Poland's Solidarity Movement and the Global Politics of Human Rights

Offers a fresh perspective on recent human rights history by reconstructing debates around dissent and human rights across four countries.

Robert Brier (Author)

9781108460491, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 23 March 2023

285 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm, 0.417 kg

'… reading Robert Brier's book is useful for understanding not only the past but also the present.' Jan Olaszek, H-Soz-Kult

In the historiography of human rights, the 1980s feature as little more than an afterthought to the human rights breakthrough of the previous decade. Through an examination of one of the major actors of recent human rights history – Poland's Solidarity movement – Robert Brier challenges this view. Suppressed in 1981, Poland's Solidarity movement was supported by a surprisingly diverse array of international groups: US Cold Warriors, French left-wing intellectuals, trade unionists, Amnesty International, even Chilean opponents of the Pinochet regime. By unpacking the politics and transnational discourses of these groups, Brier demonstrates how precarious the position of human rights in international politics remained well into the 1980s. More importantly, he shows that human rights were a profoundly political and highly contested language, which actors in East and West adopted to redefine their social and political identities in times of momentous cultural and intellectual change.

Introduction
1. The Rise of Dissent in Poland
2. Dissent and the Politics of Human Rights
3. 'The Principle of Non-Interference as Laid Down in the Helsinki Final Act': the Polish crisis, the Cold War, and Human Rights
4. The End of the Ideological Age: Human Rights and Ostpolitik
5. Solidarity, Human Rights, and Anti-Totalitarianism in France
6. The 'Bedrock of Human Rights': US Labor, Neoconservatism, and Human Rights
7. Letters from Prison: the Prisoner of Conscience and the Symbolic Politics of Human Rights
8. Lech Wa??sa, the symbolism of the Nobel Peace Prize, and Global Human Rights Culture
9. General Pinochecki: Poland, Chile, and the Global Politics of Human Rights Culture
10. Human Rights and the End of the Cold War
Epilogue.

Subject Areas: Human rights [JPVH], 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000 [HBLW], European history [HBJD]