Table of Contents
October 1994 - Vol.5/No.1
Issue Number 16
Elzbieta Matynia: Director and Editor
Sharon Cooley: Program Associate
Philip Pezeshki: Executive Editor
Justyna Duriasz: Staff Associate
Published quarterly by the East and Central Europe Program.
Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation & the Ford
Foundation.
Table of ContentsLessons in DemocracyThe seminars were over, the readings done. On one of those record-breaking hot evenings at Przegorzaly Castle, we had assembled to meet a poet with whom we all felt somehow connected: we Americans, because he is, after all, an American professor at Berkeley; the Poles, because he is a Polish poet; the Lithuanians, because he is Lithuanian; Estonians, because he cares about the "Balts"; those from the former Yugoslavia, because he knows their situation so well; and just about all the Eastern Europeans, because he had explained everything in The Captive Mind. Czeslaw Milosz, the Nobel Laureate, was sharing with us his most recent poems. Before reading "Sarajevo", he made one qualification: "This is not poetry, this is sheer anger." Then we talked together about our most anxious questions. Can anything be done, somebody asked, to nurture multi-national societies that once thrived in this part of Europe? He looked around at the dense circle of people from 19 countries. "Yes", he said, "you've created one right here: take it home!"
New York: GF's Committee for the Study of Democracy
This is the New School's autumn of anniversaries. The big one is our university's 75th. In 1919, several professors dissident from Columbia University, including Charles Beard, John Dewey, and Thorstein Veblen, decided to launch a different sort of university-one respecting full academic freedom-a new kind of school: The New School. The smaller occasion is the 10th Anniversary of the Democracy Seminar, an initiative proposed by Adam Michnik, widely published historian and political thinker, when he received-at a semi-clandestine ceremony in Warsaw following his latest spell in prison-an honorary degree from the New School. The Democracy Seminar has since become a dynamic network of branches and collaborators in 14 countries. And now Adam Michnik, Editor-in-Chief of Gazeta Wyborcza (which has the largest circulation of any daily newspaper in Europe), has come to the Graduate Faculty as a Visiting Professor. His 6-week series of seminars will officially open the GF's new Committee for the Study of Democracy.
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Almost the entire issue of this Bulletin is devoted to two texts we want to bring to the attention of the Democracy Seminar chapters and all our readers. Michnik's piece is a shorter version of an article published in the September 3-4, issue of Gazeta Wyborcza. The second is the May, 1994, Commencement Address delivered at the New School by a former Dean of the Graduate Faculty, Ira Katznelson, who has just moved uptown...to Columbia University! -E.M.
The Velvet Revolution For a year now a coalition of post-Communist parties has governed in Poland. A similar coalition governs in Lithuania. And in Hungary a post-Communist party recently won the elections. Nowhere, however, did the Communist system return. What, then, do these "returns" mean?
In Poland, and other countries of the region, a revolution had taken place: the system of totalitarian dictatorships in the realm of politics, economics, and international order was overthrown. Fortunately, this was carried out-in Poland thanks to the Round Table Agreements-without barricades and guillotines. It was-as Vaclav Havel so aptly put it-a "Velvet Revolution".
However, every revolution-even the Velvet one-has its own logic. It releases expectations and hopes which it can never satisfy. Therefore it has to radicalize its own language, devour its own children, eliminate the moderates from its ranks, decree successive "accelerations", lustrations, purges. The revolution is forever unfinished. That is why it causes frustration and bitterness. Somebody must be held responsible for the fact that manna has not fallen from heaven. The revolution finds the guilty ones. First the people of the old regime, then their defenders, and finally its own leaders.
The revolutionary camp always has its own "moderates" and "rabid ones". The former want to defend freedom in the name of the rule of the constitution and of the state of law; the latter believe that defending freedom means annihilating the enemies of freedom-that is, the people of the old regime. This is their only way of showing their concern for the well-being of the wronged and humiliated who started the revolution. After all, the liberation from dictatorship brought freedom and joy only to a few. The majority, left in poverty and despair, did not enjoy the fruits of victory. According to this majority, the revolution was betrayed by the "moderates"-the majority has to liberate itself once again. This is why "acceleration" and "completion of the revolution" are necessities. For these to happen, it is necessary to stop playing "the state of law game". Clear and firm decisions are needed: with regard to the people of the old regime, revolutionary justice should be applied, since no other justice is relevant.
