Revolution in the Cross’s Shadow: Solidarity as Performance

Abstract

The text is a fragment of a chapter from Marcin Kościelniak’s book Egoiści. Trzecia droga w kulturze polskiej lat 80 [Egoists. A Third Way in Polish Culture of the 1980s]. In the book, the author considers the first Solidarity movement in terms of its complex relationship with the Church and Catholicism, analysed at the level of signs and symbols it used, traditions it refered to, rhetoric it applied, as well as in the area of social practices and rituals it employed. Paying close attention to the extremely intense and almost universally accepted presence of the religious (and national-religious) discourse in Solidarity’s discourse, the author endeavours to problematize the widely accepted opinion of the first Solidarity as a universal, pluralistic, fully democratic movement. Viewing Solidarity as a cultural identity performance is at the same time an attempt at the genealogy of Polish modernity.