Table of Contents
December 1994 - Vol. 5/No.2
Issue Number 17
Elzbieta Matynia: Director and Editor
Sharon Cooley: Program Coordinator
Philip Pezeshki: Executive Editor
Greg Snyder and Indira Kajosevic: Staff Associates
Published quarterly by the East and Central Europe Program.
The ECEP is funded by the Eurasia Foundation and the Ford Foundation.
Table of ContentsThe Berlin Wall - Five Years
LaterWe at the New School were privileged this Fall to be visited by some of the most incisive thinkers of the region. Adam Michnik, a Visiting Professor at the Committee for the Study of Democracy, discussed the issue of populism as a danger which, dramatically visible in Yugoslavia, is surfacing in other parts of Europe as well.
Miklos Haraszti and János Kis, prominent political thinkers from Hungary, challenged the widespread notion that the Communists' return to power is hindering transition. Jacek Kuron, a Member of the Parliament and one of the most popular public figures in Poland, argued for the feasibility of a market economy with a human face. Ukrainian scholars Yaroslav Hrytsak (Lviv) and Serhiy Ivaniouk (Kiev) discussed the national, political, and cultural factors underlying the tensions in their country. We also learned the political prospects for Bosnia (Nada Selimovic), Romania (Stelian Tanase), and Bulgaria (Rumyana Kolarova).
When the Wall came down, we shared the optimism of those crowds, and looked forward to being of assistance during an interval of transition. We now know that the patience and hard work must continue. --E.M.
The Ethos of Freedom Adam Michnik: Ira's comparison is very flattering and grants our Warsaw initiatives of those times a lot of significance. The affinity, if there is any, is the affinity of the kind of people who became involved in these enterprises. That is to say, these were people whose orientation I would call anti-totalitarian. They were driven by their rejection of a world based on intolerance, violence and oppression. They were people who wanted tolerance, dialogue and inquiry. Thus, I see the affinity of a certain intellectual attitude. It is not a coincidence that Hannah Arendt used to be a professor at the New School. She was of immense importance for the people of anti-totalitarian orientation.
JK: How does this affinity work on a more personal level? How would you say your role as a visiting professor compares to your earlier experience?
Michnik: My experience as a lecturer goes back to the Flying University and, yes, I see a certain affinity with respect to the
atmosphere of unfettered exchange among people who are not the owners of some final truth, who are instead searching for truth through dialogue, people who are committed to the values of the Enlightenment but who are also aware of the limitations of those values...
JK: What are your impressions of the New School as an American academic institution. Was it in any way different from what you had expected?
Michnik: I have never worked as a regular academic teacher before; so I cannot make comparisons to other universities. What I liked here was the degree of informality, the easy-going atmosphere, or--to use a more lofty expression--the ethos of freedom. The fact that you have students from so many different countries, with different backgrounds and experiences, creates what I would call a polyphony of debate, a truly pluralistic dialogue. In my seminar alone, the diversity of the participants--Estonians, Romanians, Slovaks, and Poles, as well as Americans--was amazing. At the same time I had a chance to listen to my colleagues from Central Europe, such as Miklos Haraszti and János Kis . There are few other places where this could happen. This was truly a great opportunity.
JK: American universities are sometimes criticized for "political correctness." Have you had any experience of this?
Michnik: I have had no such experiences here: every attitude can be caricatured. I guess that democratic attitudes also have their caricature, as in "political correctness." However, Hannah Arendt's spirit cannot be reconciled with any political orthodoxy. I haven't seen any raving radicals-- Marcuse's disciples--who would try to set the School library on fire...
JK: To put it in a more general perspective, do you agree that in today's world the threat to the attitudes of tolerance and openness comes from the right wing? Is there no left-wing authoritarianism--such as the Communism of the past--which poses a threat comparable to the rising tide of right-wing populist nationalism?
Michnik: It is difficult to speak about the whole world; things may look different in different places. But the way I see it, the gauchist formations have no dynamism today. They are remnants, leftovers, from the past. At the same time, I see such dynamics in the fundamentalist and populist formations, which invoke the ideas of an "ethnically clean" state and so on. However, I would hesitate to call them "right-wing". Even though they use right-wing rhetoric, their methods and actions are often very left-wing and revolutionary. Theirs is a strange mixture of right-wing rhetoric, populism and revolutionary jacobinism.
JK: Would you see the results of the American elections as somehow indicative of this tendency?
