Prior to Zygmunt Bauman’s lecture, the event commemorating the 150^th anniversary of German Social Democracy, described in part 1, members of the National Rebirth of Poland had summoned each other via Facebook in order to stage its disruption and formulated negative judgments concerning Zygmunt Bauman’s past. Informed about the imminent danger, Leszek Miller, former prime minister and the chairman of the Polish Social Democratic Party, sent a letter to the Minister of Interior Affairs, Bartłomiej Sienkiewicz, requesting the protection of the event. The German ambassador to Poland, in an analogous move intervened at the Foreign Ministry. Consequentially, the event was secured by the police, and Bauman and his companion were assigned personal bodyguards at the University’s expense.

Shortly before the meeting, the police officer in charge of the action at the University of Wrocław said that he was obliged to stay within the limits of law and that accordingly, he could not intervene unless there was an immediate danger to life, health and property. To the argument that people who came to the lecture with an evident and announced intention to disrupt it are about to violate academic customs and rules of scholarly debate, he responded that the law does not protect these values. One of the main sources of the audacity of the Polish xenophobic groupings is the helplessness of law and of its execution. Polish law protects all sorts of irrational beliefs and religious feelings, which incidentally are in Poland extremely easily hurt, but it does not protect the principles of free scholarly discourse.

Radicalism at the Academia

After the disruption of Bauman’s lecture, some commentators said that xenophobic graduates of the academies of hatred have now decided to enter the universities. Disruptions of the lectures of the philosophy professor Magdalena Środa and editor Adam Michnik have been invoked in support of such opinions. Attempting to restore some symmetry into the debate, Ryszard Legutko, a professor of philosophy and a current member of the European Parliament, has recalled an event at the University of Warsaw in which he took part together with Norman Podhoretz. It was disrupted by a leftist group, and the police intervened there as well. One may also add that several years back the philosopher Peter Singer from Princeton University was prevented by Catholic activists from speaking at an ethical congress in Warsaw, because of his stance on euthanasia. Desiderio Navarro, a Cuban intellectual, publisher and translator of Polish literature into Spanish, recently fell a victim of a racist attack in Kraków; no such thing happened to him during his frequent visits to Poland over the past 35 years.

The opinion that nationalist xenophobia is only beginning to enter the universities is misleading. If any ideology is nowadays prominent at the otherwise de-politicised academies, it is the xenophobic. In fact, it has been present at Polish universities for a very long time now, and seems to be quite at home there.

Shortly after the disruption Bauman’s lecture, a professor of the University of Wrocław, a representative of the xenophobic, spoke, symbolically, under the monument of the king of Poland, Bolesław Chrobry, Bolesław The Great, 967-1025, the first crowned king of Poland, who waged successful wars against Germany and Russia. The professor described the organizers of Bauman’s lecture as neo-Stalinists [which would include Chmielewski, J.G.] and accordingly called for the de-Stalinisation of the University. Two weeks after the disturbance, this call, eagerly seized on by the NOP, became a pretext and a slogan of a yet another of its demonstration in the public space of Wrocław. The NOP, now charged with a great momentum after its repeated “successes,” and staged it, once again, with impunity.

The call to de-Stalinise the University of Wrocław, formulated by this particular professor, was ironic. First, because he is a convert, having been a member of the Polish communist party who changed his denomination into “nationalist” and is now apparently seeking a place on an electoral list of PiS (the Law and Justice Party, and second, because there are no Stalinists at the university anymore. Most have died out, while those who somehow managed to survive, like this particular professor, changed their views radically because some time ago Stalinism ceased to be profitable. They have adopted the xenophobic outlook as nowadays it has become profitable.

Professors, like priests, are only human. No wonder, then, that some of them are doing and thinking what is expedient. Some members of the Polish professoriate, frustrated by humiliating salaries, are seeking substitute satisfactions in the sphere of historical politics, expertly served to them by PiS. Being unable to enjoy recognition for their work, they are finding a vicarious yet unfailing satisfaction in the public denunciation games against their academic comrades who happen to hold different political views.

Academic Image

Immediately after the incident the Rector of the University of Wrocław was asked the question whether he intends to take any action defending academic integrity of the institution, leading to: (i) bringing to justice the perpetrators of the disruption which violated scholarly discourse and academic customs; (ii) investigation of the behavior of academics of the University who formulated abusive opinions about the invited guest and the organizers of the lecture; (iii) protection of freedom of scholarly investigations and openness of academic discourse through the prevention of similar disruptions taking place in the future; (iv) salvaging the image of the University of Wrocław as a place of scientific work, open toward differing views; and (v) the protection of academic workers undertaking to organize extra-curricular scholarly events. Such steps would seem to be necessary for very practical as well as principled reasons. For, one may now expect that as a result of such incidents, scholars and public figures, as well as student of diverse backgrounds, may in the future decline invitations to take part in events organised by the University of Wrocław, or to enroll in it.

The Rector’s response has been a demonstration of helplessness. He has no legal means at his disposal to do any of these things. Shortly after this exchange, an assembly of rectors of the higher education institutions in Wrocław adopted a resolution against xenophobia, which was both an expression of their determination and of their powerlessness.

On the day of the incident at the University of Wrocław, the Minister of Higher Education, Barbara Kudrycka, called the organizers asking for a private address of Bauman in order to send him a letter of apology. Sending such a letter is certainly a proper thing to do. The question remains whether Minister Kudrycka, before she leaves her office, will take any other action regarding the problem at hand. And if so, what kind of action? Will she bother herself to respond to the same questions, which have been addressed to the Rector of the University of Wrocław?

The present and the future minister of higher education will have to respond to a more general question as well. Suppose anyone within the academia attempts to invite an eminent scholar who, apart from being a recognized professional, happens also to be a Jew, Arab, German, Russian, feminist, gay, lesbian, Muslim, Protestant, Pentecostal, atheist, of a different colour, a social democrat, or a cosmopolitan. Will such a person have to take into account a possible threat from local xenophobes who may happen to perceive the invited guest as persona non grata? Will it be necessary from now on to ask for the police protection of any academic event, of which local racists happen to disapprove? Will the Minister of the Interior place his troops at the rectors’ disposal? Given the present circumstances, will the Ministry be ready to pick up the tab of the increased security costs of deliberations in the humanities and social sciences?

The politics of the present regime towards higher education, which has generated an attitude of extreme asceticism while imposing a demand of innovation, in this context a rather absurd one, suggesting that it will not be willing to cover the increased costs of scholarly research and higher education. This means that the space of free academic discourse, much reduced already by inadequate funding of research and academies, will rapidly shrink even further.

On the other hand, one is justified in suspecting that the present regime will be more willing to cover the cost of police protection of the universities rather than that of their adequate funding. Yet if the regime decides to protect the academies by police, itself heavily under-subsidized, it will have to acquiesce to the fact that scientific deliberations conducted in the shadow of police sticks and their smoothbore rifles may not be able to bring forth particularly bold or innovative results. Democracy and academic freedom are challenged, not only from the ultra-nationalists, but also from the politicians who tolerate and encourage them, and the educational officials with no apparent means for effective response.

German Responsibility

During deafening nationalist protests against Bauman, some demonstrators raised their hands in the Nazi salute. For the Germans present this unashamed public emulation of the Nazi symbolism by the Polish extremists was a shock; the Consul General sat in the first row of the audience with his face ashen from fear.

The spirit of Nazism has not been irrevocably buried in Germany. Symbols of the political culture concocted by Hitler’s spin-doctors turn out to be more lively than anyone expected. With their own neo-Nazism reborn, Germans must now feel as if the package, sent by their grandparents, has been again delivered with several decades delay. Most of them dump this package into the trash bin; some of them bury it, ashamed, in a cellar; some store its contents with nostalgia. But some of them, among them the youngest, open the package with curiosity and set free the noxious elements contained in it. But this Nazi package, against the intention of its sender, is now being received also by descendants of a nation which particularly suffered from Nazis cruelties. In this way the Polish-German reconciliation, usually perceived through the gestures of political correctness, turns out to possess an another surprising dimension, an “incorrect” one, and, as a rule, hidden from the public view.

