EXCLUSIVE - We interview British historian and journalist Timothy Garton-Ash in the run-up to June’s twentieth anniversary of the first democratic elections in Poland.

Click on the icon above to listen to the interview. Timothy Garton Ash spoke to John Beauchamp.

To many, Timothy Garton Ash needs no introduction. Currently a professor of European Studies at Oxford University and columnist for many of the UK’s top newspapers, he was heavily involved with the Solidarity opposition during the 1980s and witnessed many of the historical events first hand.

In the days counting down to Poland’s first partially free elections on the 4^t June 1989, Solidarity members were not too sure of what the future would bring. Twenty years on, much has changed. But has Poland really ‘returned to Europe’? John Beauchamp, our correspondent in Kraków, interviewed the professor after a lecture he gave, in the southern Polish city,  on the events of 1989:

Polish Radio-External Service: Going back to the days running up to the elections on 4  June 1989, what were the expectations of the Solidarity leaders for the first partially-free elections within the Warsaw Pact?

Timothy Garton - Ash:  You have to remember that nobody knew what would happen next and nobody knew what the Soviet Union would accept. The most optimistic expectation had been free elections in four years’ time. Now, Solidarity had, as it were, the problem of success, and the question was: could you achieve a non-communist prime minister in a deal which, eventually, Adam Michnik [prominent opposition activist and now Editor-in-Chief of Gazeta Wyborcza] summarised as ‘Your president, Our premier’. So we’ll get [General] Jaruzelski as president, [Tadeusz] Mazowiecki as prime minister. But the idea that you then go off and make capitalism, join NATO and the European Union - nobody thought that at the time.

You were following the opposition back then. What were your thoughts on the Round Table agreements and the elections that followed?

It was the most extraordinary year of my life. It was as if something wonderful happened every week […] I believe to this day that the Round Table - that is to say, the negotiated revolution - was a particularly Polish discovery, and is in a way Poland’s gift from 1989 to the world.

Lech Wałęsa, as leader of Solidarity and already a Nobel prize winner by that time, was obviously key to the Round Table talks and the elections. But who for you was key to the final outcome of the events of 1989?

Wałęsa was indispensible during the whole of the 1980s. But actually the Round Table talks were as much the work of intellectuals such as [the late] Bronisław Geremek and others involved in the detailed negotiations, in making what was, let’s be clear, a complex compromise with the communist authorities. When I say ‘compromise’, in English this can be a positive term, and I think this was a positive compromise.

The Velvet Revolution [in Czechoslovakia] made defunct the very definition of revolution and the events of 1989 break the paradigm set perhaps by the French Revolution exactly 200 years earlier. How did this happen?

Through a long-learning process we got to the point where you had non-violent revolutions. For 200 years that would have been a contradiction in terms. By trial and error, with much bloodshed, we reach the point now where you can have a fundamental change of system without blood flowing in the gutters.

A popular slogan back in 1989 was ‘Return to Europe’: how would you comment on Europe’s response to the break-up of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact, and were Poland and other countries in the region ready to embrace what the rest of Europe had to offer?

I think embrace is the wrong way to put it. I think Poland almost embraced too much of western consumer society. I think you should take over the fundamentals of a good system, but I actually, in a way, wish that Poland had kept more specific features of its own culture, and I think that’s a challenge for each individual country to combine the basics of a well-functioning liberal democracy with characteristics of its own culture and society.

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Biography - Timothy Garton Ash (born 1955), is an English historian and professor of European studies at Oxford University. He has written many books and essays on Polish and central European history. In The Polish Revolution: Solidarity, 1980–82 (Scribner 1984) he gave a vivid, eye-witness account of the August strikes at the Gdansk shipyard which have birth to the Solidarity Trade Union. In  The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of 1989 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague (Random House, 1990) he wrote about the momentous events of 1989 and the fall of communism in central and eastern Europe. In 2005, he was voted onto a list of the 100 Top World’s Intellectuals by Prospect (UK) magazine.  He lives with his Polish wife, Danuta, and two children in Oxford, England.