Welcome, Lech Walesa! As you make your first official visit to the United States this week and meet with fellow trade unionists at the AFL-CIO convention, you'll undoubtedly talk about the help Solidarity got from people and organizations in the U.S. during its long struggle with Poland's communist regime. You'll thank organizations like the AFL-CIO and the National Endowment for Democracy, and you'll probably ask for more help in rebuilding the institutions of a free society and free economy in Poland. But as you talk about what we have done and might do for you, we want you to know what you've done for us.
You and the other brave people in Solidarity gave us an unforgettable lesson in the preciousness of democratic institutions. Believe it or not, many textbooks used in American schools maintain that all forms of government are equally valid and desirable. These texts tell our students that people living under repressive regimes are perfectly satisfied with their forms of government. And some Americans who consider themselves sophisticated and broad-minded people would tell you that it's arrogant, chauvinistic and ethnocentric to see any special merit in our form of government. Who are we, they'd say, to consider our institutions better just because they are democratic ( and ours)?
But you showed us that democracy and all that goes with it are just as important to people under systems of government as they are to people living in democracies -- maybe even more important. People believe these things are worth fighting for, worth risking everything, including their lives, for. And Solidarity's struggle to get these precious rights has since been echoed by the Chinese students and workers calling for democracy in Tiananmen Square, the Hungarian people's rejection of communism and the thousands of East Germans who continue to flee the democratic West. \We also have to thank you for helping to restore our confidence in the future of democracy. At the end of World War I -- with the fall of powerful totalitarian regimes and the twilight of colonialism - we looked for the worldwide spread of democracy. But in a short time, we were left instead with a few embattled democracies, and we began to wonder if our form of government was innately flawed. Was the fact that everything is out in the open in a democracy a fatal disadvantage? Were only dictatorships equipped to survive in the world of the twentieth century? In moving Poland toward democracy, Solidarity was one of the first to reverse the trend toward totalitarian states and show that people still longed for human rights - and the way to attain and preserve them was through a democratic form of government. And now we see democracy spreading throughout the world.
And we thank you for demonstrating so powerfully that free trade unions are essential to a democratic society. Many people here and in other industrialized nations have forgotten that. They think of unions merely as economic interest groups and even wonder why unions need to exist at all now that there's bread and butter on the table; shouldn't individual workers strive for the additional crumbs on their own? And when unions get involved in politics, many people cry foul; shouldn't unions mind their own business and stick to the economic conditions of the workplace?
But Solidarity's struggle reminded the world that you can't separate economic conditions from political conditions, that demands for bread and butter and for a voice in how the loaf is distributed are expressions of human rights and of the desire to secure and protect those rights. You reminded us that individual workers who criticize their bosses and government lose their livelihood and are silenced with official lies, but an independent union of workers can fight economic oppression and unleash the demand for truth. And, tragically, you showed us that individual workers striving on their own can be crushed, but a union of workers acting in solidarity -- your very name -- can secure the rights and dignity of all citizens. As one Polish worker in Gdansk told the New York Times at the time of the 1980 strike, the issue was not wages or apartments or petty grievances. "It is for a free trade union. This is the idea: the worker can go and ask for his rights and do it while he is protected against the red bourgeoisie."
And of course that is why you were so brutally treated: Poland's communist regime understood very well that an independent union is not only an economic organization but a political one -- and the only way it can exist and flourish is in a democratic framework. You exposed the pretensions of the communist regime to be a government of, by and for the people when you forced the regime to show it could not tolerate an institution that was indeed of, by and for the people -- the trade union movement.
So you and Solidarity have shown us that free trade unions are necessary to building a democracy, and you've shown us that unions can't flourish outside a democracy. I wish I could also thank you for demonstrating that trade unions are necessary to preserve a democracy, but we must establish that for ourselves. Some people here think trade unions are no longer needed. They've done their job -- and thanks. But as long as our society lasts, there will be issues and struggles in which the organized voice of workers will be vital. Human rights are not won once and for all, and neither is democracy.
You, Lech Walesa, have a democracy to build. We have one to sustain. May we be of help to each other.