Bauman is a sharp critic of the present economic and social order. He believes that the present social and economic regime in Poland and in the world is deeply unjust, leads to exclusions, and grows within itself seeds of its own demise. In the lecture, he said that political parties which now pretend to represent the ideals of the Left, like the German SPD and the Polish SLD, should be held accountable for the emergence of this order, for they have betrayed the leftist values and became instead societies of mutual admiration with business bosses. He meant especially what Gerhard Schröder, known as Genosse der Bosse [Comrade of the Bosses], had done to the SPD, of which he was a leader. Bauman expressed this judgement in the same University room in which, precisely ten years earlier, Chancellor Schröder represented Germany during a meeting of the so-called Weimar Triangle, a consultation forum for political leaders of France, Germany and Poland.

The Poles are entitled to expect that Germans, especially from the present SPD, should take a clear stance concerning what is going on in their own country. They should also be aware that the Polish brand of Nazism is today not only an internal problem of Poland; it is also a problem of Germany, as well as of Europe as a whole, a sad outcome of the neo-liberal European political-economic order with Germany at its helm.

Party of Order and the status quo

When I insisted that the authorities of the University of Wrocław summon the police in order to protect an academic event, and then insisted that the commander of the police troops remove the troublemakers, I suddenly remembered Arthur Schopenhauer who pointed out to the police the most convenient place for them to shoot at the revolutionary masses during the Spring of Peoples in 1848. I also remembered Karl Marx’s ironic remarks from his 18th Brumaire: yes, I acted as a representative of the Party of Order who called the police to protect the status quo.

The point is, however, that I am not really convinced that the present political and economic order in Poland deserves to be protected. Bauman ingeniously and critically diagnoses the system whose products and symptoms are precisely those people who came to vilify him. And he seeks for ways to reform it. That is why he was invited to speak.

It may appear that extremist groupings in Poland also demand a change of the social order, as Bauman does; and that the difference between them lies only in the methods advocated. But this is not so. The present Polish radicalism is nationalistic, patriotic, xenophobic, homophobic, anti-feminist, anti-communist, anti-Semitic, anti-German, anti-European, anti-intellectual, etc. In a word, it stands for everything that is officially suppressed by the liberal and tolerant elites, striving to impose upon society their own version of constraints of decency. In this sense the Polish radicalism, in its exhibitionism and pornographic obscenity, may be perceived as a symptom of social revolt.

The question of a more just distribution of wealth is not addressed by its members. In this sense, Polish radicalism is thoroughly conservative. It does not strive towards a change of the political system, because it draws from it all its strength, and moves within it unperturbed. The whole raison d’être of the Polish radical movements is to excite disorders during which their members can demonstrate their own strength, and subsequently to use it as a bargaining argument, and a political commodity. This is the whole point of politics understood as a spectacle within which to be is to be perceived. The present system is needed by them as a venue or a scene upon which to perform their rituals of brutality and hatred. They will not find any better one. For this reason precisely they need the cosmopolitans, Jews, Arabs, Blacks, agents, communist, Stalinists, Germans, Russians, Europeans and egg-heads in order to stage their rituals of hate. They are employing their inconsistent ideological conglomerate because it guarantees to them an inexhaustible supply of objects for their hatred. Should the objects, per impossible, become in short supply, they would create them without much effort. For the time being their strength is basically the strength of a spectacle; for this reason it is only an appearance of strength. They will become really dangerous when they understand this. And they are just one step from it. One has only to wait to see whether they will summon the courage to make this step.

It has become nowadays a commonplace of political criticism that the contemporary political system has been transformed into a pathetic caricature of democracy. The slogan of democratic participation is only a smokescreen for the growing oligarchisation of societies and despotisation of politics at all its levels. In sphere of the economy, the Civic Platform excels in cultivating this art and elevated it to new levels of sophistication through managing the assets of the country in order to create further inequalities and without bothering about their social costs. The situation of a deep imbalance of social structure thus created cannot be remedied overnight; it has gone way too far. For this reason, the Finance Minister Vincent Rostowski will now have to find a place for a new rubric on the expenditure side of his budget: “the costs of social peace.” The longer he delays this, the more hefty sums he will have to put in this rubric in the future. Such a rubric will have to be filled also by the Minister of Finance in any Law and Justice government.

Cracked Crust

The six post-war decades in Poland have brought disenchantment with the leftist utopia. The past two decades of the transformation have brought disenchantment with conservative liberalism. Radicalism in Poland destroys politics and dispels the hope for social peace. It overwhelms the churches and universities, the last enclaves of relative decency. What, then, has the future in store for us? Bertrand Russell compared civilized life to a dangerous walk on a thin crust of barely cooled lava, which at any moment may break and let the unwary sink into its fiery depths. John Gray has argued that the best that flawed and potentially wicked human creatures can hope for is a commitment to civilized constraints that will prevent the very worst from happening: a politics of the least worst.

The problem is that in Poland the crust of constraints of decency turned out to be very thin, and has cracked again. The lava flowing from below refuses to cool down by itself. Nor will it cool off any time soon, or easily.

To skip this introduction and go directly to read Jeff Weintraub’s In-Depth Analysis “Some Partial, Preliminary & Unfashionable Thoughts Toward Reassessing the 2003 Iraq War – Did Anything Go Right and What Were The Alternatives?” click here.

I was sure in the lead up to the Iraq War that it wouldn’t happen. It seemed obvious to me that it made no sense, and I couldn’t believe that the U.S. would embark on such foolishness. One of my big mistakes, obviously. While Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with Osama bin Laden and American capacity to wage two wars, one clearly by choice, seemed to be a huge strategic mistake, the war proceeded and escalated, and we have paid.

Nonetheless, I did understand why deposing Saddam was desirable. His regime was reprehensible. I respected those who called for opposition to its totalitarianism, from the informed Kanan Makiya to my Central European friends, Adam Michnik, Vaclav Havel, et al. I even said so at an anti-war rally.

Yet, connecting the means at our disposal with the desirable end of a free and democratic Iraq seemed to me to be an extraordinarily difficult project, and I had absolutely no confidence that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Company could pull it off. How could my intelligent friends who supported the war not see that? I actually had a number of heated public discussions with Michnik about that.

Once begun, I hoped that the intervention would be short and sweet, and hoped that a democratic transition could be managed, but as we now know these hopes were frustrated. From every point of view, the war was a disaster: for the Iraq, the region, the U.S., and the project of democracy, and the way the war was fought, as it was part of a purported global war against terror, compromised American democratic principles. As time has passed many of the early supporters see all this and have changed their judgments, and those who haven’t, such as John McCain, choose not to focus in their speech and action on the question of entrance into the war, but rather on the exit, the so called surge, which they purport explains limited American successes.

But I am curious: what have become of those who as a matter of principle supported the war? And what have become of their arguments? A few brave souls have stuck to their positions. To have a richer understanding of our recent past and to reflect on the challenges of the day, I think it is worth paying attention. Thus, today’s In-Depth post: Jeff Weintraub’s “Some Partial, Preliminary & Unfashionable Thoughts Toward Reassessing the 2003 Iraq War – Did Anything Go Right and What Were The Alternatives?”

To read Jeff Weintraub’s In-Depth Analysis, “Some Partial, Preliminary & Unfashionable Thoughts Toward Reassessing the 2003 Iraq War – Did Anything Go Right and What Were The Alternatives?”click here.

