Bronislaw Geremek was one of the remarkable Central European intellectuals catapulted by the struggle against Communism into dramatic political activity. An academic specialist in medieval French history, fond of pipe-smoking, joking and tweed jackets, Geremek became a key adviser to the Solidarity trade union leader Lech Walesa during the sustained 1980s challenge to communist rule in Poland. As that rule came to an end in mid-1989, several months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Geremek helped to negotiate a tricky but, in the end, bloodless transition, which added greatly towards the momentum for change in Soviet-dominated Europe as a whole.

Geremek then became a central figure in Poland’s early and turbulent democratic politics, as the euphoria of revolution was replaced by hard bargaining over economic and social issues. Such developments in many ways left more intellectual figures like Geremek behind, but he returned to prominence in the late 1990s as Polish Foreign Minister, negotiating his country’s accession to Nato and its progress towards EU membership. Subsequently he was an influential member of the European Parliament, arguing for a properly pan-European and historically-based vision of the future. The European Commission president, José Manuel Barroso, praised him as “a European of exceptional greatness”.

Bronislaw Geremek was born in Warsaw in 1932 to Jewish parents — his grandfather had been a rabbi in Cracow. The Nazi occupation of Poland made his later childhood perilous. Both his parents died in the Holocaust, but he was rescued from the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943 shortly before its destruction, and managed to evade detection in the countryside until the end of the war when he began his historical studies in Warsaw.

He joined the Polish Communist Party — “I allowed myself to be seduced by the socialist ideal,” he said later. Part-membership allowed him to move in the mid-1950s to Paris, where he became a specialist in the labour markets and underworld groups of medieval Paris, and great admirer of the Annales school of French historians. He became a thoroughgoing Francophile, heading the Polish Cultural Institute in Paris. He also spent time in Washington, before returning to the Academy of Sciences in Warsaw.

His attitude towards communist society became more sceptical however, and he left the party after 1968 and the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia, when the Polish authorities violently dispersed protest meetings in Warsaw and blamed unrest on “Zionist” agitators — such anti-Semitism lurked constantly in the background of communist commentary.

Geremek concentrated initially on his academic work but became drawn into dissident activity through the “flying university” seminars held secretly by those trying to evade the dead hand of official control. “If I were in the West,” he once said, “I would probably not be involved with politics because it is simply an exercise in power. Here in Poland, however, an intellectual must be engaged, because we’re fighting for the very right to think.”

In August 1980, in a moment which changed his life profoundly, Geremek found himself driving to Gdansk with an intellectuals’ statement of support for striking shipyard workers. He had been chosen to deliver the statement as he among the intellectuals owned the best car, a Volvo. When he made contact with the strike leader, Lech Walesa, he was persuaded to stay and advise the trade unionists, who felt they needed help in articulating and pressing their demands.

Geremek’s relationship with “the workers” was not always easy — the cultural gap was large, and Walesa was liable to sudden outbursts of anti-intellectual rancour. But the two admired each other’s contrasting qualities, and Geremek became a key adviser to Walesa as they tried to plot a course from trade-union activism towards a more fundamental challenge to communist rule.

This made Geremek a prominent enemy of the Warsaw Government. When martial law was declared in 1981 he was detained and attacked on state radio as a “Jewish chauvinist”. More official harassment followed, his passport was confiscated and in 1985 he was dismissed from the Academy of Sciences. Despite all this, Geremek, aided by his historical perspective and his growing contacts within Solidarity, persisted in thinking about a non-communist future. He also made secret contact with other dissident movements such as those in Czechoslovakia.

When, in mid-1989, the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev removed its implicit veto and the Polish Government conceded talks with Solidarity on what was assumed to be limited political reform, Geremek found the formulae which edged the talks on without alarming the Communist leadership into sudden rejection. The British historian Timothy Garton Ash, eyewitness to these events, described Geremek the historian-cum-negotiator as “a delightful mixture of Macaulay and Machiavelli”. Unlike some intellectuals who struggled to reach a conclusion in their deliberations, Geremek knew how to be businesslike, much as he also enjoyed epic philosophical discussions when there was time.

Eventually, it was agreed to hold elections in June 1989. To widespread astonishment, Solidarity won handsomely, and communist rule in Poland was, in effect, dead. Geremek was elected for a rural constituency and was one of those considered by Walesa for appointment as prime minister.

In the end Tadeusz Mazowiecki was thought less of a rival to Walesa and, as a devout Catholic, more palatable to the Church hierarchy. Geremek became instead a Solidarity leader in parliament. It was a fraught period as the dramatic symbolism of 1989 was replaced by hard bargaining over issues such as the legacy of communist rule, the speed of economic transformation and the often acrimonious division of the broad anti-communist movement into its different political constituencies. Walesa became increasingly unpredictable, suspicious of the thinkers who dared to challenge his brand of “common sense”.

But Geremek always looked beyond Poland to broader international challenges, offering advice on how others could make the transition from totalitarian rule in a non-violent way, and trying to persuade his fellow countrymen not to follow their more destructive nationalistic urges over issues such as German reunification. From 1997 to 2000 he served as Poland’s Foreign Minister, and had the huge satisfaction of signing his country’s accession to Nato in 1999. “Poland forever returns to where she had always belonged: the free world,” he said at the ceremony.

He was also keen to speed accession to the European Union, and pursued his EU interest later as an MEP. He was heavily involved in debates about a new EU constitution, insisting that “Europe badly needs a new political framework”. At the same time his historian’s wisdom told him that “after creating Europe, we must now create Europeans”.

His mood must have been mixed in recent times, enjoying to the full the opportunities for travel, political life and free thought that had been denied for so long, yet aware that in Poland as elsewhere the post-Cold War Europe had not always developed as he might have wished.

And the past had not been banished completely. There was a particularly bitter row with the Kaczynski brothers’ Polish Government over the issue of alleged collaboration with the Communist secret police. Geremek, although never accused of collaboration, refused to sign a declaration now required of all kinds of public figures that they had never collaborated. But whatever the contemporary manipulation of such matters, Geremek the historian knew that the extraordinary transition of 1989 in which he had played such a central role, the first crack forced by Poles in the Soviet bloc edifice, was what, in the long term, really mattered.

His wife died in 2004. He is survived by his two sons.

Bronislaw Geremek, historian and politician, was born on March 6, 1932. He died in a car crash on July 13, 2008, aged 76