Thank you very much, Nicole. Well, we like our keynote speaker.
My thoughts are constantly torn between Poland 25 years ago and Ukraine 25 minutes ago, when, by the way,
for those of you who haven't got the news, they've just agreed to release Yulia Tymoshenko, which is very encouraging news.
And I thought I would start just by a couple of reflections on the difference between these two,
because I think it's quite an interesting place to start or the connection between them. Kiev the last week.
And elsewhere in Ukraine, brutal, arbitrary slaughter by militias, snipers and massive violence on both sides.
Scenes that, as Alex suggested, make television crews saliva because they recognise them as being like revolution.
That's what revolution looks like in Poland in 1989.
Completely different atmosphere. None of the iconography of revolution that is familiar to most people, which only comes later in 1989.
Elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe. But was there in Poland ten years before?
In 1980? 81. But.
This Roundtable table dialogue object.
By the way, for those of you who haven't seen it, you can still see it in a wing of the presidential palace.
And it is a very parallel Polish People's Republic piece of carpentry.
It's not quite plastic wood, but it feels like fashion forward.
A lot of quiet humour about what was happening,
a sense there was a sense of lightness about these events despite the seriousness of what was going on.
I have my notebook from a political self-determination with representatives of the people,
comes with the round table, comes with the Orange Revolution ten years ago,
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.
But the other point to make about what's happened in Ukraine in this relation to Poland is the fact that the EU,
the European Union, has finally paid so much attention to Ukraine.
The fact that the German,
French and Poland that the foreign ministers spent two days in Kiev is a direct result of the independence of Poland regained after 1989.
And the fact that Poland has a quite distinctive and quite forceful foreign policy towards
its eastern neighbours and for power inside the European Union to bring others on board,
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.
Now, in terms of 25 years ago and how we assessed it today,
I'm afraid a hopeless respondent to our keynote speaker because I agree with almost everything he said.
So I get to try to disagree with myself,
or at least to imagine what a disagreement with myself might be out of 25 years is, as it were, the span of revisionism.
Right? This is when revisionists come along after 20 or 25 years and they revise the
conventional wisdom which people like the keynote speaker and myself have advanced,
namely that this was a peaceful, self-limiting revolution of a unique and unprecedented time,
albeit building on elements that had been present before.
We should not forget Spain. We should not forget Portugal.
We should not forget the Philippines. We should not forget Chile.
We should not forget the learning process in the whole of East Central Europe, but nonetheless, in its realisation unprecedented.
When was the revolution?
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,
when the process is complete, only to call not just Hungary and Czechoslovakia, but, as you said, crucially, East Germany joins the process,
therefore transforming the geopolitical context from the point of view of Moscow for Poland,
of a revolution which indeed offers a new default model of revolution that of 1989 to supplant that of 1789,
which is not to say that people do not have recourse to violence.
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.
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.
My dog started with that model in mind and then became something else.
Okay, so what would revisionism look like?
What would a revisionist say? And of course, there are many people who do challenge this view of what happened and its significance.
What I think about this, I would say that three ways or two ways in which with the subcategory in which I might
be compelled to change my mind about an interpretation I've advanced for many years.
And the first. It would be if my mind changed, and the second would be if the facts changed.
That's to say, if I suddenly became converted to religious fundamentalism, that I would try to reinterpret 1989,
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.
I did. I changed my mind. I don't know about you.
The historians facts of two distinct kinds.
They are the facts of evidence brought to light by new sources and the fact of consequence
what are seen as long term consequences in the light of which we change our interpretation.
Let me take those two intact facts.
In terms of new evidence. I'll be very interested to hear that if you start on this.
I would submit that there is relatively little that really substantially changes our understanding of what happened in 1989.
There is a for those of you who want to write a doctorate about this superb documentation of the round table,
I think five or six volumes I could only manage physics.
If there is a mass of material, of course, from Soviet and East European archives.
It's remarkable how little actually this changes our understanding of what happened at the time,
partly because so much was known at the time, except in one important respect.
The Soviet sources. The papers of the people close to Gorbachev and Gorbachev himself indicate how far that private thinking had gone.
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.
It is clear that in private they had accepted or largely accepted that things might
go even further than they wished and that they would not resist it with force.
Right. This produces a truck for historical interpretation, because then what was done,
particularly by the solidarity side in the negotiations of the round table,
the many compromises they made are interpreted in the light of what we know now.
That is to say, it seems to us now that it was inevitable that the Soviet Union would give up without a shot
fired and anchor the external empire and simply reflect Poland becoming a liberal democracy,
a member of the European Union.
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,
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
the light in the light of the constant concern about the limits of Soviet tolerance.
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,
a conversation with one If I Can Hammock, who as Alexander Small, I mentioned,
is really a key political architect of the whole round table process in which he said,
I quote, Everything depends on what happens in the Soviet Union,
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.
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.
So to do justice to the compromises made at the round table,
you have to understand what people did not know at the time and how constrained they were.
And this is, of course, the fundamental flaw with what?
What do you mean? Borodai and Andrei Galitsky called the black myth.
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.
It does not understand what people found to be the really acute constraints at the time.
That seems to be the one really significant major new insight that we have from news sources.
What about the consequences? Well, like our keynote speaker, I think the consequences 25 years on, if one looks at Poland today, largely through.
How right people were to choose the path of peaceful negotiated transition in
1989 with all its objectivity and then subject to the necessary compromises.
But I think there is one lesson to be learned from this experience.
And the lesson, suitably enough,
is about the importance of history itself and facing up to history in such a process of transition in a velvet revolution.
There is what Ernest Kellner called the price of velvet.
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,
but to go off to get very rich in the process through the so-called privatisation of the Democrat order.
Simply as we often think about the prominent figures from Communist Poland,
and there is no sense of revolutionary catharsis, there's no storming of the Bastille.
There's not that moment of crisis when people say things have really changed.
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?
Ten unemployed. And those former communists and Uzbeks, security officers and now living in that business.
And so there is a sense of discontent of historical injustice.
Now, you cannot do anything about that through the legal system if you have a negotiated transition, as indeed in Spain.
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,
as we will hear tomorrow from Khalid Bundy in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
And in a way, what Poland did is to have its reconciliation commission but no truth commission.
Right. So that the roundtable was kind of reconciliation commission, but there was no truth commission.
And this was a conscious choice. We will hear tomorrow about Spain.
If you look at opposition writing in the seventies and eighties, the Spanish transition from fascism, from Franco played a significant role.
And one of the things that Polish dissidents loved or wished to emulate was let bygones be bygones, amnesia.
And let's not talk about let's not reopen these wounds.
Let's simply look to the future. We have so many more urgent tasks.
Our economy is ruined. We have to rebuild the country. We need to do it together.
And I remember many conversations when the Spanish model was present.
Charles Power will tell us tomorrow whether he worked in Spain,
because if one looks at the debates now about the Spanish Civil War, you might ask whether it has finally worked in Spain.
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.
We get in piece with black legends about 1989, play the extraordinarily prominent role they play in Polish politics to this day is,
I think, at least in part, the price that was paid for attempting to go, so to speak,
the Spanish way, only more so and have no symbolic or public reckoning of any significant cost,
except perhaps in scholarship and journalism, and then subsequently of court and in the institution of national memory with the past.
So I think there is one lesson to be learned from the Polish example from the perspective of 25 years.
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.
Right. And be sure as well to have a truth commission.
Thank you very much.