An Interview with General Wojciech Jaruzelski: Democracy, Memory and Responsibility

WASHINGTON, May 29, 2014 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Commemorating the life and career of General Wojciech Jaruzelski, the Bipartisan Policy Center's (BPC) Foreign Policy Project released a 2005 interview with General Jaruzelski. Reflecting upon General Jaruzelski's recent death on May 25, the interview provides a captive look into the general's dynamic career and with it Poland's complex recent history. The interview appears below and was published on BPC's blog today. Blaise Misztal, director of BPC's Foreign Policy Project, conducted the interview. For updates from BPC on foreign policy, follow us on Twitter and subscribe here.

Democracy, Memory and Responsibility: An Interview with General Wojciech Jaruzelski
By Blaise Misztal

General Wojciech Jaruzelski, the Polish leader who passed away on May 25, 2014, was a paradox, a man torn between two worlds. As a youth, he was educated in the Catholic Church and imprisoned by the Soviet Union in Siberia, yet, fought for the Red Army and was early to join the Polish Communist Party. After 40 years of rising through the military and political ranks, he was the last head of the People's Republic of Poland and the first president of the third Republic of Poland. He ordered both the imposition of Martial Law on December 13, 1981 and the Round Table Negotiations that resulted in Poland's first free, post-World War II elections on June 4, 1989. He was the brutal enforcer of a totalitarian system and yet, eventually, tacitly consented to that system's demise. But as a pivotal player in and witness to one of the most successful democratic transitions of the last quarter century, he also had a unique and still relevant perspective.

In the below interview, conducted in 2005 and published by the independent Cuban magazine Vitral, Jaruzelski discusses his role in and rationale for declaring Martial Law, why he assented to elections in 1989, and his reflections on the development of Polish democracy. His attempts to define and defend his legacy often ring hollow and rely on factual assertions that have been disputed by historians. But he also offers fascinating insights into both the conditions for and challenges to democracy. Jaruzelski's description of the desirability of democratic governance as resulting from its more effective mechanism for making difficult political and economic choices is devoid of references to the value and inviolability of individual freedom, but it also leads him to diagnose the danger of populism and demagoguery that lurks in dissatisfied democratic societies. Similarly, his denunciation of "recollection," of the political uses of history, seems self-serving. But he also gives this assertion context, arguing that democratic transitions can only prove successful when existing elites believe they will be accommodated, not hung, in a new political system.

These insights are valuable not only as a reflection on how far Poland has come as it approaches the 25th anniversary of 1989 elections, but as lessons that can be applied to struggling and emerging democracies today—the European Union as it struggles with populism, Ukraine as it attempts to refashion a workable political order, as well as Turkey, Egypt, Thailand or any place where democracy has taken a step backwards.

Read the full post here.

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SOURCE Bipartisan Policy Center