8 - Lech Wałęsa, the Symbolism of the Nobel Peace Prize, and Global Human Rights Culture

Summary

This chapter discusses central features of 1980s global human rights culture by discussing the political impact and the symbolism of the 1983 Nobel Peace Prize for the Polish trade union leader Lech Wałęsa. On the one hand, the chapter shows, the Prize helped keep Wałęsa and human rights violations on the international agenda. It inducted the Polish labor activist into a pantheon of unassailable icons of the global struggle for human rights. On the other hand, however, the rhetoric surrounding the Prize flattened the domestic politics of Wałęsa's struggle. The mass movement he was a member of and the material and political goals for which it struggled were collapsed into a stylized image of Wałęsa as someone struggling for transcendent values. This turned him and his movement into an empty signifier which political actors from the West could claim for different, even contradictory projects, as the chapter demonstrates by showing how both US Cold Warriors and West German peace activists claimed Wałęsa as an ally of their political projects.