The lesson of Poland’s Solidarity movement is a hopeful one of human triumph against political repression

The anniversary has been marked around the world, including in Belfast, as the picture opposite shows.

The city hall was lit up, while elsewhere a Solidarity logo was projected on to the MAC theatre.

Belfast City Hall is now lit with such frequency that the gesture is in danger of losing its impact. Yet this was an event worth marking.

Communism was one of mankind’s many disastrous authoritarian systems and blighted Russia and eastern Europe for most of the last century — an era that also saw other horrific ideologies including fascism and racism.

It is telling to remember that Solidarity was a trade union, when such organisations were otherwise banned in the eastern bloc. Thus unions in other countries including Northern Ireland have been remembering the event.

Unions have often been championed by the political left and viewed with suspicion on the right, yet Solidarity became a movement that inspired people around the world, perhaps above all conservatives in western nations.

When extremely repressive regimes get a grip on power, labels of the left and right become almost meaningless. The Nazis in Germany were the so-called ‘national socialist’ party and the communists in China have ended up presiding over one of the most unequal capitalist systems in the world.

Solidarity helped bring about the collapse of communism in Poland, and now some of the threats to legal independence and the rule of law there come from the political right.

If there is any lesson from all this it is that freedom and responsible governance are fragile arrangements and ones that are always under threat. We have to, first, recognise that fragility and, second, try to protect it.

But the lesson of Solidarity is a hopeful one, as are many of the lessons from brutal systems. Ultimately they almost always fail, when enough brave people stand up against them.

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