This chapter reconstructs the specific human rights language, or vernacular, of Polish dissent. Its central thesis is that Polish nonconformist intellectuals understood human rights in a profoundly political way. To support this thesis, this chapter analyzes the two main ideas of Polish human rights discourses: the dissidents’ interpretation of the concept of totalitarianism and the view that humans beings were simultaneously endowed with an inalienable dignity and enmeshed in social relations and cultural norms. On this basis, this chapter shows that Polish dissidents saw the issues that were usually associated with human rights work, e.g. defending one’s private sphere or protecting people from repression, asmeans to an end: the reclaiming of the public sphere from the totalitarian leviathan.Expressing an unalienable human dignity, human rights were seen as a means of breaking the totalitarian system’s grip on the public sphere by creating pockets of freedom where people could speak their minds freely and communicate with each other to tackle their shared concerns. In the discourse of the dissidents, human rights were understood not as antipolitical alternatives tovisions of social change or even to politics as such but as indissoluble linked to questions of collective agency and struggles for social justice.

This chapter provides an overview of the history of dissent in Poland from the late 1960s to the suppression of Solidarity in 1981. It makes three points: It highlights the importance of transnational interactions for the rise of dissent, it demonstrates that Poland's Solidarity movement was indebted to dissident activism, and it shows the political dimension of dissident antipolitics. To do so, the chapter’s first section reconstructs the two cultural milieus out of which Poland's first dissident organizations, the Committee to Defend the Workers and the Movement to Defend Civic and Human Rights, evolved. The section also demonstrates that dissent has to be seen as a transnational movement by showing the impact which the rise of dissent in the Soviet Union had on these two groups as well as by looking at interactions between Polish and Czechoslovak groups. The second section shows how the Solidarity movement clearly evolved out of 1970s dissents even as it went beyond its narrow formula.

This chapter assesses the question whether dissident human rights activism had an impact on the end of the Cold War and the fall of Communism. Focusing on the situation in Poland, it argues that human rights activism had a threefold impact on the end of the Cold War: First, the Polish activists’ status as human rights icons provided them with the authority to be the government’s interlocutors at round table talks which, even if accidentally, triggered the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe. Second, human rights activism also made sure that the West, and especially the United States, provided material support for the Polish opposition movement thus helping sustain it through the 1980s. Third, because of dissident demands to uphold human rights in Eastern Europe, there were strong external pressures on Poland to implement reforms. Yet by contrasting the Western responses to the imposition of martial law in Poland in 1981 to Western behavior in the late 1980s, the chapter shows that Western human rights policies were neither the automatic result of the 1970s human rights revolution nor of Cold War policies but of an activism that occurred largely during the 1980s.

This chapter is about the broad wave of support which the repression of Poland’s Solidarity trade union in December 1981 triggeredin France. It explains this outpouring of sympathy and political support by focusing on an alliance of intellectuals, including philosophers Michel Foucault and Claude Lefort, and the trade union CFDT and reconstructs the human rights language of these groups. This chapter demonstrates that French solidarité avec Solidarnosc was the culmination of almost a decade of French fascination with dissident activism in the Soviet bloc, a development in the course of which French intellectuals came to endorse the dissidents' focus on human rights. This chapter also shows that what seemed like a fascination with events in Eastern Europe was, in fact, enmeshed in intellectual and political debates on the French Left. Endorsing the dissidents' struggle allowed members of France's non-Communist and anti-etatist French Left to set themselves off from the two dominant forces in French Left-wing politics: the Communist party and the Socialists. In analyzing these debates, this chapter reconstructs the French Left's specific human rights language which did not focus on individual liberty but aimed at empowering people to join forces and shape their collective affairs through social self-organization.

This chapter deals with the response of Willy Brandt, West Germany’s former chancellor and towering moral figure, to the 1981 imposition of martial law in Poland. As Chancellor, Brandt had played a central role in putting human rights-related questions into the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) and thus on the agenda of East-West relations. In December 1981, however, he demanded Western restraint toward events in Poland and even expressed some understanding for the Polish government. To explain this stance, this chapter deciphers the ideas and wider imaginaries that informed his actions, an approach that also provides insights into the intellectual changes that powered the human rights revolution of the 1970s and the 1980s. Brandt, this chapter shows, understood human rights work in a way indebted to 1950s and 1960s discourses revolving around a vision of competing political and social systems, of antagonistic ways of organizing society, of fundamentally different views of how long-term historical processes shaped the fate of nations. Enmeshed in this culture, Brandt believed that a successful human rights policy had to take structural constraints and broad time horizons into account. The demands of the dissidents—calling upon the international community to intervene for the human rights of everyone, everywhere—seemed to Brandt not morally objectionable so much as implausible and unreasonable.

