PANEL FIVE:
CAPACITIES TO NEGOTIATE

In our conversations, I mean between the government and the Episcopate, we tried to encourage, we tried to convince the other side to start looking for paths to establish contacts. We were also trying to help the government side get rid of that fear of Solidarity and of what could possibly happen...

At the Round Table we were not concerned with the Church itself. Our concern was focused on the nation, the country, changes in the country, improvement of the situation in Poland, the life of the people. That was our concern and not dividing people into those we liked and those we didn't like.

In the 70's and the 80's, there were a lot of people in the government who were educated at the best Polish universities, traveled abroad and compared the situation here and there in the world. And these people were ready for changes. On the one government side, they were the political, or rather the social base for change. The existence of this category of people interested in change was a very important factor...

During the course of the negotiations, it was important that certain principles would be followed. I'd like to mention several of them which were important. One of them was the principle of equality. It was very scrupulously followed in a variety of aspects, beginning with the idea that the number of people on both delegations had to be the same, equal...Another such condition that was also very important was the principle of not discussing symbolic problems. We were to solve the future, and avoid arguing about the past. We believed, and I think most of us agreed here, that if we started getting into discussions about the past wrongs, we wouldn't accomplish anything. We had to accept the fact that we looked at different things from the past in different ways, and that we had different visions of various symbolic problems...

If Solidarity were blamed for breaking up the talks, it would think that it was a trap all along, that all those talks were meant to compromise...At first I was thinking to myself, there's no other way, but tomorrow, the first thing in the morning, I'm turning in my resignation officially and that's the end of it. And then I had some apocalyptic thoughts run through my head, about what would happen next, with the society's expectations. I'm imagining the Solidarity people's emotions and how they go right into the streets...that's what I was thinking...

And at one point, Ireneusz Sekuła...said this: "I'll tell you an anecdote." I thought he'd gone crazy, an anecdote in this situation! But he went on: "One day, Goethe went along a narrow path in the mountains and he met his fiercest enemy, and his enemy said, ‘I never give the right of way to fools.' And Goethe responded, ‘And I always do.' And he turned around and left..."

The negotiations met the needs of a society that wanted change but did not want confrontation. It met the needs of the opposition that was pressing for peaceful changes in the country but began to understand that if the situation continued it would not become a player in this arena because new forces were emerging, more radical and of a different orientation. It also met the needs of the authorities that were becoming aware that it was impossible to continue running the country this way, that it was impossible to implement any reforms, and the alternative of the talks was an escalated policy of repression...

There had been many historical circumstances that had been wasted, but that one did not get wasted. That's...I believe that it's worthwhile to support the myth of the Round Table, because this is a myth of Poles who were capable of taking advantage of the opportunity. And I think that, even if we don't know what will happen in ten years, that myth, that legend, can support us in difficult moments.

All the way till the very end, it seemed to me that we were being involved in an end game that was not ours. And I was afraid all the time, from the very beginning, that, well you know, great, we chatted, we visited the salons, we saw how people behave in salons, we ate some fancy food, but that finally we would start acting in somebody else's play...

I think that if anybody had thought that the system was being dismantled, the Round Table would not have happened at all...

Only after the first actual meeting of the Round Table, suddenly, like mushrooms after rain, would the local Solidarity committees spring into existence. People started meeting, working on things. When negotiations faltered, when news wasn't good, people would stop coming to meetings, work would freeze. That was clear proof for me that if we did not continue those talks, those activities would just cease to exist, and people would completely drop out from this activity...

It never occurred to me that it would be the end of communism. I thought that there would be some other kind of thaw period that would last a year or two, maybe three, maybe a little bit longer, and then the situation would get back to the same old, same old. Yet it seemed worthwhile to live and see this breath of freedom; it seemed worthwhile to create some sort of network for this...

I thought that there were some real gangsters sitting on the other side of the table, that they certainly wanted to trap us, but we had to balance on this rope and play this game, like we had been with the secret police, when we knew that our conversations were tapped and we were being followed while we had some illegal publications on us...

We knew that we had to go for it and just try to outsmart them. Did my perception of the other side change during negotiations? No,...not much! Not during negotiations...

We all had a sense that we were really transforming Poland. Well, maybe this is a huge word, but this...patriotic atmosphere, this selfless atmosphere that dominated the tenth Sejm is unfortunately gone today. I'm sorry but it's gone...

Next Panel Six: Constituencies of Negotiation

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