Last week, Adam Michnik returned to The New School and gave a provocative lecture, “After the Election of Pope Francis: What Paths for the Catholic Church?” In his talk, more about the Church and democracy in Poland than about events in Rome and the Catholic Church as a whole, the renowned Polish intellectual highlighted the two different paths taken by the Church in current public debates: the increasingly popular fundamentalist approach, termed “Integralism,” resistant to the recommendations of openness formulated at the Second Vatican Council, and the marginalized liberal approach, termed “Progressivist,” adopted by the liberal-oriented Catholics. Michnik worried that Pope Francis would be on the wrong side of this debate, or on the sidelines, given his ambiguous at best relationship with dictatorship in Argentina. The talk addressed pressing issues in Poland. Michnik, as usual, was bold in his presentation. It has broad implications beyond Polish borders, which I appreciate. Yet, I also have a question. For, I think Michnik misses a crucial point, concerning Poland, and also concerning the Pope and the Catholic Church and the need to address religious fundamentalism.

Michnik pointed out that the integralist and the progressivist paths emerged as part of the Catholic Church’s struggle for power to shape public debate in post-1989 democratic Poland. To his great dismay, instead of strengthening the Church’s liberal voice, open to the new issues that the newly democratic country had to face as it opened to the outside world, the Church has become dominated by simplistic conservative and nationalistic arguments, which reinforce hostile attitudes toward all that is unfamiliar or strange. As a consequence, the church has fostered a destructive divide between “us” and “them,” which cuts across Polish society. According to Michnik, a significant role in disseminating the fundamentalist message is played by “Radio Maryja” and “TV Trwam.” These media outlets, owned by Father Tadeusz Rydzyk, a controversial Catholic priest often accused of promoting xenophobia and anti-Semitism, are widely popular in small towns in Poland.

Michnik did not have a simple answer to his question, “What Paths for the Catholic Church?“ His overall argument centered around the Polish Church’s reluctance to accept any form of criticism, and he expressed concern that Pope Francis, with his beautiful gestures towards the poor will not address the threat of Catholic fundamentalism in Poland and beyond.

I did not have a chance to push Michnik a bit on the role Pope Francis may play in the continuing conflict between the liberal and fundamentalist factions in the Church. It relates to a topic I am studying, popular Catholic practices in post-1989 Poland. It seems to me that Francis’s gestures towards the poor have greater potential power than Michnik recognizes. They could build a bridge between the radical claims of the Polish “integralists” and the “progressivists” in the ongoing Polish Catholic debate by crossing the divide between popular and elite opinion. The integralists present radical, one-sided and often simplistic visions of reality in which Catholicism should prevail, while the  progressivists take into account the numerous competing values found in earthly life, but the sophisticated arguments they formulate are incomprehensible to many. In other words, I would have liked to have asked Michnik if he felt that Pope Francis could create a bridge through his message of radicalism in humility.

Michnik presented the conflict as a stark clash between the liberal, open-minded intellectuals, on the one hand, and  on the other, the fundamentalists: defenders of pre-Vatican II traditions who want to see the Church as the ultimate institution, founded by God, superior to secular life. In this context, the opinions and gestures of the new pope which emphasize humility instead of rapacity—including the desire of the Church to monopolize the discussion on values—seem particularly important, as they fall in right in the middle of the conflict in the Catholic Church in Poland.

The increasingly marginalized Polish “progressivists” described by Michnik, are intellectuals. I believe this very fact alienates them from popular debate dominated by the “integralist” approach. For many Catholics progressivists’ discussions are not intelligible, too subtle and too boring. The intellectuals speak over the heads of many. Yet many Catholics turn to the Church to give them clear definitions of the meaning of the surrounding world. The “integralists,” on the other hand, present a clear, one-sided vision of an age-old Polish-Catholic unity, which has to be protected in a dangerous, secularizing reality that lacks moral values. Michnik hinted that this propagated, imagined vision not only is a tool of maintaining power in the Polish political debate; what is more, this particular vision seems better suited to an authoritarian, rather than a democratic, regime.

Pope Francis does not look like a “progressivist,” but his call for a poor Church may hurt the Polish fundamentalist vision of the Church, whose opulence and unquestionable power in society is presented as justified by tradition (and God). The Pope’s simple message may be heard by the many traditionalist Polish Catholics uninterested in intellectual discussions, but who nonetheless are troubled by the Polish Church’s increasingly visible deadly sins of pride and greed. “Let us never forget that authentic power is service,” the Pope said in his homily. But will this message come through? And does this “service” include open discussion on the contemporary role of the Church, not limited to the hermetic debates of intellectuals and one-sided claims of the traditionalists?

This is the second in a three part series “Principle and Practice.” See here for Part 1.

At the New School for Social Research, my intellectual home for just about my entire career, the relationship between principle and practice is counter-intuitive. Principle, in my judgment, has been, since the institution’s founding, at least as important as practice, and, ironically, probably of more practical significance. The New School’s history has been set by its principles, even as sometimes in practice the principles were not fully realized.

I am thinking about this at a turning point in our history: a relatively new university president, David Van Zandt, has just appointed, following faculty review and recommendation, a new dean, Will Milberg. It is a hopeful moment, rich with promise and possibility for our relatively small, financially strapped, unusual institution. How we now act has, potentially, significance well beyond our intellectual community. This is directly related to the founding principles of our place, their historical significance and continued salience.

Founded in 1919, as an academic protest, The New School has represented, and worked to enact, central ideals of the university in democratic society, doing a great deal on relatively little. The New School’s founders were critical of the way economic and political powers interfered with the intellectual and scholarly life of American universities. While they were responding proximately to the firing of two Columbia University faculty members for their disloyalty during WWI, they were, more generally, concerned that those in control of American universities, their trustees, who were (as written in the mission statement) “composed for the most part of men whose views of political, social, religious and moral questions are in no way in advance of those of the average respectable citizen. Their tendency is therefore to defend established thought than to encourage a fundamental reconsideration of long accepted ideals and standards.”

Just a few years after the American Association of University Professors was founded to defend academic freedom and after the association wavered and didn’t defend the principle as it was systematically compromised during WWI, The New School was formed, primarily dedicated to independent social research, addressing pressing social and political problems. The New School’s principled commitment has been its distinction, with twists and turns, and up and downs.

The founders raised one key question and offered their solution in their original mission statement, “A Proposal for An Independent School of Social Science”:

“The question naturally arises, how can the Social and Political sciences be given the opportunity to develop at least as freely as the natural sciences…. The answer is by establishing an institution free from the ancient embarrassments.”

“Free from ancient embarrassments,” The New School opened in 1919, seeking to address the challenges of those times. The mission statement highlighted a variety of concerns: the expanding role of government, the importance of the labor movement and its organization, the problems of the modern economy. The makers of the school sought to develop modern social science and public policy that would respond to changing order of things. I particularly find intriguing the prescient declaration on women’s education and its purpose:

“The granting of suffrage to women and the extension of women’s interest into new and important spheres of public life will lead them to seek a better equipment both for power and service.”

The new institution emphasized interdisciplinary study and engagement in practical problems. Its founders sought a lean and mean educational enterprise, focused on research, teaching and public engagement, with a minimal administrative apparatus.

They sought to “Secure a sufficient endowment on the understanding that the greater part of the income shall be spent on research and education and the least possible amount on administration.”

But they were not just dreaming. The great American historian, Charles Beard, perhaps the most prominent mover and shaker behind the establishment of this new school, revealed an inventive practical side in his personal account of its project, making a special appeal.

“Those who give financial assistance to the New School are not so ingrained in their distrust of liberated human minds that they are not willing to accept the result of free inquiry… In other words, the New School is a cooperative concern, a pooling of interests intellectual and financial, designed to advance knowledge of the world and its pressing problems. ..It proposes to build up a center where those who care to work at the modern and industrial problems may find guidance and imagination. Those who have found ‘the one road’ or are now convinced that they can exercise the evil spirits of the age by single incantations will find no peace or comfort there. Those who have highly resolved that the human mind which has been so fertile in its inventive genius in the material world shall be freely applied to the problems of the social world will find welcome, good cheer, and if it is not too bold, some genuine help. The door is open and the way is broad”

Reading the original mission statement and Beard’s note, I am struck by how true The New School has been to its original mission, even at it seems to be long on idealism, short on realism. The theme of engaging the world using the advanced means of social and political science early on was extended.