Bourbon was tried ostensibly for collusion with the enemy, but in fact it was because he was a king. The execution of Louis XVI was a sentence on the monarchy, "this imperishable crime", as Saint-Just defined it. In the name of this logic, Constitution was losing to Revolution.
"Measured against the immense sufferings of the immense majority of the people,"-as Hannah Arendt characterizes Robespierre's thought-"the impartiality of justice and law, the application of the same rules to those who sleep in palaces and those who sleep under the bridges of Paris, was like a mockery."
Before, the goal was the constitutionally guaranteed freedom of citizens; now justice and the welfare of the people have become the goal. A goal so defined divides the revolutionary camp in an obvious way: the "moderates" and the "rabid ones" begin to perceive each other as enemies. This conflict tears apart and exhausts the revolution. Can anything still save it? Yes-a savior who, liquidating both camps, reaches for his armor and the language of the diktat.
But would the masses follow this leader? Or would they rather choose restoration? The same guillotine cut off the heads of Bourbon, Danton, and finally Robespierre. Revolution may give birth to terror. It can also avoid it, but then it has to give birth to restoration. Every revolution either culminates in dictatorship or brings about a restoration.
Poland's velvet revolution gave birth to the Velvet Restoration.
A restoration is never the return of the old regime and the old order. The restoration is a reaction to the revolution, a paroxysm of old-timers' comebacks, of former symbols, traditions, customs. Revolution feeds on the promise of a Big Change; restoration promises the return of the "good old days".
But the restoraton-like the revolution-must bring disappointment. First there is joy. Humiliated by the revolution, the people of the old regime live a moment of relief and glory. Justice has been done. The self-proclaimed revolutionaries are handing over power. Loyal crowds joyfully greet the legitimate monarch and his retinue. The royalists strive to outdo each other in right-thinking declarations. The "ultras" get ready to fill the posts. However, it soon becomes apparent that, as among the senators praising the House of Stuarts or Bourbons, there are many who once voted to execute Charles I or Louis XVI. Therefore the "ultras" demand purges, restitution of property, punishment and humiliation for the people of the revolution.
The legitimate monarch, returning from exile to assume the throne, utters the memorable words, "Gentlemen, nothing has changed. We just have one Frenchman more." As a witness of the period observes, "The easy-going manner, the worldly tone, the friendly dignity, in such contrast to the domineering attitude and the proud and overbearing responses of Napoleon, made the biggest impression on those present. We felt transported into some new world. We were coming back to a fatherly rule."
Nevertheless, the very same witness-Talleyrand-noted that, "soon
denunciations began, feigned zeal, resentments, forced displays of devotion. ...A crowd of firebrands and plotters of all shades were jammed into his palace. Each of them had reinstated the monarchy. Each demanded to be rewarded for his devotion and for his services. All posts needed new people. Originally the king himself was not a partisan of a settling of accounts: 'Gentleman,' he would say to the "ultras", 'I urge and oblige you to find as few people guilty as possible.'" But this did not satisfy everyone. Soon there appeared criticism of the moderate approach. The "ultras" demanded more radical action and just punishment of the revolutionary malefactors. The restoration kept losing supporters, and the defenders of the lost revolution were winning them back. Because, just as the revolution failed to keep its promises earlier, the restoration did not keep them later: the peace and order of the good old days did not come back.
For a large number of those who voted for the SLD [Alliance of the Democratic Left] and the PSL [Polish Peasant Party]*, this year of coalition rule has calmed things down. Fear from the craze for de-Communization and lustration had ended, along with fear of the contempt and discrimination of those who called the PZPR [Polish United Workers Party] "paid traitors" and "lackeys of Russia", and who compared it to the NSDAP [the German Nazi Party] and the Volksdeutsche population which had supported it in the occupied countries. Now, prior membership in the PZPR had ceased to be something shameful. This has happened thanks to the hard work of the most "rabid" zealots in the Solidarity camp.
The fear of change which brought success to the SLD and PSL resulted in a slowing down of privatization and the reform of local self-government, the reintroduction of centralization and state monopoly, the raising of protective tariffs, subsidies for enterprises going bankrupt, credits for weak farms. The decision of the Parliamentary majority concerning the concordat with the Vatican and abortion dealt a blow to the prestige of the Catholic Church.