Michnik: I think this would be an exaggeration. Some of the consequences may be socially harmful, yet you have to notice that in many cases the Republicans won by a very narrow margin.
JK: Would you agree, though, that populist rhetoric was used throughout the election campaign?
Michnik: Clearly, many stereotypes were exploited, but I don't see the possibility that American democracy will be threatened by the Republican victory. However, one might worry about the impact of the fundamentalist groups within the party. Some policies will move to the right, but that is all.
JK: Part of the Republican success can be attributed to their promise to dismantle the welfare system. Should such rhetoric be countered by rallying behind the idea of the welfare state as we know it, or should we search for new solutions? And if so, are there any such new solutions in sight?
Michnik: It is obvious that the idea of the welfare state is in crisis. It is not only a matter of Republican rhetoric; you can see this in Europe as well. There are two dangers related to welfare: first, people get something for free; this is wrong in that people should be able to earn their living. Second, and more important, welfare is connected with terrible bureaucratization, which can breed corruption. Still, the crisis of welfare cannot be solved by withdrawing from active social policy altogether. On the other hand, not even the Republicans can completely abolish the welfare system, just as Mrs. Thatcher was not able to do. Still, it is worthwhile to ask about the advantages and disadvantages of such welfare policies and, based on this, to build visions of social policy.
JK: Do you think there are people who are trying to develop such a new vision, theoretically or as political practice?
Michnik: Yes, there are. The main political question today is the question of what kind of capitalism we should have. There are different voices here: Albert, Galbraith, Daniel Bell, and so on. This discussion is particularly important for us, the people in post- Communist countries. We need to undertake a serious debate on the issues of democracy and a market economy. We were used to thinking in terms of a market versus a planned economy, totalitarianism versus freedom. Now we have to ask: which market? Which freedoms? In this debate all of us are mere beginners.
JK: Which brings us to the Democracy Seminars. What are the plans for the future?
Michnik: We are holding our fifth annual conference next May in Lviv. The Democracy Seminars continue thanks to the efforts of Elzbieta Matynia, Jeff Goldfarb, Andrew Arato, Jose Casanova, and others. Their purpose now is to focus on the most current democratic ideas and practices.
JK: The seminars began as a clandestine enterprise under the
Communist regime when few thought that change was imminent. How does the content of the current seminars compare to what you were discussing in those days? Are there any specific new issues?
Michnik: Everything is new. Certain areas of debate are no longer relevant. We no longer ask how to live with Communism or how to defend ourselves against Communism. However, the question of the legacy of Communism is still with us. This is why I was talking at the New School about the past, which is so important and yet so easy to manipulate. It is tempting to pretend that the past never happened. At the same time it is necessary to examine new dangers--things I have already mentioned, such as ethnic hatreds and so on. We try to discover what is the face of the devil in our own times. Each epoch has its own devil. What is the devil of post-Communism?
JK: Some intellectuals are warning us that mass culture, often identified with American culture, is one of the current global threats. You mentioned it in your public talk at the New School, in the form of an open letter to Neboysa Popov. Here in New York you have had first-hand experience of American culture. Do you feel it has such a demonic dimension?
Michnik: I believe that the strength of American culture lies in its multicultural character. If you are walking on the street you cannot really tell who is a 'true American'. New York is a truly cosmopolitan metropolis and it has all the grandeur and all the poverty of a cosmopolitan civilization: homelessness, crime and all that. I love this city, but I am not an uncritical admirer. Clearly many things are crying for change. Generally speaking, there is a negative potential in the mixture of mass culture, the primitiveness of television images, and the new technologies, yet I think that mass culture is like a knife, which you can use both for slicing bread or for killing somebody.
JK: Can intellectuals, as people of the word, prevail against the power of the image?
Michnik: I wouldn't treat it in terms of 'either-or' but rather 'as well as'. Clearly, the place for intellectuals is different in a democratic society than under totalitarianism: on university campus rather than in the vanguard of protest rallies, or in underground anti-totalitarian conspiracies. The intellectuals have their place and you can see it here in America. There is so much money invested in universities all over this country; it is a world in itself. One cannot imagine American culture without its campuses. There is a lot more to it than Disneyland.
JK: And yet there are voices in America that say the world of the campus has produced the social isolation of the intellectuals, who have become invisible to the larger public...
Michnik: I don't agree. Universities are central to American life. Millions of people who have been through university constitute the public at large and shape American culture.