In the twenties and thirties the arts and design were added to The New School’s agenda, formally pushed forward in 1970 when Parsons School of Design was merged with The New School. Aaron Copeland, Martha Graham and Erwin Piscator contributed to an expansive definition of social research at The New School.

The missions of academic freedom and opposition to dogma were radicalized when The University in Exile was created, as a refuge to endangered European scholars, artists and intellectuals from Hitler’s Europe. An independent center linking European art, social science and philosophy with American intellectual and public life was established.

I am particularly proud and honored to have been a part of extending this division’s activity to East and Central Europe’s democratic opposition in the 1980s, with my colleagues Elzbieta Matynia, Andrew Arato, Jose Casanova and Ira Katznelson. The New School’s board, importantly including Walter Eberstadt, Henry Arnhold and Michael E. Gellert, and the The New School president, Jonathan Fanton, supported our efforts, in the manner Beard imagined. And Fanton pushed this forward forging a cooperative relationship between The New School, and Helsinki Watch and Human Rights watch, taking a leadership role in both.

New School faculty became supporters, colleagues and collaborators with key opposition figures of the region, Adam Michnik, Martin Butora and Janos Kis, among many others, engaging in clandestine seminars before the changes of 1989, and open meeting and educational initiatives after the changes. In the region, The New School developed a significant reputation, known for its founding principles.

Independent scholarship pitted against tyranny and small mindedness, opposition to intellectual dogma, and engagement with the pressing problems of the day, these are the ideals of The New School’s founding, which have informed its history. The stated principles provided the opportunity for innovative actions. They are also strikingly present in the daily life of the university, in the faculty’s creative work and scholarship, and in their teaching, and in the problems and the challenges student pose in our classrooms and in their own work. I would love to document this in the future – an idea for a book or at least a series of cooperative blog posts.

There have been times, of course when practice has ignored principle. Many in the institution, even among its leadership, have forgotten what makes The New School, The New School, especially in recent years. And, there are a variety of different readings of its distinctiveness. More about this soon.

For today, though note my major point: the principles of The New School’s founding have persisted. I believe that these principles define the university’s history, including ups and downs, constitute its importance, and suggest its future promise.

Late Saturday night, I received an urgent email from Tomek Kitlinski “Bad, disturbing, but important news again,” followed by a brief description of a recent event in Poland and his extended thoughts about its meaning. Here, his report and reflections. -Jeff

February 23, 2013, a lecture by Adam Michnik, the foremost dissident against Communism, author, editor-in-chief of Poland’s leading broadsheet Gazeta Wyborcza and regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, was disrupted by a group of Polish ultranationalists. Michnik is Eastern Europe’s most outstanding public intellectual whose books, articles, and, before 1989, writings from prison have shaped the thinking and acting for freedom in our region. Esprit, erudition and engagement in pro-democracy struggle make him an exceptional social philosopher and activist. As Gazeta reported, on Saturday in the city of Radom a group of young people in balaclavas and masks attempted to disrupt Michnik’s talk and chanted “National Radom! National Radom!” A scuffle erupted. The far-right All Polish Youth militiamen were shouting during the lecture.

The disruption of the Michnik lecture follows a pattern of aggression in Poland and among its neighbors. Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria and Russia are gripped by culture wars, as I have explored here. The Polish cultural war is ongoing.

Recently at the University of Warsaw, neo-Nazis threatened a lecture by the feminist philosopher Magdalena Sroda. Ten years ago in Lublin, while Professor Maria Szyszkowska and I were giving speeches about the lesbian and gay visibility campaign Let Us Be Seen, a pack of skinheads marched in and out of the hall, stamping their boots loudly in an effort to distract us. This pattern of disturbing university events could not be more dangerous. Michnik this week is, once again, a focal point of repressive anger.

While ultranationalists hate Adam Michnik for his message of inclusive democracy and they also loathe feminists, LGBT and poetry, Michnik often goes back to his inspiration and friend, the Nobel Prize winning poet, Czeslaw Milosz, who was the object of nationalist outrage over the years, in fact an antagonism that dates back to the inter-war period. Michnik also refers to Nobel Prize-winning poet Wislawa Szymborska: quick-witted, unsentimental and impatient with chauvinist clichés. When she died a year ago, on February 1, 2012, the nationalist MP and Law Professor Krystyna Pawlowicz said on Polish Radio: “I don’t associate Szymborska with Poland.”

A group of young writers protested against this xenophobic comment. Michnik wrote that Szymborska zdążyła przestrzec nas przed nienawiścią (managed to warn us against hate). And in Eastern Europe we badly need this warning, as the event last Saturday reminds us.

Outright hatred characterizes Poland’s ethno-nationalism, which combines with misogyny and homophobia. During a parliamentary debate over same-sex unions this month,  Pawlowicz continued her prejudiced discourse, labeling the LGBT community sterile people of no benefit to society and derided, lampooned and insulted the transgender MP Anna Grodzka. Nigerian-born and bred journalist Remi Adekoya wrote in The Guardian: “As a whole, modern-day “Poland is still a conservative, homogenous society, uncomfortable with minorities – be they sexual, ethnic or religious.”

In Poland, poets have played a political role since Romanticism or even the Baroque. Poetry is the cultivation of inner life and revolt; particularly in Eastern Europe, writing and reading has often encouraged social critique and — sometimes — change. (Banned authors!)

Poets here were silenced under totalitarianism and also under a far-right government in the recent past. Roman Giertych, who served as Minister of Education 2006-7, revived the All-Polish Youth with its interwar anti-Semitism and attempted to delete the eminent writer Witold Gombrowicz (a post-modernist avant la lettre) from school curricula because of his queerness. This was a nadir of democracy here, which Adam Michnik described as “The Polish Witch-Hunt.”

That’s why the poetry and political stances of the two Nobel Prize winners for literature, Wislawa Szymborska and Czeslaw Milosz, are of special significance. Both opposed conformity and chauvinism. As a student in intercultural Vilnius, Milosz intervened against an anti-Semitic rally of the All-Polish Youth militia. He translated Yiddish poetry (through a philological rendering of the text), and in his novel The Issa Valley he focused on his anti-feudal pacifist ancestors from the radical Reformation (Socinians). After World War II, Milosz and Szymborska welcomed the new system which promised equality. She became a party member. He served as a diplomat for the People’s Republic of Poland. Although Milosz soon defected, and Szymborska joined the opposition, they remained progressive until their last days. Just before Milosz’s death, they both signed a petition in defense of a feminist and gay pride in Cracow (Toleration March).

Milosz was a critic of capitalism. As a leader of the current leftist Krytyka Polityczna (Political Critique) movement, Slawomir Sierakowski, reminds us, Milosz was a critic of a society subordinated to the market. Right now  Krytyka Polityczna is publishing Milosz’s unknown and unfinished novel Gory Parnasu, a political fiction. His vision of a robotized and demoralized technocracy places this important new publication alongside the poet’s classic reckoning with communism in The Captive Mind.

After Milosz’s death in 2004, the All-Polish Youth was responsible for a hate campaign against the writer. They accused him of not being a “true Pole,” but rather a “friend of Jews and sodomites.” He was characterized as suspicious, dangerous, anti-Polish. In his poetry, Czeslaw Milosz explored the guilt that Poles have towards the Other. I am particularly moved and touched by his poem “Campo di Fiori,” in which Milosz depicts the indifference of Warsaw residents toward the death and suffering in the Jewish ghetto. The poet diagnosed the failure to admit Poland’s guilt; he wrote of his compatriots as “ill with their own innocence.” This verse from his poem “My Faithful Mother Tongue” was quoted by the then All-Polish Youth leader, Krzysztof Bosak (currently part of the newly formed National Movement), in the official statement of this organization, as “deeply offensive to us.”

