Nobel winner says next decade crucial; moral leadership needed

Lech Walesa, a former shipyard worker who earned global gratitude for helping topple the communist bloc and ending the Cold War, said the United States may be the world’s military and economic leader but it no longer was its political and moral leader.

Nor is there one.

“The next five to 10 years are absolutely vital and crucial to the whole century that will follow. That’s why I appeal to you to be more committed, to participate more in order not to destroy the opportunity with which we are faced,” Walesa told a crowd of near capacity at the Lied Center, which seats 2,028.

Walesa received several standing ovations and laughs Thursday evening with his anecdotes about living in Poland during the Cold War. After a 25-minute speech, Walesa fielded questions for about 35 more minutes about the Cold War, Europe and globalization.

Then, Kansas University Chancellor Robert Hemenway gave him the Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics’ Dole Prize for Leadership.

“We stand upon an opportunity for peace and opportunity and prosperity throughout the whole world,” Walesa said during a news conference Thursday afternoon. But “we’re still unaware what political and economic systems should be adopted in the globalized world.

“A globalized world requires an order, and someone has to implement it,” he said. “Right now there is no one implementing it and controlling it.”

Walesa, winner of the 1983 Nobel Peace Prize, visited KU to receive his Dole Prize, which includes a $25,000 cash award.

Walesa predicted the current capitalist system would not withstand a globalized world. With 10 percent of the world’s population controlling 90 percent of the wealth, there are too few owners to defend the system from attack, he said.

“Right now, we need to answer very basic questions related to this new economic system,” he said.

Walesa became leader of the Solidarity labor movement that led the Poles out of communism and helped topple communism in Eastern Europe. He rose to Poland’s top post in 1990 and served as president until 1995.

Walesa spoke about his struggle.

“No one believed that the victory against communism was possible because it was a very powerful system,” he said. “We did win that war and showed to the world that it was possible.”

He spoke about how workers were the base of the movement.

“We said (to the Soviets): ‘If you love us so dearly, you have to work for us, because we give up working for you anymore,'” he said. “And, as you know, this was a successful move.”

It is now a new era of the Internet, information and globalization, Walesa said, and there is a need for new solutions about how to live together in this new world.

Walesa said he encouraged young people to see the beauty of the world, the opportunities and the responsibilities.

“You can introduce new order to the world,” he said. “You can introduce a kind of system that can make the world better for you.”

But there are unanswered questions.

“I, too, am traveling across the world trying to find the answer to these questions,” he said.

The Dole Prize for Leadership previously has been given to former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and former U.S. Sen. George McGovern.

-Staff writer George Diepenbrock contributed to this story.