This interview was conducted by Jacek Kucharczyk, ECEP Associate and 1994/95 Pew Democracy Fellow. Adam Michnik was a Visiting Professor at the GF's Committee for the Study of Democracy in Fall 1994 .
Liberalism, Democracy, and Hungarian
Politics János Kis: The most important factor is the general discontent people feel for the quite severe costs imposed on various strata of society by the transition to a market economy. There are winners, but in the short run there have been far more losers. The overwhelming majority of losers do not see a timetable for restructuring and recovery, thus they are more and more afraid that the whole process of marketization is leading them and their families down an economic blind alley. Because the socialists were politically isolated for almost the whole period between 1990 and 1994, they now appear as the least responsible for the difficulties. This was the single most important factor for their being picked out as the alternative.
The socialists actually offered two conflicting programs. One was close to a Perotian style of populism based on incompatible promises made to different strata: lower prices and higher wages, stable pension benefits, saving the social insurance system while cutting the state budget so that lower taxes would be possible. That was populist talk in the sense that if you make very crude mathematical budgetary equations they
prove inconsistent. At the same time, they also had another vision for the future which was worked out as their official economic program; this was fairly close to that of the Free Democrats, but was kept inaccessible to the wider public. I would like to stress, however, that it was not the populist discourse that made them the victors; it could have contributed no more than 3%-5% to their victory. Much more important was the value of their position on the political spectrum, which was that of the party of the ghetto.
Arato: What was the role of the Democratic Charter in the political rehabilitation of the post- Communists, in whose organization against the right they participated?
Kis: Certainly the attacks made on them, which the previous government intensified in the last six months through the electronic media, contributed very much to focus attention on them, leading to a choice of the Socialists a contrario, as the clearest form of opposition to the right wing government.
It may be true, of course, that the Democratic Charter did contribute to their success. Especially among circles of intellectual leaders, it gave the socialists the status of a normal democratic party; moreover, one that supported civil rights and the procedural rules of democracy. At the same time the Charter also helped save both the Alliance of Free Democrats (SzDSz) and Fidesz (The Alliance of Young Democrats), who in various degrees were critical of the Charter and came to be identified as soft on right- wing threats to democracy.
Arato: This raises the question of whether there ever was a danger from the radical right in Hungary. Today, some interpreters deny that there ever was such a danger since the radical right had very little mass base, even less than in Poland. Others maintain that there was a danger, and in addition to other interventions (by the President of the Republic, the Constitutional Court, and the opposition parties), a mass democratic movement (perhaps the biggest in Hungarian history) was needed to put a definitive stop to it.
Kis: I have been saying since 1989 that the extreme right did not, in itself, represent a serious threat to democracy. It represented a threat because it occurred within a party that was in charge of the government, the Hungarian Democratic Forum ( MDF). Having become a powerful pressure group within that party, it martialed resources which otherwise it could not have: namely, the state apparatus itself. So, I always argued that as soon as the MDF was ready to discard its right wing, the danger would disappear. But as long as they insist on appeasing thisforce, and even using it as a deterrent to others, the danger will be there.
I am sure that the rise of Csurka and his group within the MDF was stopped by the mass demonstrations organized by the Democratic Charter. It was these demonstrations that showed clearly that the right-wing does not represent a popular force, while the democratic side does. Thus, the governing circles of the MDF saw that as long as they ally themselves with the radical right, they put the MDF itself in terrible danger.
Dick Howard: Let's assume that the Democratic Charter is a movement of civil society whose immediate goal, the end of threats to democracy from the right, was realized, but whose long term goal is the successful institutionalization of liberal democracy. What, then, can be its role with the post- Communists holding the dominant position in government?
Kis: About a year ago George Konrad, who was the leading figure of the Charter, has claimed that the movement is like an umbrella: you open it up when it is needed and close it when it is not. Whether it is needed now is a valid question, but for the moment the umbrella is closed and put aside.
Arato: Some of the opponents of the governmental coalition of the Socialist Party and the Free Democrats denounce it as the government of the Charter. What are your observations concerning the response of Hungarian liberals and their Polish friends and counterparts to the challenge of forming the government under the leadership of the post-Communists?
