Bulletin #24

VOL. 7/1 (ISSUE 24), December 1996
The Graduate Faculty - New School for Social Research
65 Fifth Avenue, Room 404 & 423 - New York, NY 10003
Tel: (212) 229-5580 - Fax: (212) 229-5894 - E-mail: BreuerI@newschool.edu
Director: Elzbieta Matynia; Program Coordinator: Ina Breuer; Assistant and Bulletin Editor: Heshan de Silva-Weeramuni; Associate: Magdalena Iwanska

The ECEP is made possible through the generous support of The Eurasia Foundation, The Ford Foundation, The Pew Charitable Trusts, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the USIA, Mr. Aso Tavidian and the G-Tech Corporation.

Table of Contents

E-Mail from Belgrade and Zagreb

Dear Elzbieta,

I want to let you know about the civil protest in Belgrade.

If I were to stay at home and inform myself through the state TV, Radio, and Press, I would get information about the pro-fascist demonstrators in the streets of Belgrade or statements about "non-existent" student protests from the Ministry of Education and the President of Belgrade University. By taking part in events I can be sure what's going on, and see what big lies can be spread by the mass media! The students' protest has been going on for 18 days now, with the full support of 1,100 professors. Belgrade University and all other large Serbian universities are in this protest together...

The students are not taking sides between the party in power and the opposition, but insist upon the rule of law. We claim that any government unwilling to acknowledge its electoral defeat does not deserve students' support...

Our daily program is as follows: 11:30 a.m. - Gathering of students at their own faculties; 12:00 noon - Departure of all Belgrade University students to Plato Square (in front of the Faculty of Philosophy) for speeches (by professors, public persons) followed by music. If a speaker mentions the name of Slobodan Milosevic, the crowd whistles for 10 minutes or more. We set a new record for the Guinness Book of 21 minutes last Sunday!; 1:00 PM Protest walk through the main streets of Belgrade; 3:00 PM Students gather outside and inside the faculties for discussions, speeches... The next day, we do this all over again, from 11:30 AM until evening.

In a parallel process, at 3:00 PM every day about 100,000 citizens march through downtown Belgrade. Some students join these citizens' march while others take part in the activities at their faculties... The Serbian regime blocked independent media by controlling the main newspapers and periodicals and all TV and broadcast emitters. As you know, Radio B92's programming was cut off the air many times in the last 10 days during its regular reporting of the anti-government demonstrations. For three days all broadcasting by B92 and Radio INDEX was cut by you know who.

The calls for support for the radio stations by international leaders and newspapers led to the resumption of their transmissions two days ago. Sometimes political pressure in desperate situations can lead to success and peace.

Best regards,

Lazar Nikolic.

Dear Karen [1]

...With regard to media, the situation in Croatia is quite dramatic. Journalists working in independent media have problems with the police (the so-called "informative conversation" at the police station)... The Croatian government has decided to destroy the only radio station in Croatia, Radio 101, dealing with democratic ideas. Because of that we had a demonstration in Zagreb just over a week ago. All I can say is, in my whole life I've never seen so many people on the main square in Zagreb - about 50,000, maybe even more. OK, I'm sure 50,000 people is not much for somebody living in New York, but Croatia only has four and a half million inhabitants. For now Radio 101 can broadcast until the end of January. So we urgently need your help and support with signatures right away: otherwise it will be too late for that kind of pressure.

Warm regards from Zagreb,

Patricija Mirt.

[2]. Karen Underhill coordinates ECEP's Electronic Media, Politics and Policy Workshop.

Gray is Beautiful: A Letter to Ira Katznelson [1]
Adam Michnik

So: two people, with the experience that comes with age, were playing tennis. The tennis ball ended up in the bushes. Looking for the ball, one of the players saw a frog. The frog spoke to him with a human voice: "I'm a beautiful princess, turned into a frog by a mischievous wizard. If you kiss me, I will become a princess once again. I will marry you, you will be a prince, and we will live happily ever after."

