I. INTRODUCTION

Since its inception, the East and Central Europe Program (ECEP) has sought to bring scholars in East and Central Europe, Russia, and Eurasia into the broader discourse of the academic community of the world at large and to help universities in post-communist countries build a viable system of education and research in the social sciences.

One of the most successful programs through which we have connected scholars from the region with each other and with their American counterparts is our Democracy & Diversity Summer Graduate Institute. In the course of the last five years, the Cracow Institute has established a reputation throughout the region for offering one of the best opportunities for rigorous study, careful analysis, and open discussion of the most critical issues of democracy and democratization. Promising young scholars - junior faculty members - from over 25 countries, who are committed to strengthening civil society, democratic institutions, and educational reform, compete for the chance to participate in this program. And it is deeply rewarding for us to see young Croats and Serbs, Russians and Ukrainians, Czechs and Slovaks working together on finding answers to the hard questions of transformation processes taking place in the region.

This year, thanks to our Institute's supporters, we were able to add a new dimension to the Institute, by bringing participants from South Africa, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Moldova, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan to Cracow. Through their presence and participation, each significantly expanded the debate taking place at the Institute and offered strikingly new but convergent comparative perspectives. It forced all the different constituencies of the participants to rethink their preconceived notions concerning the societies and people they had never encountered.

II. PARTICIPANTS

The participants of the Democracy & Diversity Institute represent a great diversity of national and ethnic backgrounds. The whole student body was comprised of 53 students from 23 countries, 30 cities and 24 Institutions. There were 5 participants from the USA, 1 from Armenia, 1 from Azerbaijan, 2 from Belarus, 2 from Bulgaria, 2 from the Czech Republic, 3 from Croatia, 2 from Estonia, 1 from Greece, 4 from Hungary, 2 from Kazakhstan, 2 from Kyrgyzstan, 1 from Lithuania, 2 from Macedonia, 1 from Mexico, 1 from Moldova, 6 from Poland, 1 from Peru, 4 from Romania, 3 from Serbia, 2 from Slovakia, 2 from South Africa , and 3 from Ukraine.

Our intention was not only to attract junior faculty from hitherto uncharted corners of the East and Central Europe Program's globe. We have always striven to attract promising participants who, in addition to academic excellence, have shown leadership in roles that go beyond the traditional bounds of academia, and which help to build and consolidate the realms of civil society in their home countries.

In this vein, our participants included: Irina Balta, a journalist from Moldova who is studying in Romania; Elena Gapova, who designed a gender studies course in Belarus, and Tiyani Mohlaba, a graduate student at South Africa's University of Witwatersrand who, along with the South African university administration, has been working on creating structures within the university to increase democratic participation; Lyaila Ivatova, a young Kazakh professor of political science, and Jasminka Dimitrovska, a Macedonian who has been involved in the Yugoslav peace movement in Belgrade; Kathleen Blank, a law student at the University of Baltimore who also works as a conflict resolution specialist for community-based projects in her community; and Iona Onica, a member of the judicial bench in Romania.

The multicultural mosaic of young scholars involved in different aspects of building civil society is one of the attributes that makes participation in the Cracow Institute a unique and refreshing experience. In class, over lunch, in the evenings - in fact 24 hours a day - participants interact with others from various places in the world. This environment stimulates comparisons and augments what is learned in class. As one student wrote:

One exciting experience I think all of us in Przegorzaly had to go through was the result of a double challenge: how to explain what is going on in our country in a matter-of-fact way, while at the same time suggesting that our approach is individual and may not be representative. It seems to me that those who tried to be more personal, consequently more reflexive or critical, were more successful in giving a coherent and complex presentation. Starting in the classroom, the discussions went on for many hours - mostly in the dining room - and their intensity was due to the professors' ability to create an encouraging atmosphere which kept our curiosity alive.

- Roza Vajda - Hungary

Discussions, both in and out of the classroom, helped participants re-evaluate their thinking and create a new, thicker layer of intellectual and social experience. As the two South African participants observed:

It is impossible to write about the Institute without mentioning the wonderful group of people and the many different countries they represented. I was really surprised at how much I learnt not only about the various countries but above all about the wide variety of peoples of Europe itself. In my country there is a tendency to see Europe as this homogenous blob and all who arrive at our shores from this continent are vaguely dubbed : "European". Soon enough I realized - from the discussion on the situation of Gypsies and Jews in Europe - that everything is not so clear cut. This spurred my already enthusiastic interest in matters of nationalism, race, and ethnicity, which in my view are some of the most curious phenomena of our time.