Szymborska’s death in February 2012 also evoked hostility: she was vilified as a cosmopolitan intellectual indifferent to Polishness. As mentioned, the MP and Professor of Law, Krystyna Pawlowicz, insulted Szymborska’s memory, and now she mocks same-sex unions and transgenderism. Academics, including the leading conservative historian of ideas Marcin Krol, the expert on anti-Semitism, Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, the feminists Magda Sroda and Malgorzata Fuszara, the queer scholar Jacek Kochanowski, and the LGBT art curator Pawel Leszkowicz, gathered together to protest against Pawlowicz’s homo- and transphobia.

Exactly twenty years ago abortion was criminalized in Poland; this 1993 law still crushes women’s rights. Ten years ago, a landmark lesbian and gay visibility campaign Let Us Be Seen was vandalized. Pawel Leszkowicz and I participated in this campaign and describe it in our chapter for a Routledge book Men Speak Out: Views on Gender, Sex and Power, edited by Shira Tarrant.

Under Michnik, Gazeta Wyborcza has become a major force in the support of LGBT rights under the pen of eminent journalists such as Ewa Siedlecka, Dorota Jarecka and Piotr Pacewicz; the latter went as far as joining the Warsaw Gay Pride in drag! The Lublin branch of Gazeta regularly publishes reportages on homophobia and anti-Semitism by Pawel P. Reszka.

The  filmmaker, author of the Oscar-nominated movie about a Polish working-class saver of a group of Lviv Jews In Darkness, Agnieszka Holland, defined the current prejudiced behaviors in this country as “humiliating, excluding and scorning.” In a recent interview for the Polish edition of Newsweek, Holland, whose father was a Jewish intellectual, said: “It seems to me that the Jew has been exchanged for the homosexual.”

In 2004, the Szymborska and Milosz-supported Toleration March was assaulted with stones, bottles and caustic acid by far-right counter-demonstrators. As a protest against violence, young sociologists Adam Ostolski and Michal Bilewicz wrote an open letter signed, by 1200 people, which diagnosed lesbians and gays as being seen as “the pariahs of Polish democracy.” Later, Green politician, Ostolski, demonstrated parallels between Poland’s inter-war anti-Jewish policies and the current anti-LGBT prejudices. This insight was developed by analyst and activist Greg Czarnecki in his article “Analogies of Pre-War Anti-Semitism and Present-Day Homophobia in Poland” The ultranationalist attack on minorities and poetry continues.

I cherish Szymborska’s poem “Starvation Camp Near Jaslo”: it stings us from complacency and its drastic imagery approaches the unspeakable. At this death camp the inmates ”sang, with dirt in their mouth… Write how quiet it is,” the poet adds. Irena Grudzinska-Gross of Princeton rightly calls Szymborska’s work “Still” “one of the most shocking poems on the Holocaust.” It also warns against anti-Semitism after the war and states how prejudiced views of Jewish names continue: “Let your son have a Slavic name.”

The writings of the two poets were a protest against prejudice, social ills and violence. Szymborska depicted the atrocities of the war in Vietnam. Milosz dedicated a study to Poland’s rare leftist thinker Stanislaw Brzozowski and a book of memories to the conflicts and repressions of the interwar period here. He also authored a book on a poet of affectivity, linguistic genius, esprit and (early!) feminism, and a Warsaw Uprising fighter Anna Swir Swirszczynska.

Both poets accompanied us through the difficult post-1989 transition: Milosz warned against the triumphalism of the church, although he valued religion as a cultural phenomenon, translated the Bible as well as the mystic and workers’ activist and worker herself, Simone Weil.

Elzbieta Matynia of the New School invited Czeslaw Milosz to the Democracy & Diversity Institute in Cracow, where he often read not only his own poems, but also those of Szymborska. In 1999 I moderated a meeting with Milosz and international students of this Institute, during which his poetry reading healed rifts between Kosovar and Serbian participants in the audience.

And Szymborska, although less of a public figure, sent her pithy and disturbing poem “Hatred” to Michnik’s Gazeta Wyborcza, when the country was faced with the threat of a rightist coup d’état: she wrote that hatred has a “grimace / of erotic ecstasy” and a “sniper’s keen sight” (to quote the translation of Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak).

In their openness, Szymborska celebrated the male nude whereas Milosz cultivated the memory of Lublin’s gay poet Czechowicz, and wrote openly and approvingly of his homosexuality. Born in the puritan first decades of the twentieth century, they both proved to be progressive in sexual politics (middle-aged poets here are still in the Middle Ages!). In Poland, the visual arts equal activism:  in particular women’s and LGBT art create a splash. But Szymborska and Milosz, who drew on the avant-garde and produced popular poetry, contributed to the democratization of our post-Communist country. Their writings wake us from the slumber of national pride.

Resentment, conspiracy theories, the Great Lustrator, as Michnik puns on the Grand Inquisitor in his book In Search of Lost Meaning, rule Poland. In my view, prejudices have increased as the transition has lost its way, excluding so many people economically. The fight for minority rights must not overlook the plight of the underprivileged. That’s why we protested the layoff of 400 women workers in Lublin – and we succeeded. But all too often unemployment is wreaking havoc, as in Radom. Therefore, as Gazeta reports, in his lecture there Adam Michnik spoke about how the market economy has unleashed terrible social inequality.

In my view, it’s in the dispossessed of the transition that the far right finds its converts who are made to believe by the demoralized ultraconservative political class in an imaginary purity of the nation, from which all minorities are to be forbidden: Jews, Roma, LGBT and feminists are othered and rejected. We are not “one of our own” in Polish culture; according to the extremists, we do not belong here. After an anti-fascist interview I gave, a critical commenter declared: “Kitlinski, you’re a stranger.”

The poetry of Milosz and Szymborska has been important to the political philosophy and praxis of Adam Michnik. Expert on Eastern Europe Roger Cohen has written on Michnik in The New York Times:

“He was ever the provocateur, this Polish Jew whose paternal family was largely wiped out in the Holocaust. This Polish patriot. This crazy, proud Pole with the low-slung jeans that cry out for a belt, the hair conscientiously uncombed, the Polish-Latin lover’s stubble and the mind that is anything but sloppy. As he provoked, he probed: the totalitarian mind was always a target for him, even in its fathomless grayness.”

Now Adam Michnik probes the old-new prejudices  of our region of Europe. Ever with courage and wit, he challenges ethno-nationalism. His is a badly needed idea of liberty. With a full awareness of his roots in poetry, imagination and decency, I deplore the violence against his lecture in Radom.

It is odd in the extreme to read about a devastating storm in New York, listen to my local public radio station, WNYC, from Paris and Rome. It took a while to find out how my son in Washington D.C. and his wife, Lili, in Long Island City were doing. I also have been worried about my mother and sister and sisters-in-law, and their families, in their homes in Brooklyn, Manhattan and the Bronx. All seems to be OK, with very significant inconvenience. My friends and neighbors, my house and my community center, these I don’t know about and am concerned. The Theodore Young Community Center, where I swim and where I have many dear friends, in fact, is still without its basketball court after the devastation of tropical storm Irene. All this while I have been enjoying my family just outside Paris, taking a beautiful stroll in Paris on Monday and having a nice first day in Rome. I hurt for my friends and family as I am enjoying European pleasures topped off yesterday with a wonderful dinner with my dear colleague, Professor Anna Lisa Tota of the University of Rome.