Kis: There are a certain number of differences between the two countries which may explain these diverging responses. One of these was that the Polish counterpart of SzDSz, the Democratic Union, was almost continuously a leading member of the governments from 1989 to 1993. For it to enter government as a junior party would have meant a problem. In any working democracy it is quite normal for any party that has been in government for four years to go into opposition after a lost election. The Free Democrats in Hungary were, however, in opposition in the first parliamentary cycle. They were the second largest party then, as now. It was the MDF that rejected the very popular idea of a grand coalition with them. For this very reason, for the Free Democrats to reject the idea of entering into coalition negotiations, once the offer was actually made (this time by the socialists), would have been very dangerous. Especially since this idea had broad popular support, rejecting the offer could have led to a marginalization of the Free Democrats, to the wide- spread perception that it is eternally an opposition party. It would send the message to their voters that there is no use in voting for this party because it would never enter into government, since it clings to the mirage of a purely liberal government, untainted either by the conservatives or the socialists.
Arato: What can be accomplished by a liberal party in such a coalition?
Kis: First of all, there is a good chance that the liberals will enter into an alliance with the more or less liberal and technocratic groups within the socialists. This would help push through a reasonable economic strategy of stabilization coupled with a reasonable policy of privatization. They can also contribute to the consolidation of the rule of law, of the constitutional state, to the consolidation state and church relations on the bases of their separation, to the development of a less politicized, more pluralistic system of education, and to a system of public communication freed of governmental intervention.
Arato: You never believed, after 1989, that an independent social democracy (like those planned by the Social Democrats of the Czech Republic, or the Union of Labor in Poland), had much of a chance in Hungary; all such attempts did in fact fail. Yet others, like Ivan Szelenyi, believed that there was a social democratic electorate, one that no one addressed in 1990. He evensuggested that your party, the SzDSz, should take up this space. How do you feel about this debate now, after the electoral victory of the MSZP, when your party has joined them in a left-liberal or social-liberal coalition?
Kis: I am very uncertain about the structuring of the electorate in party terms. Partly due to the very narrow margin of maneuver in economic matters, and partly due to other factors, the identities of the parties in the eyes of the public are very strongly determined by non-economic distinctions which are less conspicuous in most, though not all, of the West European democracies. In Holland, for example, religious affiliation plays a strong role. In Hungary, quite plausibly attitudes to religion, ethnicity, and nationhood are more important in identifying parties in the eyes of the electorate than are economic factors. The electorate behind the social-liberal or socialist- liberal bloc is more or less the lay- oriented electorate, the electorate that wants a lay state, a secular state, whether or not it is composed of people who are religious in their private lives. This electorate is composed of people who reject the nationalist appeal. So, on these bases I find it hard to affirm or deny that there is a social-democratic electorate to which no party appealed in 1990, or which now the Socialists have picked up because no other party was there to do so.
Arato: What do you make of Michnik's slogan: "amnesty but not amnesia"?
Kis: I would say the whole amnesty issue is not seriously raised in Hungary, because the relevant crimes were committed over 35 years ago, and there is a sense of natural decency that you don't punish people 35 years later. The slogan is a reasonable one, but it should not be an issue of party politics, but rather one that intellectuals, journalists, historians and publicists discuss. The public in Hungary also believes that as soon as the issue of memory is transformed into one of party politics it turns the public against the parties or leaders responsible. Immediately there is the feeling that they are working against normalcy, that they are willing to risk permanent crises, and that they wish to moralize politics and economics. We have to remember that, one way or another, mostof the population participated in the regime of the past, and the politicization of memory would be advantageous only to the few. For the rest, the idea is profoundly anxiety-provoking.
Arato: Is social liberalism for you merely a name for a particular coalition, or at best a pragmatic combination of economic liberalism with a social conscience, or is it a distinctive political position with its own authentic normative principles?
Kis: I am a liberal of the egalitarian type, which does not mean that I think that there are two equally good interpretations of liberalism. I think social liberalism, a term I myself introduced, in fact, in my 1985 book, Do We Have Human Rights?, is not just a compromise or accommodation of different political streams. Any conception of democratic socialism, in order to be distinctive, would have to affirm heavy limitations on private property, which I reject. As far as radical democracy, which is not an economic idea, I believe that representative democracy has the advantage of being able to work as an institutionalized system. But the field must be open for single-issue and for other movements which exercise pressure on party politics, and which introduce new issues, and which represent themes and interests that would be otherwise unrepresented. I think such movements are entirely compatible with social liberalism, as long as they remain within the framework of parliamentary democracy and the rule of law.