- Brendan Boyce - South Africa

The diverse student delegation was very central in the sense that each one of us was met with highly rigorous intellectual challenges to revisit and look critically into his or her ideas on society, politics, and culture. Ideas which were centered around narrow nationalism(s).

- Tiyani Mohlaba - South Africa

III. CURRICULUM

The five principal seminars at the Institute dealt with theoretical and practical issues faced not only by societies in transition, but also by established democracies. Each seminar met daily and a total of 14 sessions were conducted during the three-week Institute, making the seminars equal to a semester worth of work. Additional activities at the Cracow Institute included the Policy as Democracy Workshop, the Curricular/Teaching Workshop, guest lectures, and field trips. The seminars, workshops, and lectures were all designed to introduce and expose participants to the newest texts in the social sciences and issues which have not yet made it into the curricula of many universities in East and Central Europe and the former Soviet Union.

Seminars

Citizenship & Democratic Politics Today

Professor David Plotke, Department of Political Science, Graduate Faculty

After communism and the cold war, problems in established democracies and in post-communist countries overlap enough to make possible a common discussion. This course explored common problems in diverse democratic societies today, using the idea and practice of citizenship as a lens. The course considered what it should mean to be a citizen in a democratic polity. How much should citizens participate in politics and with what aims? What forms should their participation take (political parties, interest groups, movements) and how should citizens be represented in political decision-making? In this manner the class considered several problems that now appear in North America and Western Europe, East and Central Europe, and elsewhere, regarding participation, political values, immigration, and competing identities.

Problems in Democratic Culture

Professor Jeffrey Goldfarb, Department of Sociology, Graduate Faculty

Political correctness, affirmative action, multiculturalism, and identity politics are controversial topics in the United States today. In this course these contemporary topics were analyzed as part of the on-going struggle for a democratic culture. The controversies were considered in historical and theoretical contexts which involve on-going attempts to address the problems and promises of democracy in America. It was a primary task of the class to consider how these issues relate to the pressing problems of the new democracies of East and Central Europe. Readings included de Tocqueville's Democracy in America and a selection of Hannah Arendt's essays, as well as texts by Stephan Carter, Andrew Hacker, Toni Morrison, Robert Bellah, Patricia Williams, and Paul Berman.

Theories of Gender in Society

Professor Ann Snitow, Committee on Gender Studies and Feminist Theory, Graduate Faculty

Now in its fifth year, this course keeps changing to include developing debates, from both East and West, about the ways in which gender structures social and political life. This summer, the course introduced a wide range of discourses about male and female as key variables in both private and public experience. Students discussed a variety of feminist movements - both their theories and practices - including a critical assessment of the current globalization of feminist ideas and action.

The Making of State and Society: Israel and Ukraine

Professor Shlomo Avineri, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel

Professor Bohdan Krawchenko, Kiev-Mohyla Academy, Kiev, Ukraine

This course compared state-building processes in Ukraine and Israel and examined the variety of societal forces that shape them. In the case of Israel the course tried, on a comparative basis, to delineate the specific ingredients of nation-building under the conditions of dispersion, lack of territoriality and powerlessness. The current challenges facing Israel in the transition from war to peace were discussed. In the case of Ukraine the course focused on the challenges of state-building in the period of independence and examine the problems of administrative reform, policy-making processes, corruption, and bureaucratic culture, while at the same time investigating the impact of societal actors and regional forces on the process.

South Africa's Transition in Comparative Perspective

Professor Stephen Gelb, University of Durban, South Africa

A growing body of literature seeks to understand democratic transition and consolidation by analyzing the experiences of Latin America and Eastern Europe. The interaction of economic and political reform with democratization is also an important recent area of research. This course located South Africa's abolition of apartheid in a comparative perspective, drawing on these international experiences. It focused upon the social and political processes which led to a negotiated transition to democracy. The class also examined current efforts to construct a post-apartheid society, economy, and state.

