About 1,000 people filled Stephens Auditorium Monday night, expecting to hear a Nobel Peace Prize winner deliver a speech about leadership, democracy and freedom.

They ended up in a question-and-answer session with Poland’s first democratically elected president, Lech Walesa.

Walesa, speaking through an interpreter, said it was possible for him to “monologue,” but he didn’t want to bore the audience.

Instead, Walesa said he wanted to speak about issues that concerned people in the audience.

“My intention is to use this meeting to the maximum,” he said, encouraging people to step to microphones planted in the main aisles.

Walesa said his purpose was to offer “another perspective” to “representatives of a superpower.”

“Poland is enriched with experience,” he said. “[We] see things in such a way . to help you in the future.”

Walesa, an expert on Polish perspective, became famous around the globe in 1980 when he scaled a shipyard wall of a Polish city, Gdansk. He delivered a speech that turned a laborers’ strike into a social revolution. He also led the labor union Solidarity, something unheard of in Communist-controlled Europe.

His work negotiating with Soviet leaders for democracy in Poland helped lead to the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the end of the Cold War.

For his work, Walesa won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983.

He became Poland’s first democratically elected president in 1990 by 74 percent of his country’s vote. Attempts in 1995 and 2000 to regain the office were unsuccessful. In 2000, he earned only 0.8 percent of the Polish vote.

One woman asked in Polish about why Poland has low unemployment.

“[There are] highly trained, highly qualified people . but we don’t have the means or the resources to put the potential to use,” he said. “We need economic [and] business partnership.”

Walesa encouraged a “New Generation Marshall Plan” to give economic aid to the people in Eastern Europe.

The original Marshall Plan, named for former Secretary of State John Marshall, gave economic relief to 17 western and southern European countries following World War II to reduce the growing appeal of communism and help prevent another world war.

Walesa said the new program would give a different boost to suffering countries.

“The whole idea . is that politicians should give money directly to western American businesses and people, with the condition the money is invested in post-communist countries,” he said.

Walesa said NATO should change to meet the different needs of the world as it enters “globalization.”

“We’ll always need organizations . like NATO,” he said. “We’ll need them . more when . progress puts us on a higher level of civilization.”

Walesa suggested transforming the United Nations and NATO into a “world government” as it moves toward a “globalized world.”

The audience was mainly composed of older people and very few college students. Still, his speech had quite an effect on some students.

“I thought his humor was awesome,” said Kristin Wenzel, junior in biology. “It really made him on our level. I related to it . And it’s hard to relate to another country.”

Julia Haas, junior in biology, said she had heard about Walesa in her high school German class.

“He talked about some really important issues,” she said. “I don’t think about that stuff very much. I really enjoyed listening to him.”