Nevertheless, for a decisive majority of the SLD and PSL electorate, the last year has brought disappointment. The good old days have not returned: the welfare state, an economy without unemployment, free vacation resorts for employees, free education and health services. The time of that peculiar egalitarianism did not return, when poor work was rewarded with a poor wage and even the very thought of personal wealth was eradicated as a harmful relic of capitalism.
* Both are post-Communist (i.e. rooted in the Communist past) groupings.-Trans.
The restoration-just like the revolution-has its moderate wing and its "rabid ones", or "ultras". The moderates want to change the logic of the democratic state of law and the market economy in such a way as to become its beneficiaries. They do not want, however, execution squads, massive purges, censorship, and closed borders, dictatorship, and the nationalization of enterprises. The "ultras", on the other hand, desire revenge and a turn back from reform. The "ultras", taking advantage of the rise of an anti-clerical climate, desire the humiliation of the Church. The "ultras" are dangerous--it is not difficult to see this.
Nevertheless, none of these observations justifies the thesis on re-Communization and the return of the Polish People's Republic.
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Theorist of the moderate restoration, Talleyrand characterized his point of view in "Memorial for a Monarch": "When religious feelings were strongly etched in people's hearts and strongly influenced their minds, people could believe that the might of a ruler was an emanation of divinity. ...In times, however, when those feelings leave slight traces, when the religious bond, if not broken, is at least significantly loosened, one does not want to recognize this as a source of legitimacy. "Popular opinion today...says that governments exist exclusively for the people. From this opinion comes the unavoidable conclusion that legitimate power is the one which best guarantees peace and prosperity for the people. Therefore it turns out that the only legitimate power is the one which has already existed for many years. ...But if by some misfortune the thought arises that abuses of this power are outweighing its benefits, the result is such that its legitimacy is perceived as a chimera. It may suffice-but it is also necessary-to constitute it in such a way that all the reasons for anxiety which it could provoke will be eliminated. To constitute it in such a way is equally in the interest of both ruler and his subjects; because today absolute power would be just as heavy a burden for the one who wields it as for those he rules."
Talleyrand was right, but he had to submit his resignation. Other people had won, those with more radical views. The French restoration was taking the path of revenge and repression. These people led France to a new revolution.
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The mark of a restoration is its sterility. Sterility of government, lack of ideas, lack of courage, intellectual ossification, cynicism and opportunism. Revolution had grandeur, hope, and danger. It was an epoch of liberation, risk, great dreams, and lowly passions. The restoration is the calm of a dead pond, a marketplace of petty intrigues, and the ugliness of the bribe.
Francois Rene, the Viscount of Chateaubriand, was the enemy of the revolution and of Napoleon. He longed
fervently for the restoration and did a great deal for it. At the same time, however, he called the people of the revolution "giants, in comparison with the small vermin who have hatched from us." He noted: "To fall from Bonaparte and the Imperium to what happened afterwards,
was to fall from being into nothingness, from the mountaintop into a chasm.
"...Generations that are crippled, without faith, dedicated to a nothingness which they love, are not able to grant immortality; they do not have the power to bring glory; if you put your ear to their lips, you will hear nothing; no sound comes from the heart of the dead."
He had contempt for the epoch of the restoration and its people: how to "cite Louis XVIII after the Emperor"? Of the Chamber of Peers he wrote: "For those assembled old men, dried out remnants of the old Monarchy, the Revolution, and the Empire, anything beyond platitudes looked like madness."
One does not have to like the Solidarity revolution any more, and it is easy to criticize it. There is a great deal of criticism of Walesa and Mazowiecki, Bielecki and Suchocka, Gieremek and Kuron. Balcerowicz and Lewandowski, Skubiszewski and Rokita, are not spared either. I have been collecting the whole repertoire of attacks on Gazeta Wyborcza, and I, myself, do not spare the Kaczynski brothers, Olszewski, or Macierewicz. Many of these criticisms are well founded. Nevertheless, it was all those people, amidst errors, inconsistencies, ill-considered decisions, and demoralizing arguments, who carried out the historic task of the anti-Communist revolution in Poland.