Seminar Impressions

Roza Vajda, one of our participants from Hungary captured the essence of the three courses she attended best. She wrote:

Jeff [Goldfarb] made us speak out our personal convictions and cooperate in marking the field of the conversations. Old views were challenged and new ideas were born, and the assets of democracy were examined critically instead of being taken for granted. These processes and practices, I think, helped us a lot in establishing a personal relationship to democratic ideals.

David [Plotke] "used" us as actors whose common performance was supposed to demonstrate what is at stake in certain problematic situations. This game allowed us to be impartial and openminded about serious political and legal issues democracies must face.

Ann's [Ann Snitow] situation was extremely demanding, since the students in the gender course had very different interests: some of them were practiceoriented, eager to know how to use the ideas provided by this field of studies, while others wanted to see how these ideas were constituted, and what the social scientific theories behind them are. Thanks to the careful selection of the reading material, and to the combination of university seminar with "consciousness-raising group" meetings, we got not only what we had expected, but even more.

We received many letters expressing similar sentiments.

The course on gender was completely new for me and I took it mainly out of curiosity. However, having met Professor Ann Snitow, I was impressed by her personality and I also found the topics very interesting. She successfully selected them and created such a sincere and open atmosphere that every student in her course was eager to participate in discussions and express his/her opinions on issues which were considered taboo not a long time ago in many of our countries.]

-Victoria Gryschenko - Ukraine

I enjoyed David Plotke's class a lot. It was flexible and as a teacher Prof. Plotke involved all the students in the debates by personalizing the subject and by applying interactive methods.

- Oana-Valentina Suciu - Romania

Professor David Plotke brought to the participants' attention to key problems of contemporary society. The profound pedagogic skills made his lectures interesting. During the seminars, Prof. Plotke managed to erect a "bridge" between himself and the students, and this made possible their active participation in class.

- Vugar Seidov - Azerbaijan

The great thing about the Cracow Institute was that we were expected to move beyond the boundaries between our respective "fields" and deliberate as both academics and citizens. My best classroom memories (especially in Jeff Goldfarb's class) concern these very moments when we strongly disagreed about something and then proceeded to defend our convictions with more or less sustained arguments.

- Jacek Kucharczyk - Poland

Every year the Democracy & Diversity Institute conducts one or two classes with guest scholars from outside the Graduate Faculty. In 1996 we featured two seminars: The Making of State and Society taught by Professors Shlomo Avineri and Bohdan Krawchenko, and South Africa's Transition in Comparative Perspective taught by Stephen Gelb. Our idea was to expose students to three very different countries undergoing state and nation building processes. The comparison proved to be very fruitful. Not only did the classes provide participants with an in-depth look at Israel, Ukraine, and South Africa, but it became a unique laboratory of the very phenomenon of social and political transitions and how three countries - in dissimilar circumstances - embarked on a similar task of building either a new state (Israel, Ukraine) or a new democratic society (South Africa).

I learned many new things in Cracow about Israel, Ukraine, and South Africa, which helped me understand the changes East and Central Europe has undergone over the past six years. I was surprised, for example, by the fact that democrats in South Africa came from the left, while in East and Central Europe, democrats came from the right.

- Vit Novotny - Czech Republic

I learned a lot about Ukraine, Israel, and South Africa, and I think it is important for East Europeans to know what is happening outside of East and Central Europe so that people get an idea of similar experiences elsewhere which we can apply in our countries.

- Panos Vallianatos - Greece

Professor Bohdan Krawchenko and Professor Shlomo Avineri's class on comparing state making processes in Ukraine and Israel provided a unique historical comparison. The class helped to differentiate two specific cases and showed how international context, internal administrative structures, cultural norms, and economic pressures influence state making processes. As Bohdan Krawchenko remarked:

It was a good opportunity for me to talk about Ukraine, and I hope it was a good opportunity for students as well. When we talk about democracy in the region, I think it's fairly important that they get a discussion of a specific country, so that they can enrich themselves. A very big problem in Central and Eastern Europe is that people tend to know more about American democracy than they do the problems of transitions of a country next door.

