Poland’s Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski last week bcame the first Western Foreign Minister to visit Benghazi and meet the anti-Gaddafi leadership.

Here at Project Syndicate are some of his conclusions:

Peoples in transition from authoritarian rule – peaceful in Poland in 1989, bloody in Libya today – grapple with decisions that determine their fate for decades. How should the former regime’s worst wrongdoers and security police, with their insidious archives, be treated? Should the former ruling party be banned? How can civilian, democratic control of the army and police be secured? What role should religion play in public affairs? Should the constitution establish a presidential or parliamentary system?

The former communist world made those choices 20 years ago. But very different choices – for better and for worse – were made in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, in the Baltic states, across the former Soviet Union, in Central Asia, and in East Germany. The results form a crucial database of experience. Today’s Arab reformers thus can draw on our successes – and avoid our mistakes…

… Around the table sat improbable allies: some had been prominent officials in Qaddafi’s regime; others had spent many years in prison under sentence of death. They were united in recognizing that their country deserved a new start. I was reminded of Poland’s “roundtable” in 1989, when Solidarity sat with the ruling communists to negotiate the end of the regime.

Following this visit, my message to European leaders is twofold. First, Libya’s TNC is the best bet we can make now for Libya’s future. Its leaders are cooperating in an effort to bring about real reform in a way that was unthinkable a few months ago. They deserve the world’s energetic support.

Second, while Europe has much to offer its North African neighbors in terms of financial support, advice, and training, the region needs to find its own path to freedom and success.

Let us approach this task in the best spirit of European solidarity, but also with a certain humility. Europe’s former communist countries can make a special contribution to the process of transition across North Africa.

Above all, we understand that sustained reform requires assuming responsibility by mobilizing the energy of one’s own people, not relying on well-intentioned but often ill-focused outside help…

That last point must be right. Look at what resources the EU has poured into North Africa in the past decade, in the misguided hope of maintaining ‘stability’. Or indeed into Bosnia.

Libya is potentially a very wealthy country. Where the EU – soon to be led by the Polish Presidency – can help is by drawing directly on the experience of the former communist countries and thereby working closely with sensible Libyans on the  sequencing and sound constitutional principles of the Technology of Transition.