The player put the frog into his pocket, found the ball, and continued the game. After a while, the frog again spoke to him, this time from his pocket: "Sir, did you forget about me? I am this beautiful princess, turned into a frog. If you kiss me, I will become a princess again. We will get married and live happily ever after!"

And then she heard his answer: "Dear lady frog, I will be completely honest with you. I have reached the age at which I would rather have a talking frog than a new wife."

This frog is Central Europe, knocking at the gates of NATO and the European Union. NATO and the European Union have not yet made up their minds to kiss. They don't yet know whether they prefer to have a talking frog or a new wife.

Let us skip the controversies about defining the borders of Central Europe. Let's remind ourselves, however, of the statement by the Hungarian writer Gyorgy Konrad: "It is we, who live in Central Europe, who began the two great World Wars." Put differently, this multi-national mosaic, conquered by German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman Empires, was, and still is, a source of conflict and de-stabilization. Today, seven years after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the nations of Central Europe are facing new opportunities and new challenges. How will things turn out for them?

More than 10 years ago, through the works of its artists, philosophers and writers, Central Europe came to be thought of as a realm of spiritual freedom, diversity, and tolerance. Milan Kundera was creating this myth against the fact of Soviet domination: in the place of the Anglo-Saxon formula "the countries of the Soviet Bloc", an image appeared of Central Europe as a home of equal nations with abundant, colorful culture, nurtured by a diversity of languages, religions, traditions and personalities.

It was not an absurd idea, and it was not a false image. Kundera, as well as Havel, Konrad and others, were fully justified in re-reading and in presenting to the world the cultural heritage of this region of borderlands -- where nations, religions and cultures rub up against one another. They were fully justified in presenting it as the realization of a multi-cultural ideal of society -- a miniature Europe of Nations -- founded on the principle of maximum diversity in minimum space. These writers also had a wise idea concerning spiritual-political strategy: these nations, strikingly weak and powerless in confronting the imperial appetites of their neighbors, are transforming this powerlessness into power. Here we have a land of small nations, conquered, subjected, and enslaved for generations, transforming itself into the fertile soil which gave birth to Robert Musil and Franz Kafka, Thomas Masaryk and Karel Capek, Mickiewicz and Conrad, Singer and Einstein, Krleza and Tatarka, Milosz and Seifert, Canetti and Levinas, Ionesco and Lukacs.

The trump card of these small nations was their very non-imperial character, which made them natural allies of freedom and tolerance. Decades and centuries of existence in an environment of oppression and repression produced a specific culture, characterized by honor and self-irony, the stubbornness to stand by values, and the courage to believe in romantic ideals. Here, national and civic consciousness developed as a result of human bonds -- and not by the order of state institutions; here it was easier to devise the idea of civil society, precisely because the sovereign national state remained largely in the realm of dreams. The great cultural diversity of this region was to be -- and frequently was -- the best weapon of self-defense against the claims of ethnic or ideological powers.

"The East European," -- wrote Barbara Torunczyk in 1987-- "already has his own kingdom. It emerges in the place where he lives. It is a realm of the spirit, but firmly rooted in reality. Today the East European of the post-Yalta generation can do without a cult of the West (...) He gives new names to Europe and does it from right here at home." What remains of this vision seven years after the fall of Communism?

Communism was like a freezer. Within it a diverse world of tensions and values, emotions and conflicts, was covered with a thick layer of ice. The defrosting process was a gradual one -- so first we saw beautiful flowers, and only later, the rot. First came the grandiloquence of the peaceful fall of the Berlin wall and of the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia. Later, a wave of xenophobic rage which took over Germany in 1992 -1993, and the breakup of Czechoslovakia. First was the memorable "Autumn of the Nations" in 1989. Freedom returned to Central Europe, and Central Europe returned to history. It returned as a messenger not only of freedom and tolerance, but also of hatred and intolerance, both ethnic and religious. Conflicts - difficult to understand for people who had perceived this territory simply as the Soviet Bloc - came to life once more. But these conflicts were understood all too well by the inhabitants of those lands. They were understood because this world of many nations and cultures had experienced the deep ambiguity of the right of nations to sovereign existence: the right of one nation usually endangered the right of another nation, and this would bring about ethnic cleansing. Grillparzer, a great Austrian writer of the nineteenth century, warned prophetically against the road that leads "from humanism, through nationality, to bestiality".

