Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Search

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

1 results

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

  • Robert Brier
  • Book:
    Poland's Solidarity Movement and the Global Politics of Human Rights
    Published online:
    28 May 2021
    Print publication:
    10 June 2021, pp 173-185

  • 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.