By Maria Wilczek and Stanley Bill
Forty years ago tomorrow, Poland’s communist government introduced martial law as part of efforts to clamp down on growing opposition to its rule, in particular from the Solidarity movement that had been formed a year earlier, in 1980.
Following the banning of the trade union in 1982, the first high-ranking Western diplomat to meet its representatives in Warsaw after martial law ended was Sir Malcolm Rifkind, then the Europe minister in Margaret Thatcher’s government.
In an exclusive interview for Notes from Poland, Rifkind – who later served as foreign and defence secretary – recalls his 1984 visit to Poland and reflects on the country’s development since regaining its freedom in 1989.
He believes that, despite its economic progress and growing political clout, Poland’s relationship with the UK and other NATO allies has recently deteriorated in some areas. He puts this down to Warsaw frustrating Western allies by backsliding on shared values. Yet he also criticises Western diplomats for overstepping their remit in pushing Poland on “sensitive” social issues such as LGBT rights and abortion.
Arriving amid the funeral of a dissident priest
After becoming a Foreign Office minister in 1982, Rifkind put off his visit to Poland for two years. “We did not think it appropriate to visit Poland while martial law was in place,” he says.
“I didn’t want to go if it would be misinterpreted as approval for what [Communist Party First Secretary Wojciech] Jaruzelski was doing, particularly in relation to Solidarity,” he recalls. His officials thus contacted exiled Solidarity representatives in the Netherlands, who requested that Rifkind meet with key figures connected with the union in Poland.
When he finally arrived, it was a frosty day in November 1984. Thousands had gathered outside the Saint Stanisław Kostka church in Warsaw for the symbolic funeral of dissident priest Jerzy Popiełuszko, who had been murdered by communist secret police. Rifkind mingled with the crowds, accompanied by his wife, whose parents came from Kraków and Łódź, and the British ambassador.
“There was a huge Polish flag draped from the steeple of the church. It was a Polish flag, the red and white of the flag, but it had been cut down the middle in order to form the solidarity V sign, rather like Churchill’s V for victory sign,” he recalls.
“It was indicative of how sensitive the issue was and how worried the Polish government were that they hadn’t sent in guys, just to remove the flag. They realised doing it would itself be a major provocation and they chose not to do it.”
During his visit, the senior Solidarity figures Rifkind met were Tadeusz Mazowiecki, Bronisław Geremek, and Janusz Onyszkiewicz, who went on to become respectively Poland’s first prime minister after the semi-free elections of 1989, foreign minister, and defence minister.
“I have to confess that I had not heard of any of them until that day,” he recalls, though Onyszkiewicz would become a “personal friend” and his Polish counterpart when Rifkind took the role of UK defence secretary years later.
“The Polish government was very, very angry”
“I don’t think there was anything dramatic in the actual conversation…I think the drama was in the fact of the meeting,” he says. Polish media did not report the event, but it was widely broadcast through the BBC’s World Service.
“The Polish government was very, very angry,” recalls Rifkind. Its chief spokesman, Jerzy Urban, accused him of “treating Poland as if it was part of the British Empire”.
The meeting, he believes, set a diplomatic precedent for contact with the outlawed Solidarity leaders, establishing them as legitimate interlocutors. The following week, West German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher amended plans for his own visit and also decided to meet Solidarity representatives.
“It then became the standard practice of any NATO visiting minister…If the Polish government wanted the visit – which they did – they had to swallow hard and accept that visit would include contact with Solidarność,” he says. “It was a sign of their weakness, but also of their anxiety, not to be cut off from the wider world.”
“At some stage, the regime had to acknowledge the world had moved on and they could no longer deliver the kind of exclusion and isolation of their main enemy or their main opponents. They’d lost that battle, effectively,” he says.
“I wasn’t very diplomatic”
Rifkind notes that – though their aims were similar – his own approach was rather different from the cautiousness of the Germans. “I wasn’t very diplomatic, you might say, but so be it.”
“I’d been involved in going to Budapest and going to Prague and helping people like Roger Scruton, who was involved in getting what in Russia would be called samizdat material to dissident elements in Czechoslovakia.”
He recalls that these activities were not popular with the Foreign Office mainstream, as they created “too many protocol problems”.
The following month Rifkind was also privy to a top-level meeting between his boss Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev, shortly before he became the leader of the Soviet Union. “The United Kingdom by historical accident became the first major country to have contact with Gorbachev at a senior level.”
“Gorbachev basically was trying to say that he recognised that the Soviet Union needed to have a new kind of relationship with the West,” says Rifkind.
