in
Prague in 1990 The survival of Solidarity was an unprecedented event not only in Poland, a
satellite state of the
USSR ruled in practice by a one-party
Communist state, but the whole of the
Eastern bloc. It meant a break in the hard-line stance of the Communist
Polish United Workers' Party, which had bloodily ended a 1970 protest with machine-gun fire (killing over thirty and injuring over 1,000), and the broader Soviet Communist government in the Eastern Bloc, which had quelled both the 1956
Hungarian Uprising and the 1968
Prague Spring with Soviet-led invasions. Solidarity's influence led to the intensification and spread of anti-Communist ideals and movements throughout the countries of the Eastern Bloc, weakening their Communist governments. As a result of the
Round Table Agreement between the Polish government and the Solidarity-led opposition, elections were held in Poland on 4 June 1989, in which the opposition was allowed to field candidates against the Communist party—the first free elections in any Soviet bloc country. A new upper chamber (the Senate) was created in the Polish parliament and all of its 100 seats were contestable in the election, as well as one-third of the seats in the more important lower chamber (the Sejm). Solidarity won 99 of the 100 Senate seats and all 161 contestable seats in the Sejm—a victory that also triggered a chain reaction across the Soviet Union's satellite states, leading to a mostly bloodless chain of
anti-communist events in
Central and Eastern Europe This was despite the fact that
Arthur Scargill, president of the British
National Union of Mineworkers had been highly critical of Solidarity, condemning it as an "anti-socialist organization which desires the overthrow of a socialist state". In 2005, the trade union
Solidarity – The Union for British Workers was created by the far-right
British National Party in honour of the original Polish union. During the late 1980s, Solidarity had attempted to establish connections with the
internal resistance to apartheid in South Africa. However, according to Wałęsa, attempts to develop links between the two forces were hampered by their geographical distance, the dearth of media coverage of events outside Poland's borders and especially in South Africa. As a result, relatively little engagement took place between the two groups. In late 2008, several democratic opposition groups in the Russian Federation formed
a Solidarity movement. In the United States, the
American Solidarity Party (formerly the Christian Democratic Party USA), a
Christian democratic political party, attributes its namesake to Solidarity. In a 2011 essay "The Jacobin Spirit" in the American magazine
Jacobin, philosopher
Slavoj Žižek called Solidarność' one of the "free spaces at a distance from state power" that used "defensive violence" to protect itself from state control. The notion of "defensive violence" runs in the vein of ideas postulated by
Alain Badiou. In a conflict summary commissioned by the
International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, Maciej Bartkowski wrote that "Solidarity always pursued its political objectives with a high degree of nonviolent discipline as well as self-imposed limitations." ==Organization==