This chapter uses the book's main findings to draw broader conclusions on the history of human rights and the place of human rights in post-Cold War international politics. It makes three points. First, it argues that the events described in this book were harbingers of the pivotal role human rights came to play in post-Cold War global politics. Second, however, it shows that human rights discourses changed considerably during the 1990s. The ideas about collective agency and social self-organization which had been at the center of Polish, French, and US human rights discourses disappeared for the sake of a human rights vernacular centered on how powerful international actors supported helpless victims in distant countries. Third, the chapter concludes that these changes do not mean that the origins of human rights really lie in the 1990s. It argues instead that the very power of human rights derived from how actors could adopt them to different aims and political projects. The history of human rights shouldtherefore not be about the quest for a moment when human rights took on a definite meaning ad established clear-cut practices but about the conditions under which human rights became plausible and useful and were reinterpreted as historical actors adapted them to their needs.

This chapter discusses central features of 1980s global human rights culture by discussing the political impact and the symbolism of the 1983 Nobel Peace Prize for the Polish trade union leader Lech Wałęsa. On the one hand, the chapter shows, the Prize helped keep Wałęsa and human rights violations on the international agenda. It inducted the Polish labor activist into a pantheon of unassailable icons of the global struggle for human rights. On the other hand, however, the rhetoric surrounding the Prize flattened the domestic politics of Wałęsa's struggle. The mass movement he was a member of and the material and political goals for which it struggled were collapsed into a stylized image of Wałęsa as someone struggling for transcendent values. This turned him and his movement into an empty signifier which political actors from the West could claim for different, even contradictory projects, as the chapter demonstrates by showing how both US Cold Warriors and West German peace activists claimed Wałęsa as an ally of their political projects.

This chapter analyzes how political prisoners in 1980s Poland sought to put their plight on the agenda of East–West relations. In so doing, this chapter reconstructs a central symbol of 1980s global human rights culture: the prisoner of conscience. The prisoner of conscience, the chapter shows, was the result of how Amnesty International had reimagined the struggle against political incarceration. In the past, this struggle had been driven by solidarity with political prisoners' specific ideology; Amnesty's activism, in contrast, centered on empathy with the plight of suffering individuals who tried to defend their very humanity against an all-powerful state. By drawing on this discourse and the social practices associated with it, especially hunger strikes, the Polish prisoners managed to turn themselves into icons of human rights culture, quasi-sacred images of the international community's most hallowed values. Yet this process also divorced the prisoners from the specific political aims they were struggling for, allowing powerful international actors to project their own views onto them. For all its antipolitical imagery, the chapter shows, the “prisoner of conscience” was part of a symbolic politics of human rights.

This chapter analyzes a symbolic politics of 1980shuman rights discourses by focusing on the place Poland and Chile had in global debates on human rights. In particular, it shows how these two countries featured in three different debates: First, the chapter reconstructs debates at the UN Commission on Human Rights in 1982 to show how the Reagan administration tried to turn the situation in Poland, where martial law had been imposed in 1981, into a symbolic counterweight to Chile, a country that had come to encapsulate the human rights discourse of actors and movements critical of US policies in Latin America. Second, this chapter shows how Polish and Chilean activists themselves struck an alliance to increase the international salience of their causes and thus mobilize international support. Third, this chapter shows how these debates on human rights in Poland and Chile intersected with US debates about neoliberal economic policies.

This chapter focuses on the strong support Poland’s Solidarity movement received from the USA’s largest trade union, the AFL-CIO. At least partly, this chapter shows, the AFL-CIO’s strong advocacy for Solidarity has to be seen within US political debates triggered by the election of Ronald Reagan. In Reagan’s rhetoric, Communist totalitarianism came to denote only the most extreme form of the general threat of the modern state to silently encroach on the lives of individuals. Even as he revived the ideological Cold War, Reagan went on to reshape the social imagery underpinning it – a change that entailed curbing the power of organized labor. Against this background, Solidarity fascinated the AFL-CIO not primarily as an anti-Communist movement, but as a trade union. As Reagan reduced the influence of trade unions, the AFL-CIO invoked Solidarity to argue that it was not human rights as such that expressed the difference between East and West, but a particular human right – freedom of association. In the United States, the chapter demonstrates, Solidarity became a contested icon in a political and intellectual struggle initiated not by different foreign policy aims – in this field, the AFL-CIO agreed with Reagan – but by a reconfiguration of the normative and conceptual world of US politics.

This chapter discusses how the book's main themes relate to the historiography of human rights. It makes four points: First, it argues that the history of the Solidarity movement shows how precarious and contested human rights remained in international politics well into the 1980s, a finding that challenges the view of the 1970s as the final breakthrough of human rights. Second, this chapter argues that the history of Polish dissent and of its supporters in France and the USA reveals discourses in which human rights were not seen as an alternative to politics so much as a means of creating a new kind of politics. Even the overtly antipolitical imagery of groups like Amnesty International merely concealed a profound symbolic politics of human rights. Third, the findings of the book do not suggest that the origins of human rights really lie in the 1980s but that the entire quest for a point of origin is misguided. The history of human rights, rather, is one of their continuous competitions with other universalisms, their repeated reinvention, and adaptation to new causes. Fourth, this chapter argues that the book's findings show that human rights had a crucial impact on the end of the Cold War.