The class on South Africa also provided a unique opportunity for many students to learn about a country they had little knowledge of, directly from South African citizens who are actively involved in the transformation process taking place there.

For me it was a unique opportunity to learn about South Africa and to engage with people from there in a conversation about the complexities of South African society. It was not like reading a book where there is little information beyond the facts written in the text. In Cracow, I could read about South Africa and then discuss what I had just read with citizens of the country.

- Anna Sosnowska - Poland

Stephen Gelb himself wrote us recently about the class and South African participation at the Institute:

In my view the experiment that we carried out - bringing the 2 South African students - was a great success. We know there was a momentary wobble in the middle, but it would have been amazing had there been no difficulties at all. And clearly by the end Tiyani had established himself as one of the "leaders" amongst the group. My sense was that the presence of the 2 people of color from a "non-American" background added an enormous amount to discussions about culture and difference inside and outside the classroom (as I felt did the presence of the 2 Peruvians). A further benefit of having the South Africans there, and the classroom sessions on South Africa, was to introduce the European students (and the Americans?) to the idea that Marxism has been a progressive force in some parts of the world, as opposed to their own experience of it as oppressive and stifling. The importance of this is not so much to try to resuscitate Marxism itself, but to make some points about the plasticity of ideologies and the need to understand ideologies in a political and cultural context, rather than as abstract formula.

Workshops

Policy as Democracy

This summer's Policy as Democracy workshop was led by Elaine Zimmerman, Executive Director, Connecticut Commission on Children. As in previous summers, it was designed to introduce students to the practical side of policy-making, showing how to turn good ideas into legislation, help legislative proposals become laws, and devise ways to implement new programs. In contrast to last year however, this summer's Policy as Democracy workshop tried to focus the discussion on specific policy areas. The program of the workshop was as follows:

Monday, August 5 Overview of Public Policy

Elaine Zimmerman

Tuesday, August 6 Child and Family Policy

Elaine Zimmerman

Wednesday, August 7 Environmental Policy

Guest Lecturers - Adam Gula (Polish Foundation for Energy) and Lawrence Markel (Vice President of Electrotek Concepts)

Thursday, August 8 Municipal Policy: What Cities and Communities Can Do

Elaine Zimmerman

Friday, August 9 Building and Sustaining Effective Policy - Tools for Democracy

Guest Lecturer - Sondra Myers (Connecticut College, Civic Engagement in Emerging Democracies)

For reading material, students were given Policy as Democracy, the policy workbook designed and developed specifically for this workshop by ECEP in collaboration with Elaine Zimmerman. The Policy as Democracy workbook is composed of 13 chapters examining various policy areas, including family policy, environmental policy, health care policy, municipal policy, etc. The chapters contain texts solicited especially for the workbook from well known policy experts and practitioners, as well as other texts they recommended or considered useful in their daily work.

In addition, every participant of the workshop received a complementary copy of the Democracy is a Discussion handbook edited by Sondra Myers and published recently with the support of USIA. The handbook provides texts, discussion questions, and a bibliography, along with practical tips for organizing and conducting discussions about democracy and citizenship. The participants had a chance to talk about the handbook with Sondra Myers, who joined the Policy as Democracy Workshop as a guest lecturer. They examined the handbook and discussed its usefulness as a tool for teaching undergraduates and for introducing the concepts and principles of democracy through civic participation.

This is the third consecutive summer that we organized the Policy as Democracy Workshop which is consistently one of the most popular of the classes offered in Cracow. Elaine Zimmerman, the workshop coordinator, shared with us her observations about this summer's workshop:

The policy workshop seemed to go well. What was different this year was the students' hunger for policy. They are no longer grappling with what policy is - but how to do it and how to think critically about strategy.

The practical aspect of the policy workshop is what attracted most of the students. It provided them both with ideas as well as the tools to bring about change. One of its most enthusiastic participants was Tiyani Mohlaba from Johannesburg:

The policy workshop taught me to move away from the view which mystifies the making of public policy. I learned that through public policy, which is centered around ordinary people and their needs, one can make a difference in people's lives. Especially the lives of the disenfranchised, the poor, and the marginalised in society, because it is legislation. - Tiyani Mohlaba, South Africa

Another student wrote:

The Workshop on Public Policy was very interesting to me. It taught me about how laws are adopted in a democratic system of government and how decision making processes should work. Now I have a better idea of how to organize a non-governmental organization, how to analyze issues, put them together into research documents, and finally how to present them to the government.

