The Observer versus the Participant

The people that you were describing were identifying with what was going on in Europe but were excluded from participation in the process, and you contributed to their sensibilities, helping to shape events, in a way. Is that fair?

Yes. One wouldn't want to overstate one's own contribution, but I think I was, to some extent, an interpreter of the Central European experience to the West, and to some extent vice versa. Even the most sophisticated opposition leaders like Vaclav Havel or Bronislaw Geremek or Adam Michnik had an idealistic and almost idealized picture of Europe. Europe was a Holy Grail. "Once we get back to Europe, all will be well and all manner of things will be well."

What were your feelings as you began to realize the impact of your writings?

Well, that's a difficult question. Satisfaction, obviously, and a sense of responsibility and a slight sense of danger.

I think there's always a danger when a writer, a political writer, begins to have an influence. It's not only the danger of getting too big for your boots, in a simple way, of getting an inflated notion of your own importance. You remember Thomas Mann in exile said, "Where I am, is Germany," which is a magnificent but somewhat hubristic statement. But specifically, once you become an actor, a political actor, you start to behave like a politician and you trim your analysis to suit your policy. You write what you want to see happen and I was very, very conscious of that danger, of always separating description and analysis from prescription.

And were you your only check on yourself? What were the other balances to keep you from stepping over this line that you had defined?

Well, there was a very healthy counter-balance, which was a very skeptical and even hostile Western policy community which, as we said a moment ago, was living quite happily in the divided Europe of Yalta and with NATO and so on. At every conference one went to, people did not want to hear that people in Eastern Europe were not satisfied with the Yalta order and were going to change it and wanted to change it fairly fast. So that was a pretty effective control.

I should say, if I may, that I did once slightly step outside this role which I had set myself of chronicler and analyst, but not prophet or politician. If you remember, the rebirth of Solidarity in the 1980s in Poland began with some strikes in the Lenin Shipyard in May of 1988. I managed to get into the shipyard, climbed over the shipyard wall, and got into the headquarters. There was Lech Walesa asleep on the floor. I woke him up, at which point someone came into the room and said, "An English Lord is sitting in the vicarage, he has a message from Mrs. Thatcher." And the message was, did Lech Walesa have a message for Mrs. Thatcher? Lech Walesa turned to his aide and said, "Look Andrzej, I'm much too busy. Can you write this?" Andrzej Celinski turned to me and said, "I don't know what to say to Mrs. Thatcher." And so I sat down at an old typewriter in the occupied Lenin Shipyard and wrote a plangent appeal for help from Lech Walesa to Margaret Thatcher -- which is not strictly the role of the neutral observer.

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