With this revolution, the time of "Solidarity"and Walesa had passed. The great myth turned into a caricature. The movement towards freedom degenerated into noisy arrogance and greed. Soon after its victory it lost its instinct for self-preservation. This is why the post-Solidarity formations lost the last elections to Parliament. Let us emphasize this: it is not so much that the post-Communist parties won, as that the post-Solidarity parties lost. They were unable to build an elementary pre-electoral coalition-a necessity obvious to anyone who has read the electoral law-because it was blocked by pettiness and a lack of imagination. Thanks to that, the party which received 20% of the votes won a stunning victory.
Now-in the face of the crawling, though velvet, restoration-the parties of the anti-Communist opposition who lost ought to undertake a critical accounting. There is nothing, however, to suggest that such a process is taking place. Aside from a few exceptions, we still hear the speech of tired words and worn out phrases-a song that no one wants to hear any more.
The people of Communist Poland returned to power. How do they differ from the people of "Solidarity"?
The people of "Solidarity"were of all kinds: wise and stupid, courageous and cautious, modest and boastful. What they shared, however, was thesense that some time ago they had made the decision to choose a more difficult life path. The memory of that decision gave them a sense of dignity and pride, the ability to act in uncompromising and non-opportunistic ways. They usually lacked experience, which could lead either to amateurishness or to a freedom of the imagination. Yet politics was for them not only a game but also a choice entailing real risk-even though, later on, many of them were to become players of the sleaziest kind....
The people of Communist Poland also come in all kinds: wise and stupid, modest and boastful. But their whole experience was different, built on their being at the disposal of others, on obedience, on the capacity for conformist adaptation. The people of "Solidarity"had both the good and the bad features of revolutionaries, or of reformers revolutionizing their own times. The people of Communist Poland have all the features of routinized bureaucrats. The people of "Solidarity"frequently made decisions that were risky and faulty; the people of Communist Poland would like best of all to make no decisions except those regarding personnel. In accordance with the rule that "the cadres decide everything" (Lenin), the people of Communist Poland consistently awarded all posts according to internal Party ranking. It is only a few steps from this to handing out perks and privileges.
The people of "Solidarity"pushed the Wheel of History forward; the people of Communist Poland have not turned the Wheel back, but they are stubbornly putting the brakes on it.
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Poland today is like a casserole prepared from various ingredients, each of which contributes to the flavor of Polish democracy.
Democracy needs the conservative factor; it needs a strong voice from the world of hired labor; and it also needs a liberal-humanist strain. The conservative factor represents that which is organic, rooted in the collective memory, constant and resistant to fashion, guaranteeing continuity, and determining the limits of change in accordance with loyalty to customs. But how to be a conservative in a world of Communism? What's to conserve, since the changes made by the totalitarian revolution over several decades are totally rejected?
For the conservative factor, the elementary frame of reference is the Catholic Church. I regard the question of the place of the Catholic Church in a democratic state as one of the most dramatic.
Will the Church become the conscience of the Polish state or a powerful pressure group on the political stage? The more the Episcopate and the clergy try to intervene in the political game, the more they lose the capacity to exert political pressure and influence public opinion; the more they use the rhetoric of war and the besieged fortress, the more they by-pass the sensibilities of society.
The conservative element, invoking the teachings of the Church, national rhetoric, the traditional family, and stern morals, is entangled in a peculiar paradox. Even though it voices conservative values, it uses the language of revolution; even though it proclaims a religion of mercy, it demands revenge and discrimination; even though it states on its banners a radical anti- Communism, it was developed in the conflict with the liberal-humanist current of the anti-totalitarian opposition. After all, for the people of the Christian National Union [ZChN] or the people of the Center Alliance [PC], the pink devil of the left-the"Catholeft"H-was hidden not in the Polish United Workers Party [PZPR] but among the supporters of Mazowiecki's candidacy for president. The Polish right is closer to the thought and method of Le Pen than of de Gaulle; to the German republicans than to Adenauer. It is more populist than conservative, more vindictive than Christian....
The conservative wing of the Polish political scene faces a dilemma today: either it will take the path of aggressive anti-Communist and clerical rhetoric, to the point of a political instrumentaliza-tion of the Church, or it will choose the language of peace, compromise, responsibility for the state, and a civilized defense of traditional values. Unfortunately, everything today indicates that temperate conservative thought, in the manner of Aleksander Hall, is losing in the circles of the so-called right....