- Mariam Ohanian, Armenia

How to Teach: Curricular/Teaching Workshop

One of the new objectives of this summer's Institute was to provide curricular training for the participating junior scholars. During the second week of the Institute we organized a panel discussion entitled: How to Teach. The panel was designed to give junior teachers exposure to the variety of teaching approaches in the social sciences as practiced at American universities. Professors David Plotke (Graduate Faculty - GF), Jeffrey Goldfarb (GF), Ann Snitow (GF), Elzbieta Matynia (GF), and Bohdan Krawchenko (Kiev-Mohyla Academy) were participants in the panel and they each spoke about teaching as a craft and about their own experiences, approaches, and methods of teaching.

Many of the Institute's participants were instructors themselves, and some had considerable teaching experience. Much of the discussion that followed the panel presentations addressed the specificity of teaching within universities in post-communist countries and the kinds of problems faculty face in this context. The discussion also considered such questions as: how does one teach at universities when there are neither books nor photocopy machines available; what are the effective methods of teaching a class of 200-300 students and how can one stimulate discussion in a classroom with a large group of students; how does one escape a tradition of lecturing; and what are the best methods of teaching small classes.

Professor Krawchenko's own remarks about institutions of higher learning in Ukraine seemed to express the experiences of many at their universities in the region.

We have serious problems in terms of the development of the social sciences here, and we are confronted with some unusual circumstances at present. For example, one of the structures I am involved in is trying to write a book on public policy analysis based on East and Central Europe. Now East and Central Europe and Russia combined is some three hundred and fifty million people. Yet we could find only three people that were capable of producing a text on public policy. This is obviously not a very good situation, and something must be done about it.

A question that provoked a long discussion concerned the accountability of professors and of university administrators vis-à-vis students. What, for example, is the objective of initiating a process in which students evaluate their professors? Is this helpful in creating a good teaching environment? What role should the university administration play in reforming a university? Interestingly, the South African participants were particularly concerned with questions of university autonomy vis-à-vis the state. Central Europeans, on the other hand, were interested in mechanisms of university reform and especially the roles that professors, administrators, and the state should play in this process.

All participants in the workshop received packets of information listing existing social science resources available in main libraries and on the Internet. In addition, a Political Science Curriculum Workbook, prepared by the East and Central Europe Program, was distributed to all participants.

Other Events

The Institute program also included extra curricular lectures and field trips designed to familiarize the participants with Cracow and its surrounding and to stimulate discussion concerning systemic transformations taking place throughout this part of the world. Below is a full list of lectures and field trips. One of the most memorable experiences was time we spent with Sonja Licht, the Director of the Soros Foundation Yugoslavia. Another event which brought the entire Institute community together (and which lasted late into the night) was an evening discussion-meeting with the South Africans.

Lectures and Discussions:

• The Native Realms of Central Europe, an evening of poetry and conversation on nations and nationalism with Czeslaw Milosz, 1981 Nobel Prize Laureate.
• Where After Communism, an evening with Adam Michnik, historian, political thinker, and Editor-in-Chief of Gazeta Wyborcza, the largest independent daily in East and Central Europe.
• After Dayton - Before Elections, breakfast with Sonja Licht, Director of the Soros Foundation Yugoslavia , philosopher and human rights activist.
• Transitions in South Africa, an evening with Stephen Gelb, economist of the University of Durban-Westville, which included a documentary video on the events leading to the ending of apartheid.
• Citizens, an American documentary by R. W. Adams about the Solidarity movement in Poland 1980-81.

• An Introduction to the art and culture of Cracow, slide show and lecture by Janusz Walek, the Curator of the Czartoyski Museum in Cracow.
• A tour of Kazimierz, the historical Jewish neighborhood of Cracow, by David Miller of the World Monuments Fund.
• A tour of Jagiellonian University's Collegium Maius, the oldest (14th century) part of the university in Cracow.
• Auschwitz/Birkenau - a guided tour through the museum and grounds of the largest German concentration and death camp in Europe.