The full version of this November 1994 interview will be published in an upcoming special issue of the journal Constellations. Janos Kis visited the New School in October- November 1994.
Seediness: Latvian Transition
in Disorder A closer visual inspection confirmed the revelation: Riga had become a city of contrasts, conforming to the Communist portrayal of bourgeois capitalism. The contrasts were quite often combined within one building, which might have several posh shops on the first floor, yet streaked and patchy stucco displayed several meters above. Many quite Western shops manifested the same contrast in the slovenly service and blunt speech of their clerks. Even the American Embassy was not spared: when I called, someone picked up the receiver and apparently placed it on the desk without even a pardon. My protest to the receptionist, who finally picked the phone back up five minutes later, was met with genuine surprise; she said (in what she obviously thought was a polite way) that she could not speak to two callers at the same time. Very characteristic seemed a broken tub, used as a plant pot in one of the buildings of the University of Latvia. I had seen it broken a year before--no repairs had been made, though they would have required inexpensive materials and little effort.
These were my initial impressions of Latvia after almost a whole year abroad. They contrasted sharply with the bright images of home I had cherished and to which I had longed to return. These may be and probably are inevitable features of a society in transition, but I would not have been so disturbed if only someone else seemed equally concerned.
Instead, the attitude here is a curious mixture of complacency and despair about the ability of people to make improvements even within their immediate reach. The country is in danger of becoming mentally stuck in transition, by thinking that it has already arrived at its destination. The infantile disorder of transition translates into putting appearances above essence, by thinking that it is enough to appear to be a Western and democratic country, rather than actually being one. Alas, even putting up appearances sometimes seems to be too much trouble.
The debate on citizenship reflected these dangerous tendencies and compounded my fears and premonitions. I have always maintained that a fair Law on Citizenship is in the best interests of ethnic Latvians, ethnic non-Latvians, and the Latvian state. By "fair", I mean a Law which would demand that the naturalizing person has lived a certain period of time in Latvia and has a conversational facility with the Latvian language. The exclusion of a certain category of people, such as, say, Soviet Army officers and high-ranking KGB and Communist Party officials, would be understandable. The victimization of Soviet-era settlers through the imposition of naturalization quotas, however, would be a glaring insult against fairness, and would therefore be detrimental to the Latvian state and the communities living here.
I have also maintained that the international community would not tolerate excessive rigidity on the part of the Latvian authorities towards those stateless people who happen to reside within the jurisdiction of Latvia.
Now that members of the Cabinet, the President, and even the columnists of mainstream Latvian papers, have finally come to a similar conclusion, I should be relieved and satisfied. Nevertheless, I see more grounds for concern than for satisfaction.
Did we really need the humiliation of being ordered to do the right thing? The Council of Europe, the CSCE and the UN did everything and more to spare us this insult by issuing very carefully-worded warnings, which they diplomatically called "recommendations". Take for example the recommendations of the Ibrahima Fall UN mission, made public in November, 1992; the letters and recommendation of the CSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities, Max van der Stoel, in April, 1993; and the recommendations of CSCE experts, which analyzed the first draft of the Citizenship Law.
What can explain this extraordinary deafness on the part of the country's leadership? One explanation is that they are simply gambling. Adrejs Pantelejevs--until July, 1993, the Chair of the Standing Commission on Human Rights and one of Latvia's representatives to the Council of Europe (and now the Chair of the Latvia's Way faction and of the Commission on State Security), used to point that Turkey's waging war against its own ethnic minority does not disqualify it from membership in the Council of Europe.
Did our leadership learn anything from the international scandal with the citizenship law? Had they learned something, the nation could have sighed with relief. Unfortunately, the main point in the debate in the nation's Parliament and in the media had been how to best deceive the international experts. The leader of the ruling Farmer's Union faction, Andris Rozentals, proposed the principle of "covert quotas" in order to avoid using the word while preserving its essence (Diena, June 21, 1994). He was echoed by the Chair of the Commission on Human Rights, Inese Birziniece, who went on record declaring that, "We can put restrictions on the number of naturalized persons by other means, without the quotas" (Diena, June 21, 1994). The pro-Government Diena, in its editorial, went even further, suggesting that the whole scandal was just a legalistic game and that the next Parliament could change the Law again [i.e. introduce quotas], after Latvia had been accepted as a member in the Council of Europe (Cela us Krieviju, Diena, June 22, 1994).