Poland’s current government “threatens Western values”
Almost four decades later, Rifkind notes that Poland’s relationship with many partners, including the UK, is once again not straightforward. “There is a strain, a difficulty,” he says.
The difficulty does not affect all policy areas. Rifkind argues that in geopolitical and military issues there are few significant differences between Britain, other European countries, and Poland, “whether it’s Law and Justice [PiS, the current ruling party] or their predecessors”. He says there is broad agreement that Poland must be given support “as a border country with Russia or with Belarus”.
Differences emerge, however, when it comes to “various domestic [actions]” of the PiS government, which Rifkind says have “threatened what I perceived to be Western values, democratic values, particularly rule of law considerations”.
“That is a serious problem,” he says, observing that the British government’s view seems to be aligned with that of France, Germany, and other EU member states. “And that will continue as long as Law and Justice are the government of Poland.”
He also outlines another category of disagreement: attitudes towards same-sex marriage, homosexuality, or abortion, where Poland’s government has been considered “reactionary and unattractive” by many Western partners.
LGBT rights and abortion are “not any business of Western diplomats”
In Rifkind’s view, however, Poland should be granted time for the gradual changes that have already swept much of western Europe.
“It seems to me that Western countries, the United Kingdom included, should not seek to interpret the current Polish debate on these sort of issues. We shouldn’t be sanctimonious about it. We shouldn’t be too condemning about it,” he says.
Asked about the policy of many embassies in Poland, including that of the UK, to be vocal on minority rights issues and attend LGBT rights marches, he says it is “not their function”.
“I don’t think it’s any business of a British or any other Western diplomats to take a public position on what Poland should do about abortion…or same-sex marriage,” he says.
53 ambassadors and representatives of international organisations in Warsaw have signed a letter in support of LGBT rights in Poland ahead of the Equality Parade in the capital.
Among them are the representatives of the US, UK, France, Germany, Israel and the European Commission https://t.co/5IMU5As4Gx
— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) May 31, 2019
Overall, Rifkind sees Poland’s democracy as more secure than Hungary’s. “I think Poland is entitled to be seen still as a democracy. But a democracy potentially under threat,” he says. He suggests that “with varying degrees of enthusiasm” the ruling camp would ultimately accept losing power by the ballot box.
He observes that a key safeguard in Poland remains its pro-European public. “When the European court made various rulings, which the Polish government originally wanted to ignore and reject, Polish public opinion was part of the reason why they realised they couldn’t do that.”
Poland and NATO
Poland’s Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki has been touring European capitals – with 11 visits in a single week – to warn European leaders of multiple threats coming from Russia in the wake of the migrant crisis orchestrated by Alexander Lukashenko’s Belarusian regime.
“It’s a sort of rather immature initiative that typifies Lukashenko but does not typify Putin,” says Rifkind, who believes the migrant crisis does “not conform either to Putin’s style or to his own interests”.
Despite the proximity of the threats, Warsaw has on recent occasions been cut out of high-level dialogue, including US President Joe Biden’s calls to a number of European leaders ahead of a video summit with Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
Rifkind believes that Poland may be overlooked in some discussions between Washington, London, Paris, and Berlin in part because of its status as a relative newcomer and smaller power in NATO.
However, he adds that the “added difficulty” is that “all Western governments are pretty fed up with the current Polish government and wish very dearly that they would either change their policy or go away…and the quicker that happens the better”.
Much of this comes down to currently poor relationships. Rifkind recalls how under previous governments “Poland was a close ally” and that a greater sense of “camaraderie” existed in NATO or the EU “even when we were disagreeing with each other”.
“There was a lot of empathy between senior French, British, German, American ministers, and Polish ministers,” he says, volunteering the example of Radosław Sikorski: “if he was foreign minister of Poland at the moment, then he might’ve been consulted”.
“There is not that relationship at the moment and therefore it is, I suppose, either a conscious or possibly even an unconscious expression of disapproval for the current Polish government.”
He adds: “Kaczyński and whoever’s prime minister at any given moment or foreign minister are not exactly touchy-feely people”.
Rifkind concludes by insisting that personal relationships in diplomacy can have real geopolitical consequences. “If there’s that personal relationship, not based on agreement, but based on trust and empathy”.
Interview transcribed by Shannon Listopad
Main image credit: Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office/Flickr (under CC BY 2.0)
Maria Wilczek is deputy editor of Notes from Poland. She is a regular writer for The Times, The Economist and Al Jazeera English, and has also featured in Foreign Policy, Politico Europe, The Spectator and Gazeta Wyborcza.