In addition to the academic component of the Institute, participants commented on the valuable lessons they learned from living in such a diverse intellectual community. What the participants experienced was not necessarily what they had expected. As was the case in past years, everyone was awed by the sheer diversity of the Institute. The recurring comment the organizers of the Institute kept hearing was what a wonderful opportunity it was to meet one's peers from all over the globe. And their conversations, heated discussions, and voyages of cultural discovery were conducted over Kurdish food in the Castle's restaurant, or over coffee and a view of the Tatra mountains, or at an outdoor impromptu clarinet concert, or during cross-continental soccer games.

The Institute was an opportunity to learn the unexpected and recognize the taken-for-granted. Marian Gabriel pointed out that as a Slovak in Cracow, he was able to understand some Polish, Czech, and Croatian. The words were similar, it was the pronunciations which were distracting. He observed that, contrary to some ideological declarations in his home country, differences were relative and many cultures are more alike than they first appear to be.

Similarly, some evenings, some of the participants watched the Olympic games in the foyer of the hotel in which we stayed and also played cards. A card game that was regularly played was called 'crazy eights' by the Americans, but this same game was known to the Greek and one of the Kazakhs as 'uno.' The card suit known as 'clubs' to the Romanians, Croats, and the Americans was known as 'crosses' to the South Africans. When the Anglo-Sri Lankan, an administrator of the Institute, had only one card in his hands, he declared, "last card" as notice that he was about to win. Another player from Poland turned to him and said, "Not 'last card,' you have to say 'Uno!'" The card game is a good metaphor for the Democracy and Diversity Institute. Students had to go beyond superficial differences to find that we all have a lot in common.

Barbara Blakely, a Graduate Faculty student from Mexico, expressed her sadness that the Institute only lasted three weeks. She said, "being here you realize the human side of the conflicts you read of in books and newspapers, and you realize that people are just like you and may have gone through things that are the same or worse than what you have experienced."

Croatian Patricia Mirt observed that "the three weeks here was a perfect opportunity to meet people from different countries, exchange ideas, and build a picture of the world. It provided a good opportunity to build networks, a public space, and the people I met here I will know for the next twenty to thirty years of my life." Her sentiments echoed those of ECEP Director Elzbieta Matynia who, at the final dinner, remarked that with the Democracy & Diversity Institute, all endings are beginnings. We will continue to facilitate the building and maintenance of those individual networks between people. In many ways, it was no surprise that during the second week of the Institute four members of last year's Institute came to visit us. They were a Czech, a Slovak, a Pole, and a Croat who are now hard and fast friends and collaborators.

V. IMPACT

What began five years ago as a promising initiative of the East and Central Europe Program has evolved into a major catalyst for, and hub of, its activities. Since Democracy & Diversity provides the time and space most conducive to the emergence of a sense of community, it is really becoming the very heart of the Program as a whole. There is no longer any simple way to describe its impact, because we are now beginning to see that the experience it affords has a ripple effect on several levels at once.

No doubt the most important effect is that arising from the return of the Institute participants to their home universities. While they had all applied to participate because of their scholarly interest in the problems of democratic theory and practice, they go home inspired, qualified, and to a great extent actually equipped to make serious contributions to curricular reform within their home universities and to influence public policy through local NGO's. We hosted participants from 23 countries this year, including almost all the post-communist countries, and they have gone home not only with their horizons dramatically broadened - personally, academically, and professionally - but as members of a network that has already been expanding for five years: a network not only of Cracow alumni, but of associates and collaborators from the whole spectrum of ECEP activities.

The impact on participants is also, of course, a deeply personal one, as their many letters eloquently attest. In part this comes from their first exposure to American-style graduate-level teaching, which challenges them to freer self-expression, especially in class, than is traditionally granted them, while simultaneously demanding a greater rigor in both thinking and arguing.

And finally, the participants from Central and Eastern Europe, and Eurasia, have a decided impact on the Americans and other western participants; not just the students but the faculty as well. The chemistry was further complicated (but the rewards, if anything, heightened) by the presence this year of strong contingents from Central Asia, South Africa, and Latin America.