If the MP's do not think about the nation's interests, they do not forget to think carefully about their own. The leaders of the ruling coalition are well aware that, even if they might manipulate the present electorate into voting for them again, every naturalized citizen adds a vote for the opposition. It is safe to that most new citizens would support the People's Harmony Party, whose misgivingsabout the recently passed Citizenship Law curiously coincided with the opinion of international experts.
That is why the Foreign Ministry of Latvia kept secret the recommendations of the international experts (particularly the April, 1993, letter of Max van der Stoel), not only from the Latvian people but even from the parliamentarians. That is why our authorities sometimes pretended--against common sense, reason and decency--that the experts and international organizations actually supported infringements against the rights of Latvia's residents. That also explains why the authorities have done nothing to promote the integration of non-Latvians.
For these reasons, amendments in the text of the Law itself would probably not solve the problem, and the authorities will go on trying to shape the composition of the electorate according to their own preferences. Even the amended text of the Law leaves many loopholes for the restrictions promised by Inese Birziniece. For example, a person who meets all the stipulations in the Law still may rather than must be naturalized. The decision lies with the institution or the functionary conducting the naturalization process.
That institution is well known and its activities are predictable. The influential international human rights group, Helsinki Watch, published in October, 1993, a report about the work of this institution, stating, among other things, "Helsinki Watch has uncovered sufficient evidence to substantiate serious, systematic abuses in Latvia's Department of Citizenship and Immigration similar to those alleged in the November, 1992, U.N. report...".
After this report produced an international scandal, the authorities did carry out a superficial reshuffling of personnel at the top of the Department. But the Department's practice of relying on the political and ethnic preferences of its personnel, rather than on the letter and spirit of the Law, remained largely unchanged. The new bosses still have not take any administrative action against the Department's personnel. According to the office of the State Minister on Human Rights, immigration officials in Ventspils, Liepaja, in the Ziemelu and Vidzernes districts of Riga, are particularly notorious for refusing to carry out rulings of the Court if those rulings run counter to their convictions (Segodna, May 31, 1994).
When the support of Russian intellectuals was needed in the last years of the Soviet empire, people like Abyzov, Kosteneckaja, and Dozorcev raised their voices in support of the Latvian bid for independence, even though they were often labeled as traitors by many other Russians who favored the continuation of the Soviet Union. In view of all the lawlessness against local Russians supported by the state institutions, one would expect that Latvian intellectuals, writers and poets--the conscience of the nation--would protest against the injustice. Unfortunately, either their voices are too weak or I am hard of hearing. Something is wrong with the nation when its conscience is mute.
The most bitter conclusion is that the people, or at least the voters, seem susceptible to the myths about the extinction of the nation and the other manipulative fairy tales used by the present officialdom to frighten people into voting for them and into viewing their Russian-speaking neighbors and colleagues as threats to Latvia. The new establishment thrives in the its self-induced atmosphere of narrow-mindedness, ignorance and seedy provinciality, all of which are mistaken for patriotism. --Riga-Bergen, June 1994
Alex Grigorievs is an adjunct professor at New York University, and a free-lance journalist for the Baltic Observer. He was a Member of the 1990-91 Latvian Parliament.
In Brief: Democracy and Diversity
1994 Cracow Summer InstituteFaculty and Curriculum: The Faculty came from the Graduate Faculty (GF) and, as last year, from one of what we call beacon institutions in the region, the Graduate School for Social Research (GSSR) in Warsaw. Four principal seminars were designed and conducted for twelve two-hour sessions each: Beginning Politics: Starting Regimes in Political Theory and Contemporary Politics and Democracy after Communism (Prof. David Plotke, GF); Ethnos and Demos: the Dynamics of 19th and 20th Century Nationalisms (Professors Elzbieta Matynia, GF, and Jerzy Szacki, GSSR); and Theories of Gender in Culture (Prof. Ann Snitow, GF).
Special Workshop on Public Policy: This year we introduced into the regular program of the Institute a special segment on policy analysis and design, entitled: Workshop on Families, Women, and Public Policy. The workshop was led by Elaine Zimmerman, Executive Director of the Commission on Children for the State of Connecticut, who has extensive experience in the design and implementation of legislative initiatives.