And I push on, talking about my work with colleagues and students first here in Italy and next week in Poland. This morning, I am off to give a lecture at the University of Rome to a group of film and media Ph.D. students, on media, the politics of small things and the reinvention of political culture. I decided to post today a lecture I gave in Gdansk last year which was a variation on the same theme: the project of reinventing democratic culture. The lecture highlights the links between my political engagements of the past and how they relate to the political challenges now. I will return to Warsaw and Gdansk with a follow up next week. In all the meetings and in the “in-depth post” today, I am struck by how important a creative relationship between the politics of the central stage and of the margins is central to a vibrant democratic culture and politics. I will be thinking about this with deep concern as I speak here in Europe and look from afar at the election back home.

To read “Reinventing Democratic Culture: Then and Now,” click here.

It’s good to be back in Gdansk. It is especially good to be invited by The European Solidarity Center to give this lecture at the All About Freedom Festival. It’s a visit I’ve long wanted to make, and an occasion that seems to be particularly appropriate.

The last time I was here was in 1985. I was on a mission in support of Solidarity, to observe the trial of Adam Michnik, Bogdan Lis and Wladyslaw Frasyniuk. Adam had written an open letter to “people of good will” in the West to come to the trial, published in The New York Times. He also earlier through The Times Warsaw correspondent, our mutual friend, the late Michael Kaufman, asked me personally to come. It was a request I couldn’t refuse.

When I arrived I was under constant surveillance. I was denounced by Trybuna Ludu [the Communist Party official organ] for not understanding the nature of socialist justice, when I tried but was refused entry into the courtroom. It wasn’t a leisurely visit. I communicated with Adam through his lawyers. We planned together a strategy to keep going an international seminar on democracy we had been working on before his arrest. He asked for books. I did not have the occasion to go sightseeing. And the sights to be seen weren’t as beautiful as they are today.

That was one of the most dramatic times of my life. Not frightening for me personally (I knew that the worst that was likely to happen to me was that I would be expelled from the country), but very frightening for those on trial, and for the mostly unrecognized heroes of the Solidarity movement, the workers, the union leaders, the intellectuals and lawyers who during my visit helped me move through the city and make my appearance, and who risked imprisonment for their everyday actions in making Solidarity. While I then met Lech Walesa, as well as Father Jankowski [a Priest associated with Lech Walesa, who after the changes became infamous for his anti-Semitism], I was most impressed by those who acted off the center stage. They were so dedicated to and worked so hard for the cause of freedom, without apparent prospects that it would be won and without fame or fortune for themselves. It was clear to me that they created their freedom in their persistent actions. This is a key to my talk today.

What I saw then and what I observed and studied in my research and political activities in the 1970s and 80s throughout Poland and also among its neighbors, has shaped my entire intellectual life. It’s the touchstone of my work as a social theorist and researcher. I could explain in a four hour lecture how just about every one of my writings, certainly all of my books, have been informed by what I observed here, even when I am writing about my own country or about the Middle East, two other areas where I have done research and which I will explore with you today. I am, we are together, deeply indebted to the sung and unsung heroes of Solidarity. But today, I am concerned less with the debt, more with the insight that their actions provide.

I will focus on two theoretical points: “the politics of small things” and “the reinvention of political culture,” (the title of my two most recent books) in order to think about the project of reinventing democratic culture, a pressing one in my country, and in much of the world today. I will try to present a clear and condensed account of the theoretical points, and then think about them with you by considering instances of the project of the reinvention of democratic culture. I will compare the way things were here then, when I first visited your city, to the way things are now, in my country, and I will look ahead a bit to the way things might be in one of the centers of geopolitical conflict in the world today, the Middle East.

In retrospect, thinking about this part of the world and my experiences in it in 20^st century, I gained two key theoretical insights which help illuminate the global situation in 21th: 1. Small things matter, democracy is in the details of everyday life interaction, and 2. Political culture is not just a matter of destiny, but also one of creativity.

First my notion of the politics of small things: a concept drawn from the political theory of Hannah Arendt and the sociology of Erving Goffman, and developed by looking carefully at the day to day life in the democratic opposition and alternative cultural activities here in Poland.

When people meet and speak in each other’s presence, and develop a capacity to act together on the basis of shared commitments, principles or ideals, they develop political power. This power is constituted in social interaction. It is realized in the concerted action. It has its basis in the definition of the situation, the power of people to define their social reality. In the power of definition, in the politics of small things, there is the power of constituting alternatives to the existing order of things. When this power involves the meeting of equals, respectful of factual truth and open to alternative interpretations of the problems they face, it is democratic. As Arendt has theorized, such meeting, talk and action constitute political power as the opposite of coercion. As Goffman investigated, this power is constituted in the expressive life of the involved people. Power by acting together, expressively created, such power has been highly consequential.

In Poland, the significance of the politics of small things was apparent during the Communist experience, contributing to the quality of life in People’s Poland, and it became a force that put an end to the experience. Its importance is underappreciated in the present political environment. I will explain by providing snapshots of experience, highlighting their significance.

As I remember the day I arrived to observe the trial of Michnik, Lis and Frasyniuk, I feel as if I was moving through an American spy thriller. Met at the Warsaw airport. Taken to an apartment. Underground solidarity, broadcast equipment in the apartment, solidarity TV and radio. After an hour or so, I was put on a train to Gdansk, given instructions to go to an apartment in the old city of Gdansk. A few minutes after I arrived on that rainy night, the phone rang. Whoever just arrived, the caller reported is being following by the authorities. I was observed from the moment I arrived in Warsaw by both the authorities and the underground. The next day I tried to enter the courtroom. I walked in a cloud of solidarity supporters and activists, women pushing baby carriages were the most impressive. Each step I took during my ten days, the authorities of the People’s Republic and the network of solidarity activists surrounded me, revealing the two sides of power. The authorities had the full power of the Party State, the secret police, the nomenklatura and the Soviet alliance behind them. Solidarity’s power was grounded in the persistent capacity of people to act together. That this power persisted and was very real was confirmed when it persisted after martial law, not to mention its ultimate triumph in 1989.

Indeed I think it is important not to interpret the meaning of Solidarity by its ultimate victory. It was not only a means to this end.  The people I met in the early and mid eighties did not anticipate the defeat of Communism and present day Poland was way beyond their imaginations. Their activities, and I believe their significance for us today, are best understood as a continuation of what they had done in the past. We misunderstand if we impose teleological meaning upon them. There was a hope that the activities then would contribute to a more decent future, but there was mostly an appreciation that it contributed to a more decent present. A world where an unjust political trial was met with fear, resignation and silence was not acceptable, even if the fall of the regime was unimaginable. Acting together immediately changed the situation for the better.

Michnik himself explained the logic of this action in his classic essay “The New Evolutionism.” This essay, together with Vaclav Havel’s classic “The Power of the Powerless,” helped me imagine my idea of the politics of small things. Thus I understood the theater movement I studied here in the early 70s and Pope John Paul II’s visit to Poland in 1979.

I wrote my dissertation on a theater movement, Polish Student Theater including such groups as Kalambur and Nawias of Wroclaw, Teatr Stu and Pleonazmus of Krakow, Teatr Plastyczna of Lublin, Teatr 77 of Lodz and Teatr Osmego Dnia of Poznan. In these theaters and in their audiences the power of the politics of small things was revealed. They were not engaged with regime or anti-regime politics. Their importance was that they provided a zone of independent sensibility for their performers and audience. In these theaters a different Poland was not only imagined and performed. It actually existed. They did not support the regime or attempt to reform or overthrow it. They created a life apart from it.

Such life apart became a societal experience in 1979. I think is the way to understand the profane significance of the Pope’s visit. To be sure, he was an opponent of Communism. But when he came here and was greeted by millions, they were not engaged in a political demonstration, but in a religious and social one. People did not flock to see the Pope and celebrate mass with him as an explicitly political, anti-regime act, instrumentally directed toward the defeat of Communism. Their activities were ends in themselves, and they came to see themselves differently. Clearly seeing this laid the groundwork of Solidarity, revealed a collective shared understanding that the Polish people had a different character than that which was imagined in the official Communist press, a perception that could imagine people acting on their own independent of officialdom, as indeed occurred on a grand scale not only when the Pope greeted the public, but also in the planning of the event.