Dear Ira,
I suppose, for the American public, these meanderings of Central European democratic thought may appear a bit exotic. This thought was put to a double test: the test of captivity and the test of freedom. Hence, certainly some statements will appear unclear, while others perfectly banal. However, it seems to me that this thought was born out of a common inspiration: a passionate dream, about freedom and democratic order.

Democracy is not identical with freedom. Democracy is freedom written into the rule of law. Freedom in itself, without the limitsimposed on it by law and tradition, is a road to anarchy and chaos -- where the right of the strongest rules. For my generation the road to freedom began in 1968. It was in that year that tens of thousands of students filled the streets to demonstrate their protest against the establishment. Was there any common denominator in the rebellions of students in Berkeley, Paris and West Berlin and those on the streets of Warsaw and Prague? At first glance these were completely different phenomena: the students of Berkeley and Paris rejected the order of bourgeois democracy. The students of Prague and Warsaw were fighting for the freedom which bourgeois democracy guaranteed. Moreover, the students of Berkeley and Paris were fascinated by the communist project, and by the revolutionary rhetoric of Mao Tse Tung -- of which the students of Warsaw and Prague had had enough.

Nevertheless, I think there were also some common threads: the anti-authoritarian spirit, a sense of emancipation, and the conviction that "to be a realist means to demand the impossible." And finally the need for rebellion, rooted in the conviction that "as long as the world is as it is, it is not worth it to die quietly in your own bed." "The world as it is"...meant an unjust world.

So there we are! At the root of the rebellion of 1968 was a need for justice: a need to have access to freedom and to bread, to truth and to power. There was something wonderfully uplifting in this rebellion, which transformed not just the collective consciousness of one generation. But there was also something frightening in it: the vandalized universities, destroyed libraries, barbarian slogans which substituted for intellectual reflection; and finally, violence, terrorism and political killings. All of this also belongs to the heritage of nineteen sixty eight.

At that time we defined ourselves as socialists and people of the left. Why today does this formula cause in me an internal protest? Why do I myself not want to subscribe to any of the great ideologies? Here, I believe, lies the source of many arguments with my American friends. But possibly, this is more often an argument about language than about ideas. I once asked Jurgen Habermas: "What do we have left of the idealistic faith in the freedom-oriented socialism of the sixties?" His answer was: "Radical democracy." Since this formula is close to me, I will try to decipher it in my own way.

The system of parliamentary democracy and market economy has had fierce adversaries since its inception. Let's give them the symbolic names of "conservative" and "socialist". For the conservative, the democratic order was a negation of tradition -- the defeat of the Christian spirit by a rapacious nihilism; the total victory of relativism over the world of tested and absolute values. For the socialist, it was a system which generated, disguised, and perpetuated inequality and injustice. The conservative saw in man a wild being, which cannot be domesticated by calls to reason. Only strong institutions can achieve this. The socialist, on the other hand, saw in man a good being, forced by inhuman social conditions into animal behavior. Both conservative and socialist rejected the order of a freedom based on the free play of political and economic forces, on the specific domination of property and money.

The conservative held that this order liberates in man an animal rapaciousness, while the socialist was of the opinion that this order virtually requires an animal aggression. This is how the two great utopias were established: one retrospective, and the other prospective, a utopia of conservative, hierarchical harmony, and a utopia of egalitarian, socialist harmony. One can debate the relations of both these utopias with the two totalitarianisms of the twentieth century. One can argue whether bolshevism was preying on the socialist idea, or whether the socialist idea provided bolshevism with its intellectual and political arguments. One can also try to explore whether fascism used the anti-liberal arguments of conservatives and the conservative dream of returning to a world of pre-industrial values, or whether the conservatives saw in fascism a way to defend themselves against demo-liberal destruction. But there is no doubt that such connections existed, even though we can find conservatives among the anti-fascist opposition, and we can find socialists among the most consistent adversaries of bolshevism. The crowning for both anti-liberal utopias became the totalitarian systems. I lived in one of them for forty years; but I learned to distrust both.