Extra-Curricular Events: Among our extra-curricular activities were: Roundtables on Research Projects, an evening devoted to discussion on participants' research projects, and Feminism in America, led by Ann Snitow, on the relationship of the US women's movement to the democratization processes in various parts of the world; Lectures by Jacek Wozniakowski, on the "Culture of Cracow," and Czeslaw Milosz, Nobel Laureate, who treated us to an extraordinary evening of poetry and discussion on "The Culture and Politics of East and Central Europe." Field trips included Auschwitz-Bierkenau and Jagiellonian University, with a lecture by Prof. Stanislaw Waltos, the curator of the Museum of Jagiellonian University.
NotesJacek Kuron, Chair of the SOS Foundation and Member of the Polish Parliament; Prof. Shlomo Avineri, Hebrew Univ. in Jerusalem; Josef Brodsky, poet; Victor Markowicz, GTECH Corporation; Iveta Radicova and Alena Brunovska, Academia Istropolitana, Slovakia; Cvetanka Sundovska and a group of Macedonian educators; Prof. Eva Cseke Gyimesi, Head of the "Invisible College," Babes-Bolyai Univ., Cluj, Romania; Joanna Regulska, Local Democracy In Poland, Rutgers Univ.; Viatcheslav Brioukhovetsky, President, Univ. of Kiev-Mohyla Academy; Claus Offe, Univ. of Bremen; Ulrich Preuss, also of the Univ. of Bremen; Janos Kis, Chair, Political Science Dept., Central European Univ.; Miklos Haraszti, Visiting Prof. at Northwestern Univ.; Igor Barsegian, Fulbright Fellow, CUNY Grad. Center; Sebouh Aslanian and Yuri Shevchuk, GF Political Science Dept.; Serhiy Ivaniouk, Rector, Univ. of Kiev-Mohyla Academy; Rabbi A. James Rudin, Director, American Jewish Committee; Rumyana Kolarova, Sofia Univ.; Renata Salecl, Institute of Criminology, Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Visiting Fellows
Adam Michnik is Editor-in-chief of Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland's most highly-respected and Europe's most widely circulated non-tabloid newspaper. Winner of many awards and honors, he has been a leading dissident and activist in Poland since 1965, prominent in the student protests of 1968, the founding of KOR in 1976 and of the Solidarity movement, and the Roundtable Negotiations that led to the elections of 1989 and the collapse of Communism. Imprisoned many times for a total of six years, among his two books published in English are Letters from Prison (Univ. of California Press), and The Church and the Left (Chicago Univ. Press). He has been a frequent contributor to the "New York Review of Books".
Prof. Serhiy Ivaniouk is Rector of the University of Kiev-Mohyla Academy, successor to the eponymous 17th C. Ukrainian educational institution. During his stay at the GF, Prof. Ivaniouk met with faculty and students. He gave a talk on November 20, entitled Literature, Culture and Society of Contemporary Ukraine.
Democracy Seminars
Lviv
The Democracy Seminar in Lviv, Ukraine, established in February, 1993, is affiliated with the Institute of Historical Research, Ivan Franko State Univ. of Lviv and chaired by Yaroslav Hrytsak, the institute's Director. The December meeting will discuss "The Velvet Restoration," an article by Adam Michnik published in September's Bulletin.
Annual Meeting
The Sixth Annual Meeting of the Democracy Seminar Network will meet in Lviv, in late May, 1995. It will be co-organized by the Lviv chapter. More information will be forthcoming in the next issue of the Bulletin.q
Rebuilding the Social Sciences
During its first five years the East and Central Europe Program focused primarily on the countries of Central Europe, especially Poland, Hungary, and the Czech and Slovak Republics. A new grant, funding a project entitled, Assistance for the Rebuilding of the Social Sciences in Ukraine and Armenia has made it possible to build on growing interest among the New School community in issues concerning those countries. The resulting collaborative projects include: bringing Ukraine and Armenia into the Democracy Seminar Network (with chapters in Lviv, Kiev, and Yerevan); collaboration on social science curricula with the University of Kiev-Mohyla Academy and with the Yerevan State University; and the participation of advanced graduate students and junior instructors from both countries in Democracy and Diversity, our Summer Graduate Institute, in Cracow, Poland.
We have established a Working Committee on Collaboration with Ukraine, as well as a Committee on Collaboration with Armenia, which include members of the New School faculty and student body, to ensure careful consideration of issues related to our activities.
Support for the Project is provided by the United States Agency for International Development through The Eurasia Foundation.
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