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Lech Walesa and Waldemar PawlakI: These two people are the symbols of two epochs: the revolution and the restoration. Walesa will remain forever a symbol of a great Poland, creative and heroic, but also unleavened, primitive, and cocky. Pawlak is today a symbol of a grey and ordinary Poland which does not want heroism but normality.
The Solidarity governments were under the pressure of their own history: they were handed an invoice by all those who had attached to them their hope for a miracle. And of those there were many. This legion-internally differentiated-deafened and frightened by the dynamics of change-saw itself as the victor over Communism,but soon began to perceive itself as the victim of anti-Communist reform. Bitterness and helplessness were being transformed into the aggressiveness of people who have been cheated. That is why the Solidarity governments were stuck in a certain schizophrenia, whether to give up to their former colleagues from the movement or to take care of the economic
H "Catholic" plus "left".-Trans.
I Pawlak, leader of the post-Communist Peasant Party, has been Prime Minister of Poland since October, 1993.-Trans.
interests of the state. Pawlak's govern- ment is not perceived that way any more. Along with a slowing down of the reforms, it is bringing about a calming down and an end to the schizophrenia.
Whence comes the political strength and popularity of Waldemar Pawlak, about whom one can say many critical things except one: certainly he is neither an heroic man nor one of that new breed of political loonies.
Poles have had enough of that peculiar syndrome: honest heroism associated with the megalomania of the power-mad. They have had enough of appreciating someone else's-real or imagined-deeds and sacrifices; they have had enough of listening to the boastfulness of yesterday's-real or imagined-conspirators from the anti-Communist underground. They sense intuitively that deeds and sacrifices become devalued, are converted into cash and high positions in the state administration. They want to live normally, and they have a right to do so. They want calm. They want the right to respect their own biographies-no matter whether they were the biographies of the Polish People's Republic and the Polish United Workers Party, or those of the anti-Communists and the opposition.
Those who do not understand this understand little about today's Poland.
I do not like restoration. I do not like its ethics or aesthetics, its shallowness or boorishness. Nevertheless, one cannot simply reject this velvet restoration. One has to domesticate it. One has to negotiate with it as with an adversary and/or partner. One has to permeate it with the values of the velvet democratic revolution. Even though it is bad, the logic of the restoration is better, after all, than the logic of a Jacobin-Bolshevik purge, revenge, or guillotine. A consistent restoration is grey with boredom; a consistent revolution is red with blood.
Restorations, too, are also sometimes bloody, but their shape also depends on the strategy of their opponents. If the people of the revolution reach for violence and announce revenge, restorations will use the same weapons. This is when the "ultras" win, like Zyuganov, the leader of the Russian post-Communists. This is why one has to look carefully at the hands of the restoration and not turn one's back on it. Brauzauskas, Horn, and Pawlak are better, after all, than anti-Communists with a Bolshevik face.
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One must not forget that, although restorations do not bring back the old order, they can cause gangrene in a democracy. After all, neither a return to Communism nor a return to Solidarity is possible. We are entering a new epoch, a world of new conflicts and new divisions. Walesa and Pawlak are signs of a nostalgia for the past, whether for the Polish People's Republic or for Solidarity. Who today is a sign of the future?
Somewhat timidly, I think of certain distinguished politicians of the anti-Communist opposition, people of the Church, and people of the post-Communist formation, who were once divided by everything and are still divided by many things today. But they nevertheless share a certain perspective on reality: they all look to the future. In the face of the ominous temptations of the contemporary world, in the face of class, ethnic, and religious wars and hatreds, these people are proposing a conversation about an ordinary Poland in an ordinary Europe.
This project is free of the utopianism which has usually accompanied great turning points. Yet this very project has been the utopian dream of several generations of Poles.q
This article is reprinted with the permission of the author from the September 3-4, 1994, edition of Gazeta Wyborcza. Translator, Elzbieta Matynia.
Liberalism's Crooked Circle The Club of the Crooked Circle composed a group of skeptical intellectuals in a polity that valued conformity. Its Fellowship was clearly leftist in the sense of a strong commitment to egalitarianism, but unlike Poland's ruling class, its commitments were democratic in values and in practice. Between 1956 and 1962, the Club's membership included such outstanding scholars as sociologist Stanislaw Ossowski, philosopher Maria Ossowska, and economist Edward Lipinski. A harbinger of the Workers Defense Committee (perhaps better known to you as KOR) and of Solidarity, the Club of the Crooked Circle probably was the first recurring gathering of dissidents in the region entirely independent of the ruling Communist Party. They engaged in what has proved to be a very long-term process, one that is far from complete: the struggle for a decent politics and society enfolded within the premises of the liberal political tradition. To this end, they sought to recover Poland's traduced and hidden traditions of ethical pluralism and group diversity, and to raise them up as guides to a principled politics.
