A ‘FROG HYPNOTIZED BY A SNAKE’? WESTERN EUROPE AND THE POLISH MOVEMENT SOLIDARNOŚĆ, 1980–1989

The story of Solidarność’s relationship with Western Europe is far richer, and far more paradoxical, than the familiar tale of a heroic movement championed by the democratic West. Behind the iconic images of resistance and support lies a landscape shaped by enthusiasm and fear, solidarity and suspicion, moral commitment and strategic caution. Drawing on extensive research in Polish and many Western European archival repositories, this study reconstructs how Solidarność’s encounters with Western European trade unions, national governments, and EC institutions revealed a profound tension within Europe itself: the contrast between its proclaimed attachment to democratic values and the pragmatism imposed by Cold War diplomacy. Nowhere is this tension more visible than in the sharp divergence between two types of interlocutors. Trade unions across Western Europe embraced Solidarność with genuine, cross-ideological solidarity, mobilizing resources and public opinion. Governments, by contrast, maintained a cautious distance, wary of destabilizing relations with Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Their restraint stands in stark contrast to the far more assertive, and openly supportive, approach of the United States. At the same time, the evolution of Solidarność further complicates the picture. Born in the Gdańsk shipyard as a trade union, it rapidly expanded into a nationwide force articulating broader demands. By 1981, it had become a social actor capable of shaping national and international debates. The imposition of martial law drove the movement underground, but did not extinguish it. Instead, Solidarność adapted: it relied on clandestine networks, harnessed the language of human rights, and cultivated international support built during its legal years. These strategies enabled it not only to endure repression, but eventually to re-emerge as a key player in the 1989 Round Table negotiations and the first semi-free elections in the Soviet bloc. The study also exposes a structural ambiguity: Solidarność’s identity, and the way it was perceived, shifted across borders, across the decade, and across social layers. A crucial gap in existing scholarship emerges here: the specific place of Western Europe within this constellation has not been sufficiently explored. By differentiating between civil-society perceptions, evident in trade-union archives, and governmental or diplomatic ones, reflected in EC and state records, the analysis shows how interpretations of Solidarność evolved unevenly and how these interpretations actively shaped the movement’s international agency and visibility. Ultimately, the 1980s appear as a prehistory of Poland’s post-1989 relationship with the European Union. Early contacts between Solidarność and the EC anticipated both the aspirations and the contradictions that would later characterize Poland’s Europeanization. As such, the research aims to shed new light on several subfields of historical research: the end of the Cold War, Polish national history; transnational history and human rights; the history of European integration and its enlargements.