I feel as if I am following President Obama’s itinerary through Europe. For me, it started with a quick stopover in Dublin on my way to Paris. My wife and I will spend more time in Dublin next week, where she will explore her father’s hometown for the first time. Naomi is one of a rare breed, an Irish Jew. Her family spent a generation there between Latvia and Canada. We are even going to be looking for a long lost elderly cousin. Later this summer, I will be off to Poland, on my annual teaching stint in The New School’s summer Democracy and Diversity Institute. These coincidences (I was also in London a few months ago) and returns come to mind because, as with Obama, my stay in Europe this time is stimulating me to think not only about European matters, but also about North Africa and the Middle East from the point of view of European experience.
During his stay in Poland, the President met with former leaders of the democratic opposition and Solidarity movement, and noted that what Poland went through twenty-five years ago proves that the move from an authoritarian regime to a democratic one is quite possible, though also quite difficult. He spoke as a political leader wanting to position America and its allies together in support of the Arab Spring. He emphasized institution building, the rights of minorities and a free press. I don’t disagree with him, and I should add as an old Polish hand, it warms my heart to see my friends being used as an example of political success.
Yet, democratic consolidation is not completely achieved in Poland and among its neighbors, and there is always a threat, as has been observed here in Andras Bozoki’s report on the situation in Hungary, that a transition to democracy may be followed by a transition from democracy. This depends upon attitudes and shared beliefs of the citizenry.
Mourners in front of the Presidential Palace in Warsaw after Smolensk plane crash. Sign says "What a President. What a Patriot." © Sebk | Wikimedia Commons
In Poland, the demonstrators who were outside President Obama’s appearances represent an anti-democratic threat. They are sure that the Russians are complicit in the murder of the former President of Poland, Lech Kaczynski, who died in airplane crash, and many of them are pretty sure that the present President, Bronislaw Komorowski, is somehow involved. Such conspiracy theories, in which political opponents are perceived as murderous enemies, undermine democratic life. These demonstrators resemble the more outrageous members of the Tea Party and are kissing cousins of the birthers. Such agents are more dangerous in new democracies than old, more dangerous still in the nations of the Middle East and North Africa trying to form democracies. Even in well-established countries such as the US, people who approach politics in this way present serious problems. No big deal, if they remain on the margins, but when they enter or even define the mainstream, they pose a significant threat.
Thus, when I think about Poland, Egypt, Tunisia and their neighbors, I am concerned not only about democracy as a political system, with a democratic constitution and institutions. It seems to me that just as important is democracy as a matter of ongoing political practice and beliefs. This is one of the great achievements in Poland, which changed its political culture in the course of the making of a democratic opposition, the Solidarity movement, and a democratic state, helping it weather anti-democratic currents. This suggests possibilities among the perils now present in the Middle East and North Africa.
In Poland, during the Solidarity period (and even before), the oppositionists acted as if they lived in a free society, and in the process, freedom actually became a part of the life of the people involved. They showed how the sociological theorem of the definition of a situation, as first developed by W. I. Thomas, constitutes a crucial dimension of political power. “If men [and women] define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.”
The demonstrators in Tahrir Square revealed this power as well. When Muslims and Coptics openly supported each other during the transformational events, they constituted Egyptian democratic pluralism. Their common action created a political reality, which I will analyze in my next post.
I am thinking about such things, as I follow the path of Obama. The world looks differently from the summit and from the ground. A major end of his trip here this time was to help galvanize support for his approach to the great potentially democratic transformations in North Africa and the Middle East, while also attempting to get the European powers to support the U.S. in its opposition to the UN resolution recognizing Palestinian statehood. In his words and actions in Poland, he attempted to underline the possibility of fundamental democratic change and its persistence. From my point of view, looking at democracy in everyday practice, I see that his high-flown rhetoric can and has been sustained, but also that it depends on the definition and redefinition of democratic realities as social practices. Democracy in the Middle East and North Africa, and in Central Europe, confirms fundamental insights of Tocqueville, as he was looking at democracy in America.
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