Many of you will immediately note affinities between the character and project of this Warsaw group of scholar-activists and those of the New School for Social Research. Founded seventy-five years ago as a part of Progressivism's experimental and pragmatist attempt to enlarge the scope of liberal democracy, the New School's courses for adults quickly took the form of an open discussion club based on learning, debate, and engagement. Resolute on behalf of sustained free inquiry, our founders of 1919 fashioned that most rare of institutions: one that cares more for the ideas and ideals it nourishes than for the security of its persistence.
The New School was launched at a time when most social science communities in more encrusted and smug universities were proving incapable of probing the unprecedented problems of the early twentieth century. These included the slaughterhouse of the First World War, nationalist assertions in the wake of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman empires, massive movements of populations across borders, the physical and cultural domination of European colonialism, Bolshevism's mixture of utopian ideals and brutality, the first cast of fascism's ugly head, deepening inequalities of capitalism's second industrial revolution, and challenges of difference in polyglot America: differences of race, gender, ethnicity, religion, and region.
Faced with this set of issues, the founders of the New School were not innocents. They understood that a simple faith in human decency and progress bordered on the credulous. Instead, they tackled these subjects in the nonutopian spirit of what the late political theorist Judith Shklar, a recent recipient of a New School honorary degree, called a liberalism of fear; a liberalism that stares hard at cruelty, suffering, coercion, and tyrannical abuses of public power. Institutions, rights, and the law, in this view, are judged not only for the ways they protect conscience, reduce inequality, or promote autonomous human development. They are valued for their capacity to allow people who are vastly different in ascriptive characteristics, in social standing, and in ethical values to live together without sanctioned harm, free to pursue a contentious public politics while being bound by rules of fairness and inclusion, guaranteed by the trump cards of rights that cannot be taken away.
The New School was re-founded in 1933 when the University in Exile was brought into its fold, soon to become the Graduate Faculty. No less than a humanitarian rescue effort for academics threatened by German Nazism and Italian Fascism, it also was more. The scholars brought to 12th Street possessed the knowledge that the circumference of liberalism's circle never runs smooth. They understood that liberal tolerance requires difficult judgments about tolerated differences. They knew that all liberal regimes are built on foundations of state violence and coercion; and that these instruments in the basements of the state can be used to topple the upper floors of open societies. At best, they remain in place as hidden instruments of rule.
The issues that obsessed the founders of the New School in 1919 and 1933 also were key themes in the considerations of Warsaw's Club of the Crooked Circle. Philosophically liberal, egalitarian, and devoted to a diverse political culture and a multifarious civil society, its members and those of its successor institutions in Poland and elsewhere in East Europe have crafted a challenging body of thought fashioned in full understanding of liberalism's crooked circle. Given the affinity of their concerns with those deeply embedded at the New School, the links fashioned between the New School and East European opposition intellectuals beginning in the early 1980's retrospectively have taken on the illusion of inevitability. In fact, we owe these ties to the prescience of President Fanton and to a small group of colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic, including, at the New School, Jeffrey Goldfarb, Elzbieta Matynia, Andrew Arato, and Robert Gates.
Just ten years ago, when the Graduate Faculty celebrated its first half-century, we conferred honorary degrees on such venturesome advocates of human rights as the Reverend C.T. Vivian, Martin Luther King's aide; the Maryknoll Sisters; South Africa's Helen Suzman;and Poland's Adam Michnik. Confined to a prison cell, Michnik could not attend. Those of us who did, however, will never forget the charged silence in the First Presbyterian Church when the poet and Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz accepted the degree for the absent Michnik. Milosz read out Michnik's letter to General Kiszczak, then Minister of Internal Affairs, explaining why he had rejected the General's offer of exile. Michnik spurned what he called the exchange of the Cote d'Azur for a "moral suicide," and he observed, "I have no idea whether I will yet live to see the victory of truth over lies and of Solidarity over this present antiworker dictatorship. The point is, General, that for me, the value of our struggle lies not in its chances of victory but rather in the value of the cause. Let my little gesture of denial be a small contribution to the sense of honor and dignity in this country that is being made more miserable every day. For you, traders in other people's freedom, let it be a slap in the face."
