A key architect of Poland's Solidarity-led revolution tells Patrick Smyth of his country's European vocation
A delay in the EU enlargement process caused by a No vote in Ireland on Nice "would be a very negative signal to Poland", one of the country's most celebrated former dissidents argues. It could slow the process of internal reform and would feed Euroscepticism, Mr Adam Michnik told The Irish Times.
"There are lots of dangers. It would send a signal that the new, young democracies are unacceptable to Irish society in the EU. Yet the Irish model has been an inspiration - its economic success, its democracy, the ending of the conflict in the North, etc . . . It would be a bad signal to Poland," he said.
And, he claimed, a No vote would fuel the arguments of the Eurosceptics in Poland who tried to portray a Europe that "only wants to use us so that our women can become domestic servants, not as real partners".
"The roots of democracy in Central Europe are still very weak," he warned.
Mr Michnik (55) is a key figure in Poland's recent history. A leading dissident intellectual from the 1960s on, he served six years in jail for political activities and was one of the founders and leaders of the Workers' Defence Committee (KOR) in 1976 that helped to forge the alliance between the country's intelligentsia and the workers that eventually brought down the communist regime.
He was part of the Solidarity team led by Mr Lech Walesa, which in 1989 negotiated with the country's communist leadership the successful peaceful transition to democracy.
That year, Mr Michnik also founded the successful independent daily, Gazeta Wyborcza, - "the first free newspaper from the Elbe to Vladivostok" - and he remains its highly regarded editor.
He was in Dublin over the weekend to speak to a conference at the Royal Irish Academy on Central Europe, "Reclaiming the future", organised by the Dublin European Institute.
It is his first visit to Ireland but he wants to come back, he says, and speaks with warmth of Joyce, whose Ulysses he discovered in prison. At first, "I could not understand a thing", he said.
But he found books on English and Irish history in the well-stocked prison library, and the meaning of "wild geese" and Joyce became clear. "I got the sense that Joyce was really a Polish writer," he told the conference, "reflecting all our passions, complexes and humiliations."
He sees parallels in Polish and Irish history: a shared sense of a bullying neighbour who simply "will not understand why we do not want to be British. Or German, or Russian."
When asked about the source of Poland's European vocation, he returns to the same theme. "When a Polish journalist researched an article for Gazeta on Ireland, he went to visit an IRA militant in jail," he recalls, laughing. "He asked the militant why he had done such things and the latter responded by starting to talk about the eighth century.
"For us it's a problem with a similar dimension because deep in our psyche, psychologically, historically, and in terms of our identity, we have had a sense that we are a part of Europe, a part cut off artificially by dictatorship - firstly by Russian tsarism, later Nazism, and yet later by the dictatorship of Soviet communism. For us it is a return to our real history."
For Mr Michnik, Europe is not a geographical concept. "One's geography is God-given. Europe is a cultural phenomenon, a human choice. In my view Europe is not just western Europe, bounded by the Oder-Neisse line, but a Europe of ideas that extends to the Urals." It is intimately bound up with the ideas of democracy and human rights, and a sense of social solidarity.
Insisting that the idea of "European culture without the great names of Russia - Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev - is unimaginable", he does worry, however, that the question of Russia's European vocation remains unresolved.
There are still tendencies which lean towards Asia while others are willing to fully embrace European values, he says.
But is he not in danger of idealising the European Union project? He laughs again. "You're absolutely right. That's perfectly normal. People who have lived under a dictatorship are bound to idealise their life in liberty. That's true of Ireland, too. The generations of independence fighters idealised the future of their life after independence."
Does he worry about the remoteness of the Brussels decision-making system, and perhaps understand Irish fears?
"Of course. If one is on the train, there's a lot of noise, and messing; things go wrong - but first one has to be on the train."
And yet those who fear that Europe is heading on a slippery slope to closer and closer integration will take comfort from an anti-utopian Pole who identifies more closely with the Gaullist notion of a Europe of nation states than with the proponents of a more federalised Europe.
"It's very simple. It's a problem of my generation. Identity during much of our political lives has been about national independence, first, during the second World War, under Nazi domination, and, after Yalta, the domination of Soviet communism. For us the thesis that we are a free, independent nation is profoundly important.
"For my son's generation it will be different. We must allow time to pass. So perhaps I am closer to the British vision of a Europe of nation states than the vision of Joschka Fischer [the German Foreign Minister]," he says.
"I have a lot of time for Joschka - he's a friend - but Germany's history is different to that of Poland. The German dilemma is a question of Germany in Europe as opposed to a Europe dominated by Germany. That has been a preoccupation of German democrats.
"The Polish challenge is to have two things simultaneously: independence with a strong sense of national cultural identity, and to participate in the structures of the EU."
Mr Michnik is critical of what he sees as dangerous anti-American tendencies in Europe.
"There are two different things going on. The criticism of the US Republican administration is quite normal in a democratic debate.
"But the other perceptions of an American global imperialist plot . . . These are the sentiments of the traditional extreme left and extreme right which have always been anti-American. I think it's quite dangerous because the US, despite all the differences we have with it, despite its arrogance, is an ally in the fight for a democratic order."