Dear Ira,
Why did we rebel against communism? Why did we prefer to become a small repressed minority, rather than to join the majority which lived and made careers in the world of totalitarian dictatorship?

Well, we rejected communism for several different reasons: it was a lie, and we were searching for truth; communism meant conformity and we desired authenticity; communism was enslavement, fear, and censorship, and we desired freedom; it was an ongoing attack on tradition and national identity which we held to be ours; it was social inequality and injustice, and we believed in equality and justice; communism was a grotesquely deficient economy, and we sought rationality, efficiency, and affluence; communism meant the suppression of religion, and we held freedom of conscience to be a fundamental human right. So, we rejected communism for reasons equally dear to a conservative, socialist, and a liberal. In this way, a peculiar coalition of ideas emerged, which Leszek Kolakowski noted in his well-known essay, "How to be a Conservative-Liberal Socialist?" This coalition collapsed along with communism. But before it collapsed, the coalition had marked public debate with a specific tone of moral absolutism.

The moral absolutism of the anti-communist opposition required us to believe that communism is inherently evil, the evil empire, the devil of our times, and that resistance to communism and communists is something naturally good, noble, and beautiful. The democratic opposition demonized communists and angelicized itself. I know what I am writing about because this moral absolutism was to a certain degree also my experience. I don't regret this experience, nor do I think I need to be ashamed of it. Standing up to the world of totalitarian dictatorship was to risk, or even to sacrifice, not only one's own safety but also that of one's friends and family. One had to believe that "Human life is a serious game," as a Church historian of the communist period wrote. Each day one had to make a choice which could have costly consequences. Those decisions were not the result of academic debates, but were moral acts frequently paid for with imprisonment, or ruined careers. For active dissidents, this situation created a climate favorable for harsh and demanding valuations. One professed humanistic values, but lived within heroic values, with their fundamental principle of loyalty to one's own identity and loyalty to one's friends from the democratic opposition; loyalty to values which were betrayed and mocked; loyalty to the nation, to the Church, and to tradition. "The weak side" - wrote Bogdan Cywinski - "was always under siege." The most outstanding witnesses of resistance in those years--Solzhenitsin, Havel, Herbert--defended absolute values. Herbert wrote: "let your sister Scorn not leave you / for the informers executioners cowards - they will win."[2]

And in the end it was we who won. But, woe to those moral absolutists who emerge victorious in political struggles - even if only for a while.

Moral absolutism is a great strength for individuals and groups struggling against dictatorship; but it is a weakness for individuals and groups active in a world where democratic procedures are being built on the rubble of totalitarian dictatorships. There is no more room there either for the utopias of a just, harmonious, and perfect world, or for moral absolutism. Both of these come down to either anachronism or hypocrisy; both of these threaten the democratic order. Because a democratic world is a chronically imperfect one. It's a world of freedom (sinful, corrupt and fragile) which came after the collapse of the world of totalitarian necessity (also, luckily, imperfect).

This world not only forced the collapse of the coalition of anti-totalitarian ideas, but also revealed their contradictory character. Egalitarianism found itself in conflict with the principles of liberal economy; conservatism challenged the spirit of liberal tolerance. Dilemmas appeared which the socialist, the conservative and the liberal resolved in different ways. Let's mention some of them: the ways of dealing with the communist past; the shape of the market; the fundamental principles of the state; the place of the church and religious values in the new reality.

For the socialist, the central issue will be to give a human face to a rapacious market economy; to defend the poorest sectors in society; the secular character of the state; and tolerance toward people of different faiths and nationalities.

The conservative, would bring back the continuity of national symbols; he would fight for a Christian reshaping of the constitution and institutions; he would warn against the dangers coming from liberalism and relativism; he would demand harsh treatment for people of the old regime.

