ABSTRACT
On 18 September 1990, an illustrious circle met at Warsaw’s Senatorska Street in the palace of Archbishop Józef Glemp, cardinal and, since 1981, primate of Poland. In the summer of 1990, the political landscape of Poland began to take shape, with old and new parties forming on ideological grounds. On the last day of December, a constitutional revision declared the rule of law in Poland. The commitment to socialism was excised, as was the leading role of the Communist Party. Four decades of communist dictatorship, of course, were not to be done away with by a simple stroke of the pen. The notion of an ‘unfinished revolution’, which manifested in Poland as a thick line, and the subsequent call for radical purification of the political sphere first emerged from concerns over marginalization rather than from cool-headed analysis of political developments.
