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.
“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...”
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 4t 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.
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