The liberal will say: the economy first - economic growth, clear rules of the market, stable system of taxation, privatization, exchangeable currency. He would be a careful defender of the idea of a tolerant state -- with regard to the Church, to national minorities, to the neighboring countries, and with regard to the past. The point is, that each of them will be formulating his ideas in a new context: the context of a new, populist and still unnamed ideology. There is a bit of fascism in it, and a bit of communism; a bit of egalitarianism, and a bit of clericalism. These slogans will be accompanied by a radical criticism of the ideology of Enlightenment, and by the harsh language of moral absolutism. At the same time, a nostalgia will appear, surprising for all - for the socialist, the liberal and the conservative. A nostalgia for the security of the "good old communist days", when, as they said, "the state pretended to pay the people, and the people pretended to work".

One must know this context in order to understand the dilemmas of the new post-communist democracies. Dealing with the communist past has divided the participants of the debate into spokesmen for justice and spokesmen for reconciliation. The first demanded the methodical punishment of the guilty parties. The second proposed a process of national reconciliation in the name of future challenges. Both those attitudes at times took on a grotesque form: the first went so far as to demand discrimination against the members of the communist apparatus; the second behaved as if they had forgotten that the past dictatorship ever existed. The formula for which I was a spokesman: "Amnesty-yes; amnesia-no" -- turned out to be too difficult for the people of the democratic opposition.

The dispute over the shape of the market economy took on the form of a social conflict, in which the arguments of the socialist and of the conservative came together in a criticism of the policies of liberal transformation. Unemployment, social contrasts, the frustration of employees, all of that resulted in a slowing down of the pace of reform. The dispute over the shape of the state -- should it be national or civil -- turned out to be fundamental, especially in multi-national countries, which had just regained independence after their long enslavement.

Conservative partisans of national principle emphasized the need to reconstruct the ethnic fabric destroyed through the years of official de-nationalization; the partisans of the civil principle were defending the fundamental tenets of democracy against an invasion of intolerant chauvinism. And finally, the Church. After years of repression, the church reasserted its claim to a place in the public debate. In communities where the national identity was frequently accompanied by a religious identity, there appears a natural temptation to endow those new states with a religious identity. The Church called for such a constitution and criminal code which would be in accordance with the moral norms of religion. The debate around the penalization of abortion was a classic illustration of the argument about the axiological foundation of the state. Does the admissibility of abortion imply approval of the murder of unborn children? Does the criminalization of abortion constitute an attack on the fundamental right of a woman to decide about her own maternity? Each of those arguments was accompanied by extreme emotional tensions: there was a constant appeal to moral arguments; the language of war propaganda was used. Two opposing worlds of values confronted one another: the pragmatic, often saturated with corruption and with the cynicism of people of the old regime, versus the chronic patriotism of people of the world of conservative values, which in the recent past had resisted communism. The former heroism of the world which had resisted repression showed its second face: intolerant, fanatical, and resistant to new, modernizing ideas. This is a natural turn of events in the world of post-communist democracies.

None of these disputes is fatal for democracy, which after all is a permanent debate. Fatal, indeed, would be such an intensification of conflict that all sides, by absolutizing their positions, become incapable of compromise. Then, it will already be easy to undermine the procedures of the democratic state. Because radical movements -- whether under black or red banners -- gladly use the procedures and institutions of democracy in order to obliterate it. In the meantime, democracy is neither black nor red. Democracy is gray, is established only with difficulty, and its quality and flavor can be recognized best when it loses under the pressure of advancing red or black radical ideas. Democracy is not infallible, because in its debates all are equal. This is why it lends itself to manipulation, and may be helpless against corruption. This is why, frequently, it chooses banality over excellence, shrewdness over nobility, empty promise over true competence. Democracy is a continuous articulation of particular interests, a diligent search for compromise among them, a marketplace of passions, emotions, hatreds and hopes; it is eternal imperfection, a mixture of sinfulness, saintliness, and monkey business. This is why the seekers of a moral state and of a perfectly just society do not like democracy. Yet, only democracy -- having the capacity to question itself -- also has the capacity to correct its own mistakes. Dictatorships, whether red or black, destroy the human capacity for creation, they kill the taste for human life, and eventually, life itself. Only gray democracy, with its human rights, with institutions of civil society, can replace weapons with arguments. Parliamentarianism became an alternative to civil wars even though a conservative would argue with a liberal and with a social democrat whether that was the result of common sense or the wisdom which comes from misfortune.