Of course, Michnik did live to see the collapse of the Jaruzelski regime, and, unexpectedly, far more: the termination of the Bolshevik experiment everywhere, even in Moscow. As Michnik was amongst the first to recognize, the revolutions of 1989 signified more than a rout of liberalism's adversaries. Their success also revealed an intellectual crisis deep inside western liberalism and its far too abstract portrait of civil society as composed of individuals living outside community, meaning, and belief. Further, the cataclysmic violence based on affiliations of blood and kin that has racked so many of the successor states to Communism has underscored the importance of a political sociology of institutions capable of grappling with and managing the passions of nationality and diversity.
More than ever, we need the kind of political theory and institutional creativity entwined in politics, history, and policy that the New School's founders and the members of The Club of the Crooked Circle sought to advance. Alas, seventy-five years after the New School first devoted itself to social research, far too little work in the social sciences confronts these problems with the normative and analytical dispositions they cultivated. Their issues-about the state and organized violence, moral and group heterogeneity, exclusion and inequality, and the pitfalls and possibilities of democratization-endure as our questions. We, too, need to appreciate their irresolvability, and the stubborn fact that only partial and provisional truths are available inside their fields of play.
The New School today possesses a rich harvest of scholars and settings to conduct these probes. These sites include a new International Center on Immigration and Ethnicity; the World Policy Institute; the Center for Studies of Social Change; the Center for Politics, Theory, and Policy; the East and Central Europe Program; the Janey Program on Latin America; and new cross-disciplinary Committees on Democracy, Gender Studies, and Political Economy. As our studies grapple with such connundrums as the width of our immigration gate, the regulation of sexuality, the racial divide, and the reorganization of the post-Cold War international system, we would do well to renew the style of inquiry characteristic of the original New School and The Club of the Crooked Circle. It teaches that the alternative to fixed dogma is not a lapse into relativism, but sustained political argument tempered by an appreciation for complexity and contradiction; and it knows that liberalism's circle never can be made smooth.
In October, Adam Michnik, who now edits Poland's leading newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza, will arrive at the New School as a visiting professor. It will be good to welcome him here for many reasons, not least those of friendship and sentiment. He will come at a time when the killing fields of Europe and Africa are working overtime, when victims of history here and abroad are being seduced by a fanaticism of hate, and when our politics and policies lack a moral compass. But he will also visit at a moment when ancient antagonists are meeting, as in South Africa, on the best common ground of the liberal tradition; even, paradoxically, at a time when some of liberalism's fiercest enemies are reentering the governments in East Europe within a framework of democracy. In such circumstances we could do far worse than heed Michnik's unsentimental call in December of last year for "more humility and fewer illusions," or his formula of reconciliation under the banner "for amnesty...against amnesia."
One final word to the Class of 1994, whose achievements I am delighted to salute: As you move on, you will discover ever more clearly the distinctive qualities of the New School. America's larger research universities, committed though they also have been to the values of reason and freedom, have been rather too inclined to think that liberalism's circle does run smooth, too willing to treat its perimeter as a boundary of exclusion, and too disposed to place on the periphery the questions and work that have been so central to this institution. I am confident your exposure to the New School's brand of social research has taught you to question doctrines and institutions ceaselessly and responsibly. May all your endeavors flourish!
Ira Katznelson is the Ruggles Prof. of Political Science and Constitutional Law at Columbia Univ., and a member of the Steering Committee of the ECEP.
1994-95 FellowsIndira Kajosevic (Podgorica, Yugoslavia), completed her postgraduate studies on international relations at the Belgrade Faculty for Political Sciences. She is a member of the Women in Black Against the War and a feminist activist in Belgrade. Since the beginning of the war in former Yugoslavia she has worked for the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. Her research focuses on the issue of rape in Bosnia and the adoption of the UN Security Council Resolution.
Democracy Fellows
In its third year of hosting the Democracy Fellows, supported by the
Pew Charitable Trusts, the East and Central Europe Program is pleased to
welcome to the Graduate Faculty some of the most promising young scholars
from the region.
