The Polish Solidarity movement can be said to have begun on August 31, 1980, when an inter-enterprise strike committee in Gdańsk signed an agreement with the authorities granting the right to form independent trade unions in Poland. It is misleading to begin an analysis of Solidarity with that day, however. Strikes raged throughout Poland in the preceding weeks of that summer. A Pole became Pope of the Roman Catholic Church less than two years earlier, reinforcing the identity of nation and church. The previous decade was an economic roller coaster, with a boom in the first half of the 1970s and bust in the second. The technocratic spirit of that decade was a response to a death of ideology in the previous years, after the hopes of an anti-Stalinist communist reformation in 1956 yielded anti-Semitic and anti-intellectual maneuvers instead. And all of these Polish historical developments have taken place within a context of Russian/Soviet-Polish tension and global cold war.

It is impossible to consider adequately any social movement ex nihilo. This is the common historical critique of timeless sociology, but this charge has special power in the case of Solidarity. The movement was historically self-conscious, with its participants grounding their present struggles in those of the past. One particularly powerful example of this historical self-consciousness can be found in a document written by leading Solidarity activists that called for the formation of a self-governing republic.