The subject of democracy is people, and not ideas. And this is why, in the framework of democratic institutions, citizens can meet and collaborate independently of their faith, nationality or ideology. Today the classic ideological positions, like liberalism, conservatism or socialism, do not dominate public debate about taxes, health reform, or insurance. Yet in each of those debates, there is a need for the presence of a socialist care for the poorest, a conservative defense of tradition, and a liberal reflection on efficiency and growth. Each of those values is needed in democratic politics. It is these that give color and diversity to our life; it is these that equip us with the capacity to choose; it is thanks to their mutual contradictions that we can afford inconsistency, experimentation, changes of opinion, and changes of government. In opposition to so-called 'corrupt demo-liberalism', the fanaticism of ideological inquisitors offers again and again new projects for a "promised land". Fundamentalists of different varieties condemn the moral relativism of democracy, as though it were the state which should be the guardian of moral virtue. We, however, the defenders of gray democracy, do not grant the state this right. We want human virtues to be guarded by the human conscience.

That is why we say, "gray is beautiful."And all of this has been told to you by a frog from Central Europe.

(Translated by Elzbieta Matynia)

Adam Michnik, Editor-In-Chief of Gazeta Wyborcza, was the Fall 1996 G-Tech Professor in Democracy at the Graduate Faculty.

____________________________

1. A response to Ira Katznelson's Liberalism's Crooked Circle: Letters to Adam Michnik, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1996.

2. Zbigniew Herbert: "The Envoy of Mr. Cogito" in Mr. Cogito, The Ecco Press, NJ 1993, p.61. Translated from Polish by John Carpenter and Bogdana Carpenter.

Democracy & Diversity Video

ECEP Alumni Update

Democracy & ECEP Fellows at the New School Pew

Democracy II Fellow Dionyz Hochel (Slovakia,'96), is teaching his public policy course entitled "Modern Political Ideologies" at Trnava University. Next spring he hopes to also invite members of the NGO sector to be guest lecturers in his course on public policy.

Darius Aidukas (Lithuania,'96) is teaching a course called "Public Administration and Policy Analysis" at Vilnius University,

Pavel Fedorchencko (Ukraine,'96) is offering a similar course at Kiev-Mohyla Academy,

Mariela Vargova (Bulgaria,'96) will be co-teaching a course on Constitutionalism at New Bulgarian University in the spring.

Mellon Democracy Fellow Gabor Juhasz (Hungary, '96) is teaching a course on social rights at ELTE.

Pavel Tychtl (Czech Republic,'93) is currently the Executive Director of the Organization for Aid to Refugees, or OPU, a Czech based non-profit assisting in the integration of refugees into Czech society.

Radim Marada (Czech Republic,'95) visited the New School this fall. While here, he delivered a public lecture entitled, "The Czech Elections of 1996 and their Political Consequences." He continues to teach at Masaryk University in Brno.

Democracy & Diversity

Oana Suciu (Romania, '96) wrote us recently: "I've been more than busy: I am the program coordinator of a civic education project, targeting 18-year olds. I have organized training workshops in high-schools all over Romania to convince these young people to go and vote. I received a lot of media coverage in many cities, including Bucharest, where I was invited to different talk-shows and for interviews on TV."

Sasho Veljanovski (Macedonia, '96) is working at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic Of Macedonia.

Vugar Seidov (Azerbaijan, '96) is studying Political Science at Cambridge University. He has also been instrumental in publicizing our Media, Politics and Policy Workshop.

Also in England is Roza Vajda (Hungary, '96) who is on a one-year research fellowship at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at the University of London.