Monica Ciobanu (Bucharest, Romania), has an MA from the University of Bucharest, 1993. Currently she works as an asst. researcher at the National Institute of Sociology, Romanian Academy, where she is pursuing her Ph.D.
Jacek Kucharczyk (Warsaw, Poland), is a PhD candidate at the GSSR in Warsaw, where he is focusing on the history of the concept of liberal culture and multiculturalism.
Lydia Kudlickova (Ruzomberok, Slovakia), received her MA in Sociology in May 1994, with a thesis on the problem of homelessness in Slovakia.
Peeter Muursepp (Keila, Estonia), has an MA in Philosophy from Tartu University, 1992. He coordinates the Estonian branch of the ECEP's Democracy Seminar and is a PhD student and senior lecturer in Philosophy at Tallinn Pedagogical Univ. His scholarly work is on the philosophical problems associated with rapid social and economic change in the post-totalitarian world.
Valeri Pandjarov (Sofia, Bulgaria), is completing his MA in Political Science at the New Bulgarian University in Sofia. His research focuses on European integration, with special attention to the problems of ethnicity and migration, liberalism, and democracy.
Andras Tapolcai (Budapest, Hungary), has an MA in Sociology from the Budapest University of Economic Sciences in 1993. He is now a research Fellow and lecturer at the Center for European Studies in the Dept. of Sociology at Berzsenyi College in Szombathely. His doctoral research focuses on the Roma population in Hungary.
Soros Fellows
In a joint project with the Open Society Institute's Consortium for
Academic Partnership, the East and Central Europe Program is proud
to announce the arrival of three students from the Central European University.
Pavle Jovanovic (Belgrade, Serbia), is currently working on his MA in Philosophy in Prague. His research interests focus on problemetizing the concept of aesthetics in the context of postmodernism.
Laurentia Ghita (Corabia, Romania), is currently working on her MA in Political Science in Budapest. She is interested in the process of democratization, the role of the state in democratic societies, and theories of democracy. Ms. Ghita has also had extensive political experience in Romania during the Democratic Convention in 1992.
Jozsef Berenyi (Okoc, Slovakia), was a Member of Parliament in the Slovak National Council from 1990 to 1992. He just finished his MA in Budapest, where he is currently doing post-graduate study on questions of Slovakian and Eastern European nationalism, and the role of the media in fostering nationalist linguistic hysteria.q
NOTESThursday, October 6
Nada Selimovic (Ctr. for Anti-War Actions, Sarajevo), Recovering Sarajevo: Prospects for Peace, 4:00pm, Rm. 217.
Wednesday, October 12
Stelian Tanase (Deputy to the Romanian Parliament, Vice President of the Committee of Foreign Affairs), The Ruling Class in Post-Communist Romania, 12:00pm, Ctr. for European Studies, 51 Wash. Sq. S. (Co-sponsored by NYU.)
Thursday, October 20
Adam Michnik (political writer, Editor-in-Chief of Gazeta Wyborcza, visiting professor at the GF-Fall 1994), Post-Communist Europe: Challenges for the New Democracies, 7:45pm, Swayduck Auditorium.
Monday, October 31
Janos Kis (Head, Political Science Dept., Central European Univ.), Between Revolution and Restoration: Current Hungarian Politics, 6:00pm in Rm. 242.
IN NOVEMBER:
Wednesday, November 16
Yaroslav Hrytsak (Director, Inst. of Hist. Studies, Lviv Univ., Ukraine, and Coord., Lviv Democracy Seminar), National and Political Consciousness in W. and E. Ukraine, for the NY Democracy Seminar, 2:00pm in Rm. 217.
Jacek Kuron (founder, Comm. for the Defense of Workers (KOR); one of the architects of Solidarity; Minister of Labor in the first post-Communist gov't.; head of the SOS Foundation; and the most popular public figure in Poland, Is Market Economics with a Human Face Possible in E. and Cent. Europe?, 7:45pm, Swayduck Auditorium.
Tuesday, November 22
Serhiy Ivanouk (Dean of Humanities, Univ. of Kiev-Mohyla Academy), Literature, Culture, & Society of Contemporary Ukraine, 6:00pm, Rm. 242. Monday, November 28
Marcin Krol (GSSR, Warsaw; Editor-in-Chief, Res Publica),
Liberal-Communitarian
Debate: Its Relevance to the Public Discourse in Poland, 6:00pm, Rm.
242.q
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