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

Robert Brier

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781108478526
• eBook ISBN:
  9781108568524
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Series information
• Title page
• Copyright information
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Geographical Regions
• Note on Cited Primary Documents
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 The Rise of Dissent in Poland
• 2 Dissent and the Politics of Human Rights
• 3 The Principle of Noninterference 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 Walesa, 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
• Bibliography
• Index