The relationship between power and culture changed, as the nature of the culture and of the power was changed. More in a moment about that. Let’s look elsewhere to understand what was involved here.

A poetry salon in Damascus, Syria, I read about last year, before the Arab Spring, reminded me of Polish student theater. Both the theater movement and the salon are examples of constituted free zones in repressive societies. They both are examples of the politics of small thing. They, further, both demonstrate the possibility of re-inventing political culture, the possibility of reformulating the relationship between the culture of power and the power of culture.

The secret police were present at Bayt al-Qasid, the House of Poetry, in Damascus, The New York Times reported in an article published last September. Yet despite the presence of a significant arm of the repressive state, this has been a place where innovative poetry has been read, including by poets in exile, politically daring ideas are discussed, a world of alternative sensibility has been created. Not the star poets of the sixties, but young unknowns have predominated. The point has not been political agitation nor to showcase celebrity, but the creation of a special place for reading, performance and discussion of the new and challenging.  The Times article quotes a patron about a recent reading. “‘In a culture that loathes dialogue,’ the evening represented something different, said Mr. Sawah, the editor of a poetry Web site. ‘What is tackled here,’ he said, ‘would never be approached elsewhere.’”

In this poetry salon and in Polish theater, people interacted with each other on the basis of common interest in the arts. On a regular basis they presented themselves to each other, developed a shared definition of the situation, and through the expressive gestures developed a setting of trust and experimentation. Art not politics prevailed. Cynics would say that the Polish theater and the Syrian salon are safety valve mechanism, through which the young and the marginal can let off steam, as a repressive political culture prevails. But in Poland, the “safety valve” overturned the official culture, even before the collapse of the Communist regime, as I explored in my book Beyond Glasnost: the Post Totalitarian Mind. And now something remarkable is developing among Syria and its neighbors.

I am not asserting that a happy ending is necessarily the result of such cultural work: the fall of Communism, the Arab Spring. But I do want to underscore that the very existence of an alternative sensibility in a repressive context changes the nature of the social order. Poland was not simply a totalitarian during the Communist era, and the Syria of a year ago was not simply repressive. That country now is in a virtual civil war. Yet, with amazing persistence, the most violent repression has been met with incredibly sustained non-violent resistance. I believe that these miracles are not conceivable without the experience of places where the possibility for dialogue was established, places where poetry and theater could prevail, and because of this, political culture can be, has been reinvented – in Syria, at least for a discrete number of people in a particular location at a particular time. But the limits of today may be very different tomorrow. This I learned as I observed my Polish friends.

Social movements create publics. They make it possible for people to express and act on their common concerns together. This creativity of movements has not fully appreciated. It has a long history, and it is also a key characteristic of the new “new social movements.” We discussed this in the Wroclaw seminar, moving from history to the study of the movements of our times.

Our discussion reminded me of the work of one of my former students, Angela Jones. Her dissertation, now a book, is on the Niagara Movement, which preceded the NAACP. The movement established the first national forum for the discussion of African American concerns by African Americans. Until very recently, it has been viewed as little more than a footnote in the career of W.E.B. Dubois. Jones’s work fills in a gap in history, the first fully developed study of this early episode in the long civil rights struggle. The gap existed because of the insufficient understanding of the importance of creating free public interaction in social movements.

In the democratic opposition to Communist regimes, specifically in Poland, the goal of establishing independent publics was not overlooked. In fact, for quite a while, it was the major end of the social struggle. The constitution of a free public space for discussion and action became the primary end of underground Solidarność in the 1980s. Because the regime couldn’t be successfully challenged, the end became to constitute a zone beyond its control. The end was for individual and collective dignity, to create an area where one could express oneself, appear outside of official definition, consolidate agreement among diverse participants in an autonomous public, which could be applied at an appropriate moment. The goal was to engage in a long cultural march, as Adam Michnik put it in a 1976 classic essay, “The New Evolutionism.”

In the new “new social movements,” this movement feature has been cultivated in a new political, generational and media environment. New media forms have played an important role, for better and for worse, and the creation of new autonomous publics has been put forward as a primary end.

Tahrir Square and Zuccotti Park were places where all sorts of people met. Many came to know each other virtually, and then being together became the important feature of square and the park. The demands in the square centered on ending the Mubarak regime and its corruption, and in the park the rally cry was for the 99%, but the meeting of Coptics, Muslims and secularists together in the square, and the coming together of students, unionists, young and old, employed and unemployed in the park were at least as significant as the ends of their actions. Indeed, the ends were not all that clear: An Islamic or a Secular Democratic polity, a rejection of the American Dream or the restoration of its promise? As the movements couldn’t answer these questions, they opened up opportunities for new sorts of public expression and action. They expressed a simple but powerful point: the way things have been is not necessarily the way they will be, as the people in these movements revealed themselves to each other.

Wroclaw seminar participant Fernanda Canofre of Brazil wrote her master’s thesis on the Arab Spring and Moroccan films. When we discussed the Arab Spring, she suggested that we review twenty of videos from Morocco posted on globalvoicesonline.org. The videos add up, pointing to the diversity of those who support the protests in Morocco and the breadth and depth of their concerns, and the importance of constituting a free public life. The videos present “the February 20^th movement” in action.

The first video presents the demands of the movement made by one of its young leaders, Oussama Lakhlifi. It stimulated a fierce debate about the planned demonstration on February 20th. A week before the demonstration, activists released a well-produced film, the second video clip, in which a variety of Moroccans, from apparently secular students and labor activists to a religious woman in traditional dress, explain why they will join the movement. (See video embedded below.) They want to have a chance at a decent life. They call for a constitution and democracy, an end of corruption, and a chance for a job and the dignity of labor, and lower food prices.

Other videos respond to the unfolding events. The videos counter official propaganda, document official violence and the response of officials to movement demands. Attractive videos include an animated cartoon Einstein giving a lesson on the power elite and music videos of Moroccan pop band, Hoba, Hoba, Spirit and rap video “Mellit!” (I’m fed up!).

An official referendum on constitutional reforms was held and the opposition presented video parodies of the enthusiasm shown on official media. Two other videos call for a boycott. Another documents fraud on the day of the referendum.

After the reforms were overwhelmingly approved. Videos followed, one expressing continued international support for the movement from a gathering of activists and bloggers at a meeting in Tunis. The last video shows a lonely singer with a group of accompanying musicians all but ignored on a busy city street. The post concludes: “What role will the February 20 movement be able to play next year as revolutionary fatigue begins to gain ground? Will it be able to be creative enough to keep pace?”

The February 20^th movement changed the course of Moroccan history even though the social order was not fundamentally changed. Reforms were enacted, though the King was very much still in charge, relatively popular, not a Mubarak figure. The demands for the most radical change were not realized. But in this far corner of the Arab world, the accomplishments of the Arab Spring are well documented in these videos.

We see from the inside an independent public, with links to similar publics in the region. They have established the important political fact of their existence. As long as they keep speaking, showing and sharing, their world is fundamentally transformed.

Canofre’s discussion of the movement, and the Arab Spring more generally, was not at all pessimistic. Her interest in the videos, and in film as well, is not only as they document a historical development, but also as they make history. When the Wroclaw seminar participants questioned her about her interest in the videos, it became clear to us that a fundamental transformation in Arab politics is revealed and enacted in them. The fundamental relationship between culture and power has been transformed.

More on this, extended to the case of Occupy Wall Street, in my next post.

