280 And this was a conscious choice. We will hear tomorrow about Spain. 114 00:15:38,330 --> 00:15:45,650 If you look at opposition writing in the seventies and eighties, the Spanish transition from fascism, from Franco played a significant role. 115 00:15:46,460 --> 00:15:55,760 And one of the things that Polish dissidents loved or wished to emulate was let bygones be bygones, amnesia. 116 00:15:55,760 --> 00:15:59,010 And let's not talk about let's not reopen these wounds. 117 00:15:59,030 --> 00:16:02,990 Let's simply look to the future. We have so many more urgent tasks. 118 00:16:03,020 --> 00:16:07,700 Our economy is ruined. We have to rebuild the country. We need to do it together. 119 00:16:07,820 --> 00:16:10,940 And I remember many conversations when the Spanish model was present. 120 00:16:11,660 --> 00:16:15,500 Charles Power will tell us tomorrow whether he worked in Spain, 121 00:16:16,790 --> 00:16:23,480 because if one looks at the debates now about the Spanish Civil War, you might ask whether it has finally worked in Spain. 122 00:16:24,290 --> 00:16:37,330 But it sure as [INAUDIBLE] did not work in Poland. And the role that conspiracy theories what someone has wonderfully called the harvest of paranoia. 123 00:16:38,920 --> 00:16:50,420 We get in piece with black legends about 1989, play the extraordinarily prominent role they play in Polish politics to this day is, 124 00:16:50,420 --> 00:16:58,579 I think, at least in part, the price that was paid for attempting to go, so to speak, 125 00:16:58,580 --> 00:17:06,380 the Spanish way, only more so and have no symbolic or public reckoning of any significant cost, 126 00:17:07,070 --> 00:17:16,700 except perhaps in scholarship and journalism, and then subsequently of court and in the institution of national memory with the past. 127 00:17:17,300 --> 00:17:27,200 So I think there is one lesson to be learned from the Polish example from the perspective of 25 years. 128 00:17:28,280 --> 00:17:40,310 And that lesson is that if you are going to do a Velvet Revolution, then also for opponents mistakes as well as for market shock. 129 00:17:40,340 --> 00:17:45,230 Right. And be sure as well to have a truth commission. 130 00:17:45,860 --> 00:17:46,490 Thank you very much.