Both Boris Kostov (Bulgaria, '96) and Anna Laido (Estonia, '96) are at the New School this year as Democracy II Fellows, and have been joined by Malgorzata Gajda (Poland '92), Magda Iwanska (Poland, '95) and Michal Vasecka (Slovakia, '94/95).

Ivana Breierova (Czech Republic, '95) is not far away, she is spending a year at Rutgers University in New Jersey studying sociology.

Alexandru Vari (Romania, '95) spent this semester at the Center for Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pittsburg through a USIA-funded research scholarship.

We also received visits Lyaila Ivatova (Kazakhstan, '96), and Elena Gapova (Belarus, '96). Their separate, brief working stays at the New School provided us with the opportunity to further discuss collaborative projects in social science with their respective universities.

Karolina Matynia '94,'95,'96 (as our Institute Assistant!) graduated from UNIS and has begun her undergraduate studies at Cedar Crest College in Pennsylvania.

Please tell us about your adventures - write to Heshan de Silva-Weeramuni (weeramun@newschool.edu) at ECEP.

NOTES

In January
Thursday, January 30th
Andrei Richter, Director, Moscow Media Law and Policy Institute, "The State of the Russian Press at the End of The Yeltsin Era," 12 p.m., Room 211.

In February
Thursday, February 6
Andras Szanto, Research Manager, Freedom Forum Media Studies Center, will speak on "Voters and the Media," 12 p.m., Room 211.

Thursday, February 27
Arlene Morgan, Fellow, Freedom Forum Media Studies Center, will speak on "Affirmative Action and the Media," 12 p.m., Room 211.

ANNOUNCEMENTS

Kevin F. F. Quigley, a Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson Center, is the author of a forthcoming book entitled For Democracy's Sake: Foundations and Democratic Assistance in Central Europe (John's Hopkins U.P.). The book examines foundations' democracy assistance programs in Central Europe immediately after 1989. It offers lessons regarding the most "effective strategies, approaches, and techniques for helping others develop their versions of democracy." The book is previewed in his recent monograph, "Conversations on Democratic Assistance" (available at the Woodrow Wilson Center, phone - (202) 357-4439).

The Civic Education Project, a private voluntary international educational organization dedicated to assisting democratic reform through cooperation with regional universities, is seeking Visiting Lecturers from the both the region and from the US, to teach in the region as part of its efforts for the next academic year. For further information, contact CEP by e-mail at - info@cep.yale.edu.

The following lists our Media, Politics & Policy Workshop Long Distance Study Groups and their coordinators. For more information write to the New York coordinator Karen Underhill: underhik@newschool.edu.

• Belarus: Belarussian State University - Elena Gapova.
• Czech Republic: Gender Studies Center, Prague - Petra Jedlickova; Open Media Research Institute, Prague - Elin Sulejmanov; Masaryk University, Brno -Radim Marada.
• Estonia: Tallinn Pedagogical University - Tiuu Pohl; Tartu University - Epp Lauk.
• Hungary: Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest - Sharon Cooley, Gabor Juhasz, Peter Gyorgy; Budapest Institute of Graduate Int'l Studies - Hegedus Istvan; Central European University, Budapest - Kyrylo Loukerenko.
• Kazakhstan: Kazakh State University - Lyaila Ivatova; Almaty State University - Shinara Imangalieva
• Kyrgyzstan: Kyrgyz American University - Ainoura Sagynbaeva
• Romania: University of Cluj / ELTE Budapest (joint Romanian Hungarian group) - Doru Pop, Tibor Dessewffy; University of the West, Timisoara - Brindusa Armanca.
• Russia: Moscow State Institute of Electronic Technics - Olga Malinova; Tver State University - Boris Gubman; Ural State University - Dmitri Strovsky; Mari State Pedagogical Institute, (Yoshkar-Ola) - Galina Rokina.
• South Africa: University of Witwatersrand - Tiyani Mohlaba.
• Slovakia: Comenius University, Bratislava - Sylvia Mihalikova; Trnava University - Dionyz Hochel.
• United Kingdom: Cambridge University - Vugar Seidov.
• Yugoslavia: University of Belgrade - Lazar Nikolic.