In this post Malgorzata Bakalarz deliberately responds to my posts on Polish Jewish relations from the point of view of a young Polish scholar studying in New York. I deeply appreciate her update. Jeff

At the end of his text “Why Poland?” Jeff recalls the exchange between Adam Michnik and Leon Wieseltier about Polish-Jewish relations and the public discussion about Jedwabne pogrom. He makes a statement that could become a title of a new book on Polish-Jewish relations (or, perhaps, on Polish-Polish relations). He summarizes the exchange, acknowledging the importance of the Jedwabne discussion and concludes: “but something is missing.”

Something, indeed, was missing, and that was patience and sympathy.

The debate around Jedwabne, although groundbreaking and influential, was still in most cases elitist and center-oriented. Observing it, I was under the impression that default ways of framing the Jedwabne discussion were established very early on, and it was somehow impossible to contribute outside of them. And the situation was extremely sensitive: content-wise, it was urging Poles to embrace their difficult past, to admit it’s not exclusively heroic character, when there was still a largely unsatisfied need for the public acknowledgment of the Polish suffering: from the Soviet system, from the WWII, from the 19-century partitions.

“Formally,” the official narratives about Jedwabne ignored familiar Roman Catholic rhetoric, known and trusted as the “language of truth.” Dry, factual descriptions of the event, and the discussions about it, left no room for dramatic, stilted (but familiar), ceremonial, timeless narrative, which had been framing anti-communist discourse for so many years.

The legacy of Communist “parallel realities,” with corrupted and not trusted public discourse confronted with the private, (mainly) Roman-Catholic, reliable one, made this “linguistic estrangement” of Jedwabne debate an important issue. It contributed to the fact that many dismissed the debate altogether: unacceptable content confirmed by unacceptable “official” (read: not ours) language.

Not enough time was spent to translate and make available the discourse about complex Polish-Jewish past, and, in particular, about complex Polish war history. Not enough time was spent to listen to the voice of people from the outside of the center: not fitting the framework, and yet not necessarily anti-Semitic, willing to express confusion, struggle, often mourning.  The “lost in translation” Jedwabne debate revealed and, sadly, sealed the split in the Polish society, driven by the attitude towards the past.

There have been “two Polands.” One is the heroic, resistant, faithful to the post-Romantic imagery of the special role of the suffering of the Polish nation: a conservative, past-preserving, anti-communist Roman Catholic Poland. The other is pragmatic, willing to quickly settle accounts with the past for good (sometimes insensitively ignoring it) and to move forward, liberal (and secular), aspiring. The two have been speaking different languages, using different symbols, and thinking different (national) imagery.

The Polish-Jewish relations after Jedwabne are stretched between these two Polands, or, actually, three. The third group is the young generation of Poles far from framing their identity with any relation to the past, freely picking interest in some parts of (Polish) history and abandoning others.

The general attitude vis-a-vis Polish-Jewish past gained, therefore, an interesting twist: whereas the first two groups commemorate (or manifest the rejection/lack thereof), the third one “discovers” the common past. “Common dramatic Fate”, “important collaboration and prolific coexistence, both cultural and economic” and “fascinating story of multiethnic mosaic, which is sexy to know about” – these may be the (oversimplified) ways to frame current Polish-Jewish narratives. Implications of these stories should be a subject to a new chapter of “Why Poland?”.

The “something is missing” split, though, has been a pattern rather than a theme, legible in numerous political and cultural events: Polish accession to the European Union, the Pope John Paul II’s death and most recently, the crash of the plane with Polish top officials traveling to Russia to commemorate the 70^th anniversary of the massacre of Polish officers by NKVD, in 1940 – all these bring the mismatched voices of the two groups, accompanied with disinterested silence of the third one.

Perhaps the Jedwabne debate was the last chance – and a lost one – to bring them all together.

I am preparing my class on the new “new social movements” this week. I will be giving it at The New School’s Democracy and Diversity Institute in Wroclaw, Poland in July. I am excited and challenged about the course, happy to be returning to our institute, which has a long history, related to the topic of my class. The seminar, also, will be an attempt to thoroughly address the complex issues in my May Day post.

In that post I noted the media obstacles OWS faced on May 1^st. Neither the serious, nor the sensational media portrayed a meaningful popular demonstration, a national commemoration of May Day demanding social justice. While some might see this as a kind of conspiracy, I, as a matter of principle, don’t, or rather won’t until I consider alternative explanations. In the summer seminar, I hope to explore the alternatives with an international student body. Here’s an overview, which is informing my preparation.

Social movements have generally been understood in two ways. They have been seen as non-institutional means of a group of people to pursue their common interests and achieve their shared goals. The traditional archetype for this is the labor movement. Alternatively, social movements have been seen as not only interest focused, but as well, and perhaps more importantly, as non-institutional means for the formation of a group with common identities, concerned with supporting the identities and acting upon them. Civil rights movements, the women, lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and transgender movements, environmental movements and the like, are understood as being newer kinds of movements, “new social movements.” To tell the truth, I never quite understood why the new social movements were considered new. They, like labor movements, emerged in the nineteenth century. They, like the traditional movements, pursue interests. And the traditional movements, like the new ones, are about identity. Yet, I know this is not central. Rather we need to note that new and old movements are not only about the pursuit of interests. Movements are important ends in themselves for the people who create and are active in them.

And clearly, this is still the case. Social activists in Tahrir Square in Cairo and in Zuccotti Park in New York have specific ends, and the demonstrations in these places also create identities that are as significant as the ends the demonstrators are seeking. But something else is important, quite apparent in these and other such places around the globe today. The coming together based on some shared concerns with different identities and even different goals has been a common feature of the movements in our most recent past. The demonstrators occupy a space and the way they do so, the way they interact with each other is an important end of the movement. The form of interaction, as well as the identity and interest content, is central.

Coptic Christians and Muslims protect each other with mutual respect in Egyptian demonstrations in Tahrir Square and throughout Egypt. Radical anarchists and conventional trade unionists hung out at Zuccotti Park last fall and in Union Square on May Day. Their political ends may be different, radical critics of the American Dream, along with those who want to keep the Dream alive, but they have figured out ways to find common purpose and joint actions. The new “new social movements” are first about that commonality, the creation of independent public space, in New York and beyond, people with differences working together in the name of the 99%, creating an alternative free public space.

Communicating from this space to the dominant media and mainstream publics is a fundamental challenge, now evident for the Tahrir democratic activists and OWS. The quality of their public character, its social media constitution that facilitated the formation of the movement, also presents problems for moving beyond the newly constituted public space. Leading spokespersons are not evident, a strength but also a weakness, nor are clear ends and demands forthcoming. The new sensibility and purpose of the new “new movements” can get lost, as it was in New York on May Day, as is happening as the Egyptians are about to go to the polls to elect a president.

The summer seminar will be an exploration of this. We will try to discover any common cause of the movements. Is it the state of global capital and the breakdown of neo-liberalism? While I have my doubts, we will discuss the works of observers suggesting this. I think that there is a generational dimension to the emergence of the new movements: we will discuss my depiction of the “wisdom of youth” and reconsider the sociology of generations. We will analyze precedents such as the American civil rights movement and Solidarność in Poland. The old distinction between new and traditional social movements revealed as much about the old as the new, and we will consider the way the creation of independent publics were central to movements past as well as movements now.

And herein lies the irony of the course being given in Poland. It is the fruit of the alternative public of a major social movement past. The Democracy and Diversity Institute is an outgrowth of the Solidarność underground. Members of The New School, led by Democracy and Diversity founder and director, Elzbieta Matynia, and I worked with Adam Michnik, the great Polish “dissident” intellectual and later editor of Poland’s major newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza, on a clandestine “Democracy Seminar” in Budapest, Warsaw and New York in the 1980s. The seminar was a small activity of the underground Solidarność cultural world. The Democracy and Diversity Institute built upon its legacy. I have always thought of my class as being explicitly a continuation of this activity, starting my classes where the discussions of the Democracy Seminar left off. This history continues in July, taking on very new concerns and experiences.