This chapter assesses the question whether dissident human rights activism had an impact on the end of the Cold War and the fall of Communism. Focusing on the situation in Poland, it argues that human rights activism had a threefold impact on the end of the Cold War: First, the Polish activists’ status as human rights icons provided them with the authority to be the government’s interlocutors at round table talks which, even if accidentally, triggered the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe. Second, human rights activism also made sure that the West, and especially the United States, provided material support for the Polish opposition movement thus helping sustain it through the 1980s. Third, because of dissident demands to uphold human rights in Eastern Europe, there were strong external pressures on Poland to implement reforms. Yet by contrasting the Western responses to the imposition of martial law in Poland in 1981 to Western behavior in the late 1980s, the chapter shows that Western human rights policies were neither the automatic result of the 1970s human rights revolution nor of Cold War policies but of an activism that occurred largely during the 1980s.

This chapter discusses how the book's main themes relate to the historiography of human rights. It makes four points: First, it argues that the history of the Solidarity movement shows how precarious and contested human rights remained in international politics well into the 1980s, a finding that challenges the view of the 1970s as the final breakthrough of human rights. Second, this chapter argues that the history of Polish dissent and of its supporters in France and the USA reveals discourses in which human rights were not seen as an alternative to politics so much as a means of creating a new kind of politics. Even the overtly antipolitical imagery of groups like Amnesty International merely concealed a profound symbolic politics of human rights. Third, the findings of the book do not suggest that the origins of human rights really lie in the 1980s but that the entire quest for a point of origin is misguided. The history of human rights, rather, is one of their continuous competitions with other universalisms, their repeated reinvention, and adaptation to new causes. Fourth, this chapter argues that the book's findings show that human rights had a crucial impact on the end of the Cold War.